We had an amazing party to bring Barneys to Beverly Hills before the store opened in 1994, thrown by Lisa Eisner, one of my oldest friends in the business, and the fairy godmother of all fashion aspirants in L.A. Lisa had been a Mademoiselle editor; she and Lyssa Horn, Steve’s daughter, worked together there and were like sisters. In the ’80s, they both ended up in Paris, where Lisa worked for Vogue and Lyssa ran Barneys’ Paris office, the advance guard for all of our activities in France, from setting up showroom appointments with fledgling designers at their little garrets to booking out Chez Omar, my favorite Lebanese restaurant in the Marais, for the dinners we’d throw during the collections. There, too: discretion. You’ll never find pictures of a Lebanese belly dancer gyrating on top of a table with Azzedine, or sticking her boobs in Rei Kawakubo’s stony face. Live and learn.

By the ’90s, Lisa (though not Lyssa) was back in the States, having settled in L.A. with her husband, Eric. They lived in a kooky, rambling mansion high in the hills of Bel-Air, higher even than the Hotel Bel-Air. Lisa has worn many hats in her day — jewelry designer, photographer, art-book publisher, Ashley Olsen’s mother-in-law — but as much as any of the others, she’s an incredible connector. She hosted a great party to introduce the Pressmans to the L.A. crowd in a Moroccan tent set up in her backyard, where all the guests sat on pillows on the ground. Barbra Streisand was there. Diane Keaton. Jerry Bruckheimer. Wayne Gretzky, then with the L.A. Kings. That part everyone remembers, because he was sitting on one of Lisa’s ground pillows, and she accidentally stepped on his hand walking across the room. A few centimeters over and she might’ve ended his career a few years early.

I was so excited about the store we were building in Beverly Hills. Eric remembers me dragging him out of a dinner we held at Mr Chow nearby — another “meet the Pressmans event” — after a few too many drinks to see the construction site on Wilshire. I was even more excited because it was freaking out all the department stores there. Our landlord owned both Saks and what would be the Barneys location next door to it; Saks was about to move out and take the new space, but when they got wind of our interest in the West Coast, they tried to pressure the landlord into not renting us their old one. Big mistake: The guy, pissed off at the attempted bigfooting, sold us the lot next door instead, which we designed and built from the ground up. He could’ve been a Pressman.

Los Angeles was finally getting cool. The style out there still wasn’t on par with New York — and still isn’t — but now they were hungry for the good stuff. There were some great boutiques in L.A., like Maxfield, where Simon Doonan, our window-dressing genius, had worked, and a good-enough Neiman Marcus. But nothing like what we built for Barneys. To this day, [my ex-wife] Bonnie Pressman calls L.A. the prettiest Barneys we ever made. We had designed three huge stores in tandem — Madison Avenue, Tokyo and Beverly Hills — even before we had any idea whether any of them would be successful. Madness? Probably. But that was how we rolled.

In the months leading up to the opening, in the spring of 1994, the whole town seemed to be paying attention. “Wilshire Retailers Brace for Arrival of Barneys in L.A.,” blared the cover of Women’s Wear Daily in the fall of 1993. The department store I. Magnin nearby spent that fall renovating and adding younger, cooler designers (“I don’t want my organization to become obsessed with Barneys, just with becoming a better store,” its chairman told the paper — yeah, right). Saks was struggling through its own renovation. Our name was on everybody’s lips. At a Todd Oldham show at Neiman’s in Beverly Hills that December, a news reporter overheard someone saying that the audience was “more Barneys than Neiman Marcus.” We already had plenty of L.A. customers who’d fly in to visit Barneys in New York; as [former Barney’s co-chairman] Bob Pressman pointed out, 10 percent of the population of Beverly Hills had Barneys credit cards.

When the store was finished, in March of 1994 — down, once again, to the wire — it was a beauty. Five stories high, spanning almost the full block of Wilshire, right in the “Golden Triangle” where Wilshire, Rodeo and Santa Monica meet. At 125,000 square feet, it was smaller than Madison but larger than the downtown New York women’s store, though it resembled its 17th Street cousin, with a majestic spiral staircase climbing all five floors to a grand atrium skylight. If there’s one thing Angelenos dream of, it’s stardom, and anyone who walked down that staircase felt like she was Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. A balcony off the men’s section looked straight out onto Hollywood. There were Barneys touches everywhere. The mad genius Ruben Toledo, who had worked with us for years on displays, made a 60-square-foot mosaic for the cosmetics section, a cousin of the one on Madison, only instead of medieval portraits, this one had 50 portraits of his muse: his wife, Isabel, one of the designers we carried. Having learned the lesson in Manhattan, we opted for light and space, doing away with walls and installing floor-to-ceiling windows to let in the light. There was a turret like on a medieval castle where we put the VIP department, a literal tower with 30-foot ceilings. This was the Tinseltown dream of Barneys. We’d arrived.

Los Angeles was no New York, but it was very amenable to Barneys. Years later, many of the town’s biggest fashion people — the stylists who dress up stars for the red carpet — revealed that in that often fashion-challenged town, it was at the Wilshire Barneys where they’d first discovered this or that designer. Young stylists would come to the store just to experience the best European clothes up close, to see them and touch them for the first time.

We did adapt a little to our new environs. Glenn O’Brien, our ad wizard, came up with new L.A.-ified lines for our local ads, which we put up on billboards on the Sunset Strip: “For Lucy, meditation was not enough.” “Cliff wanted understanding but he would settle for residuals.” Some of the local flakiness may have set in. In those days, the thing to do when opening a new store was partner with a local charity to host a big event: Make nice with the hometown grandees, bring in some likely customers. But we accidentally irritated the wealthy do-gooders of L.A. by dragging our feet on picking one. I guess we ended up pissing off a few people — I learned as much from the Los Angeles Times. “Not even a note saying, ‘It was very nice meeting you,’ ” a local charity worker told the paper.

Whoops. We had too many options, and I wasn’t exactly unhappy about being the hot new commodity in town. I remember running into Barbara Davis, who was one of the big society matrons of L.A., at a restaurant, the fall we opened. I was with two new friends of mine, Bret Michaels, the long-haired frontman of the rock band Poison, and his girlfriend, Pam Anderson. (This was before she was with Tommy Lee.) We were having a good time — Bret asked me to come on tour with them, and if I’d been 20 years younger, I would’ve. But when I saw Barbara Davis sitting nearby, I knew I had to go over and kiss the ring. She immediately started in on me about partnering with her Carousel of Hope ball that she threw to raise money for juvenile diabetes. Everyone told me, if you don’t play ball with her, you’ll never survive in Beverly Hills. But I never was into her, and as she looked over at my table, between Bret and Baywatch blond Pamela, I had a hunch the feeling was mutual.

We couldn’t stay long to chat. We had places to be that night: Specifically, the Playboy Mansion, for an AIDS benefit organized by the New York club doyenne Susanne Bartsch. This was quite possibly the gayest party ever held at the mansion, before or since. It was a bunny fashion show called “The Hoppening,” at which most of the bunnies were men in drag; only a few, like Pamela and Roseanne Barr, were women. Local designers created bunny costumes for them, and a judging panel — Phyllis Diller, Cheech from Cheech and Chong, Debi Mazar, and a very pregnant Elvira, Mistress of the Dark — eventually crowned Roseanne the winner. She wore a gray silk bunny suit by Richard Tyler, the red carpet designer. Judy Tenuta played the emcee. “Are there any straight people here tonight?” she asked from the stage. “Pick up the courtesy phone!”

There were two, at least: me and Hef. I’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to party at the Playboy Mansion — every boy has — but when I got there, the reality left something to be desired. The Grotto? More like a cesspool. Every infection that ever lived and died must’ve taken a dip in those waters. (“You can smell history in there,” one drag queen quipped.) If amoebas could talk. … Hef himself was no better. I took my seat for the fashion show, and found myself next to Mr. Bon Vivant himself. Paisley bathrobe, velvet slippers, greasy hair and smoking a pipe. I hate pipes, but live and let live — it’s his house. But I was smoking a cigar — I never was without one, in those days — and he had the nerve to say to me, “Could you please put that out?”

“Sure,” I said to him, “when you put yours out.” I never did get invited back.

From They All Came to Barneys, by Gene Pressman, to be published on Sept. 2, 2025, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Gene Pressman.

This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.