Barneys creative director Simon Doonan thinks that Brooklyn is a natural location for a new Barneys Co-op store. “Every girl I work with lives in Brooklyn,” he said at the SCAD Style Étoile Awards last night. “Everybody at the Observer and at Barneys, all my colleagues are in Brooklyn now.” The new Barneys Co-op is near the Jonathan Adler boutique on Atlantic Avenue, and the couple went to check it out on Sunday. “We were in the BK, in Crooklyn,” Adler said. “Yeah, we’re totally down with the ‘hood,” Doonan added, although they felt a tad out of place. “We felt so self-conscious about not having facial hair,” Adler admitted. “I wondered why Jonny stuffed me into a little baby stroller before we went out,” said Doonan. “He said, ‘I have to pretend to be a single-mother lesbian over here.’”
While they disagreed with New York’s assessment of Park Slope as the city’s best neighborhood, and insisted that Greenwich Village, where they live, is tops, they’re bullish on Brooklyn. Adler says his store there is doing very well, and Doonan thinks Brooklyn is “groovy” and can’t wait for the Co-op store to open there. “Next to Trader Joe’s! Hello! Bonjour!”
Sunday’s Brooklyn sojourn, Doonan said, was for scoping, looking at the façade, thinking about it, and looking at the neighborhood. “It would be really fun to do something completely bananas with that façade. You know, like Salvador Dalí’s museum in Barcelona, he covered the whole front of it in Spanish bread. Something insane like that, I think they would love that in Brooklyn.” “But,” Adler told us, “it’ll probably just be ironic-facial-hair-and-baby-stroller themed.”
