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In some of the UK’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, domestic workers are falling victim to abusive employers

Elizabeth Canuday got away on the last Sunday of August 2016. Having been asked to pack the belongings of her Saudi employer’s family after a stay in London, Canuday — not her real name — took the bags to the lobby of the serviced apartment complex in prosperous South Kensington.

Then the domestic worker from Mindanao in the southern Philippines ended two years of overwork, underpayment and underfeeding by slipping through a throng of people and into the street. As she headed between the elegant Victorian apartment blocks of Harrington Road, she asked for God’s help.

“As I’m walking, I’m praying, ‘Lord, bring me to your people,’” Canuday recalls.

Her prayer was answered. After a little more than two miles, Canuday, a slight, round-faced woman who is now 50, heard Filipino religious music coming from a west London church. When she followed it, she found herself at a service being conducted in Tagalog, the country’s most widely spoken language.

Members of the congregation sat her down, gave her coffee and food and offered reassurance. Today, Canuday remembers the event as an act of divine providence. “God took me to beside people who took care of me,” she says. “They said, ‘Don’t worry; don’t worry — relax.’”

Canuday’s reception at St John’s, Notting Hill — a prominent Gothic-revival building that houses London’s only Tagalog-language Church of England congregation — represented a rare nugget of good fortune for an overseas worker fleeing an abusive employer in the UK.

In theory, the maids, housekeepers, nurses, cooks and other domestic staff of visiting overseas families enjoy the same legal protections as any other employee in Britain. In reality, that protection seldom reaches behind the doors of the town houses, five-star hotel rooms and country estates favoured by the employers who choose to travel with their domestic servants to the UK.

The result, according to multiple workers and people who seek to help them, is that some of the most respectable addresses in the UK — a country that proclaims itself at the forefront of the fight against worldwide labour abuse — conceal labour practices that are the very opposite.

Marissa Begonia, a founding member of The Voice of Domestic Workers, a group that supports abused staff, testifies from long experience that some of the complaints she hears are as serious as rape, beatings or starvation.

Originally from Manila in the Philippines, she suffered sexual harassment when working as a maid in Hong Kong. She lists other cruelties that are so common they are virtually routine. “It’s the unpaid wages, no day off, very long hours of work and no rest, no food,” she says.

Begonia, 50, arranges to meet by the vast memorial to Prince Albert in Kensington Gardens, at the western end of Hyde Park in central London. She and the group’s volunteers often come to the gardens on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons, looking for signs that, among the scores of nannies and carers accompanying their employers’ children or aged parents, there might be some working under duress. Begonia describes past efforts to help such workers.

“We gave out cards in the park with my number on it and the writing in different languages saying, ‘We’re here to help.’ Some of them would call us.”

The concentration of the workers’ stories of abuse and escape in Kensington and nearby parts of inner west London make it hard to look at the area’s neat red-brick blocks of luxury flats and ranks of white, stuccoed town houses without wondering what lurks behind any given door.

The privations suffered by abused workers are all too familiar to Canuday. She recalls how she was faint with hunger when she fled three and a half years ago.

But it is when she talks about lacking the dignity of a decent place to sleep during her two-week stay in Kensington that she bursts into tears. “This air conditioning was right next to me,” she remembers. “I felt too much, too much cold. I went to the toilet because in the toilet there was a heater.”

Lily Baloran, 31, from Manila, escaped a serviced apartment off Kensington High Street in 2014 when she worked out how to unlock her employer’s door. She subsequently spent two years living undocumented in London, fearing her employer would seek her out.

Baloran — not her real name — had taken the job in Dubai in 2013, having suffered a deeply troubled childhood in the Philippines and marriage to an alcoholic. But she says her employer gave her too little food, missed several months’ pay and deprived her of sleep. “I didn’t know what to do. I was desperate.”

Though she has now been able to satisfy the UK authorities she qualifies for refugee status, which offers applicants five years’ leave to remain in the UK, her experience has left her feeling profoundly traumatised. “I think I’m still recovering,” she says.

More than three-quarters of the 20,000 people annually granted Overseas Domestic Workers’ visas to come to the UK with an employer arrive from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Arab countries. Some visas are also issued in other countries, including India, Nigeria and Lebanon. About half those issued visas are women from the Philippines.

The London embassies of both Saudi Arabia and the UAE insist they have worked hard to offer better protection to people such as Canuday and those that Begonia seeks out in Kensington Gardens.

The embassy of the UAE, which includes the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, says that in 2017 it implemented “broad measures in support of overseas domestic workers”. This made it easier for them to change employers, guaranteed them paid leave and offered official adjudication in any dispute.

Saudi Arabia’s embassy gives a long list of the rights it guarantees overseas domestic workers, including at least one day off weekly, paid leave in their home country after two years and the right to consult with their homeland’s embassy.

The UK’s Home Office paints a similarly optimistic picture. During Theresa May’s time as home secretary between 2010 and 2016, the department made it a priority to act against the severest forms of labour abuse, known as modern slavery. It regards the Modern Slavery Act of 2015 as a world-leading example of how to tackle the problem.

Asked about the experiences of Canuday and other workers, the department points to a change it made in 2016 as evidence of its determination to help them. This extended the maximum length of time that workers found to have been victims of modern slavery could stay in the UK after such a decision from six months to two years.

“We are committed to protecting migrant domestic workers from abuse and exploitation,” says the Home Office.

Yet the story of Dee Wen, 38, illuminates why those working most closely with abused domestic workers fear that the UK authorities are not only failing to improve the workers’ conditions but contributing to their deterioration.

Wen, who is from Legazpi City, 500km south of Manila, was speaking last October at one of the regular Sunday meetings organised by The Voice of Domestic Workers. In the brightly lit Cubitt Gallery, a modern art space in Islington, she recounted how her employer had brought her to York from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and was paying her less than the minimum wage and forcing her to work excessive hours. She had no access to money in the UK.

After a concerned person contacted them in November 2018, North Yorkshire Police rescued Wen from her employer and applied for her to enter a Home Office body known as the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).

This adjudicates whether people have been victims of modern slavery. Because the police had acted promptly, and she had gained entry to the NRM process before her visa expired, Wen had the right to work legally, caring for a British family.

“It’s good because I’m earning higher than the Riyadh salary,” she said. “The family are good also. They’re not shouting. They’re not saying that you’re crazy or lazy, because in Riyadh my head was loaded with bad words.”

Yet, according to Marissa Begonia, Wen has since fallen victim to the demanding processing system. For so far undisclosed reasons, she was rejected by the NRM for a “conclusive grounds” decision that would certify she is a victim of modern slavery.

According to campaigners, such decisions illustrate how modern-slavery legislation, designed to protect victims of organised crime, works poorly to protect victims of the abuses that domestic workers face.

Begonia says that if Wen loses an expected appeal, she could also lose her right to remain in the UK. “It’s one of many cases that I expected to be positive,” she says. “This result is depressing.”

Virginia Mantouvalou points to a still more fundamental problem. Speaking in her top-floor office, Mantouvalou, professor of human rights and labour law at University College London, attributes many of the difficulties facing domestic workers to a visa regime introduced in 2012 that she calls “a recipe for exploitation and abuse”.

The previous visa, introduced in 1998, allowed domestic workers to renew their visas for up to five years, change employers and eventually seek UK citizenship, says Mantouvalou, a trustee of the Kalayaan charity that is helping Canuday. The new version lasts just six months and is non-renewable.

This current structure means that workers have too little time in the UK to bring cases against abusive employers in employment tribunals, the UK’s main labour courts. Those who escape generally find it impossible to secure a new employer for the remainder of such a short visa term. “It . . . makes you feel suspicious about how committed the government are to tackling modern slavery,” Mantouvalou says.

“Of course, there are terrible individual employers who take advantage of workers. But there are structures, including legal structures, that make workers vulnerable to exploitation. So why not change those as well?”

The system’s failings have conspired jointly against Canuday. Staff at Kalayaan, based in the community hall of a Roman Catholic church close to St John’s, quickly sought a “reasonable grounds” decision to enter her into the NRM. But the Home Office refused the application because Canuday’s passport, which her employer had retained, was recorded as having left the UK at the same time as the employer.

The department rejected her application, having decided, implausibly, that Canuday must have returned to Saudi Arabia with her employer, then re-entered the UK illegally.

While officials subsequently reversed their decision, Canuday’s visa expired in the six weeks between the rulings. That meant she was stripped of the right to work while her case was processed by the NRM, a procedure that often lasts as long as two years. Canuday’s case has already dragged on for two and a half years.

Avril Sharp, casework and policy officer for Kalayaan — the name means “freedom” in Tagalog — says her organisation is encountering growing numbers of such “stupid” Home Office decisions. That increase adds evidence to the suggestion that conditions for migrant domestic workers coming to the UK are gradually worsening.

In 2018, the last full year on record, 52 Filipinos were recorded by the NRM as victims of domestic servitude, the form of modern slavery most similar to Canuday’s and Wen’s experiences. Workers’ stories — along with the accounts of groups that help them — make it clear that those figures represent only a tiny proportion of overall abused domestic workers in the UK, and there are many others who either fail to qualify or never apply to the NRM.

For Kalayaan, the changes since 2012 have obliged the group to reduce its previous campaigning work to focus on helping clients who the system is serving ever more poorly, says Sharp, who struggles to hide her frustration. “A large part of our time is taking clients and trying to sort their mess out, the mess they’ve got into because of the immigration system.”

Speaking beneath the high, vaulted ceilings that betray the Kalayaan offices’ origins as a church school, Canuday says she is frustrated she cannot earn money to remit to her family, who sent her to Saudi Arabia because they were struggling to pay their rent. In Saudi Arabia, her employer had paid her only around SR500 (about £100) a month, instead of the SR2,500 she was promised. But she says she was nevertheless able to remit SR100 or SR200 a month to her family.

“For the sake of my family, it’s better [if] I’m in Saudi,” Canuday says. “I’m suffering too much but [then] my family can survive.”

Such frustration is universal among those waiting for conclusive-grounds decisions without the right to work. Annie Ebrahim, 38, a Kalayaan client who also hails from Mindanao, says she was terrified after running away from an abusive, powerful Abu Dhabi family during a stay at a property in Buckinghamshire in 2015.

As a result, Ebrahim — not her real name — waited before seeking Kalayaan’s help and consequently lost the right to work. Like other people waiting for an NRM decision without the right to work, she has to get by on a £35 a week government allowance to cover all her food, transport and clothing costs. “I can’t support my family, even myself,” says Ebrahim. “I’m just like a poor lady. I have one son — he needs my support to him and my family.”

A visit to the office of James Ewins, an experienced family-law barrister in London’s Middle Temple complex, holds out some hope of a potential solution to the problems facing Ebrahim and the other women.

On a bookshelf just within reach of his desk, Ewins keeps a now seldom-consulted copy of the report that Theresa May’s Home Office commissioned him to draw up in 2015 on the future of the Overseas Domestic Workers’ visa.

Like many involved in the field, Ewins, who is precise, well-spoken and earnest, remains worried about the challenge of letting staff behind the locked doors of privileged employers’ residences know their rights.

There is little prospect that the Home Office will act on one key unmet recommendation of his report: that workers should be allowed to extend their initial six-month visa up to a total stay of two and a half years as it would be impossible to secure their rights in a shorter period.

However, the department has also failed to act on a more straightforward suggestion — that all holders of domestic workers’ visas should have to attend, shortly after their arrival in the UK, an information meeting explaining their rights under UK law, in their own language. No contractor is willing to organise the meetings on its behalf, the Home Office has said.

Ewins, who is mostly tight-lipped about the government’s response to his report, argues that information meetings would provide a welcome opportunity to ensure independent advisers met workers separately from their employers.

“My suspicion is the information meeting might bring to light a group of people for whom [legal] remedies are not available, despite the fact that they should be,” he adds.

Yet, in Notting Hill, Larry Galon is sceptical improvements will come soon. Father Larry, as his congregation calls him, is a smiling, unassuming man and head of the Filipino chaplaincy of the Church of England’s Diocese of London.

One Sunday evening in an empty St John’s, he estimates that about two-thirds of the 60 to 80 people who gather for Tagalog eucharist each Sunday are domestic workers who fled abusive employers.

“We try to give them an opportunity to enjoy their freedom in my community here,” he explains. He adds jokingly that he is not allowed to drink too much at parties in case he is called out to help a freshly escaped worker.

Shortly after Christmas, a couple from the congregation called him because their employer, from Kuwait, had thrown them out at 2am when they requested compensation for working the whole year without a break.

In Galon’s view, the bureaucratic barriers facing such absconding workers are growing more formidable; many feel powerless. Rather than navigate the twists and turns of the NRM, he thinks the majority of people slip into London’s dangerous, unregulated grey economy. “I’m not really sure if our voice can be heard,” Galon says.

“Maybe that’s one of the reasons that most of the Filipinos choose to stay below the radar — because from the very start, from the very beginning of their servitude, they’re deprived.”

Industry association forecasts ‘very tough year’ for carriers due to deadly epidemic

Grounded planes and travel bans as a result of the deadly coronavirus outbreak will cost global airlines almost $30bn in lost revenues in 2020, an industry body said. 

Asia-Pacific carriers will shoulder the vast majority of the $29.3bn revenue fall, according to the International Air Transport Association on Friday. It forecasts a 13 per cent fall in passenger demand for the region’s airlines over the full year — the first decline in demand since the financial crisis.

“The sharp downturn in demand as a result of Covid-19 will have a financial impact on airlines — [it will be] severe for those particularly exposed to the China market . . . This will be a very tough year for airlines,” said Alexandre de Juniac, Iata’s director-general, in a statement.

The epidemic has led to fears over a global economic growth slowdown and hit demand for commodities such as oil. 

Two-thirds of Chinese passenger planes have been grounded due to the epidemic. Passenger numbers in China fell to 10.21m from January 27 to February 12, a 70 per cent decline compared with a year earlier, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

That has heaped pressure on Chinese airlines, including those owned by conglomerate HNA Group. “HNA was already in trouble, but [the] coronavirus is like a dagger for them. It makes it almost impossible for them to sustain their business,” said Ivan Su, an analyst at Morningstar. 

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that the Chinese government was nearing a takeover of HNA prior to selling off its airline assets. HNA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Asia-Pacific airline revenue could plunge $27.8bn this year, with that of Chinese carriers falling $12.8bn in their home market, Iata estimated. Lost revenue at airlines outside the region is likely to come in at $1.5bn, it added.

Iata’s forecasts are based on the assumption the spread of the coronavirus follows a similar path to that of the deadly Sars outbreak in 2002-2003. That epidemic hit airline revenues for six months, but they recovered quickly.

The association said it could revise its forecasts if the rate of new infections outside of China starts accelerating. “If it spreads more widely to Asia-Pacific markets then impacts on airlines from other regions would be larger,” Iata added. 

Mr Su said Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific was particularly exposed to the outbreak. The airline, which hs had a long-held strategy of connecting China with the wider world, has been pummeled by months of anti-government protests and coronavirus has compounded those woes. The carrier’s passenger numbers plunged in January and the company warned the epidemic will “significantly” hit its financial performance.

“They have already announced unpaid leave for their staff but it could get worse for them,” Mr Su added.

US and European airlines have also cancelled flights to China, while Singapore Airlines has cut flights across its network until at least the end of May. Australia’s Qantas has reduced flights to Asia, citing weak demand. 

Shiseido’s $845 million acquisition of Drunk Elephant was the most buzzed-about beauty deal of 2019. Here’s how the Japanese conglomerate plans to turn its new brand into a global powerhouse.

NEW YORK, United States — Drunk Elephant founder Tiffany Masterson and her investors are very happy with the $845 million deal that saw the seven-year-old skincare brand sold to Shiseido. Some of their customers, less so:

“Ever since you sold out the products have not been the same,” read a comment from @CodedLips, on one of the brand’s recent Instagram posts.

“Have the ingredients been altered? This usually happens when a big corporation purchases a company and they start to cut corners on those products,” the user asked below a photo of the label’s newest product, “F-Balm.”

For the record, the formula for F-Balm, a hydrating overnight mask that launched on Jan. 1, was set in April, six months before the acquisition, Masterson told BoF. However, independent brands frequently face this sort of scrutiny from customers who worry their favourite products will be tampered with by new corporate overlords.

Just ask any of The Ordinary’s loyal fans, who took to social media to voice their concerns after The Estée Lauder Companies purchased a minority stake in the brand’s parent in 2017. Customers wondered whether Too Faced would remain cruelty-free after Lauder acquired it in 2016, given the conglomerate’s business in China, where animal testing on cosmetics is required. Urban Decay devotees claim those brands’ products weren’t the same after L’Oréal bought it. Customers worried that Tatcha would change after the line was acquired by Unilever last June.

It’s a natural fear, especially in the realm of skincare, where brands like Drunk Elephant and The Ordinary made names for themselves by promising to use only the highest-quality, most-effective ingredients. Their customers worry that, as new owners look to cut costs post-acquisition, the special formulas that won them over in the first place will be the first to go.

The reality is that many “indie” brands are pretty much the same. Lauder did not start testing Too Faced on animals, and The Ordinary formulates its products the same it always has. Tatcha is still Tatcha, though it’s only been a Unilever brand for under one year.

“L’Oréal approaches all brand acquisitions with a deep respect for the consumer and the heritage, values and product offerings of the brand,” the company said in a statement, confirming that Urban Decay has maintained its cruelty free certification. “Every one of L’Oréal’s brands are constantly evolving their product portfolios to deliver the best in beauty innovation for their consumers and Urban Decay is no exception.”

The stakes are particularly high at Drunk Elephant, an early leader of the “clean” beauty movement, which caters to customers who worry that ingredients found in many popular skincare products and cosmetics are harmful (the brand is also cruelty-free). Shiseido, which has no other clean brands, projects that Drunk Elephant will hit over $150 million in sales this year, a 30 percent jump from 2019.

First, the company has to allay customer concerns about the future of Drunk Elephant. Shiseido is allowing the brand to operate independently. The goal is to preserve the clean messaging and product formulas, as well as the feel of a quirky indie label, even if it’s now the newest brand in a portfolio that includes labels such as Nars Cosmetics, Laura Mercier, Cle de Peau and Shiseido itself and generated ¥1.1 trillion (about $10 billion) in global sales last year.

“We’re not going to integrate,” Marc Rey, chief executive of Shiseido Americas and chief growth officer, Shiseido Group told BoF. “The last thing we want is to integrate.”

Drunk Elephant won’t move into Shiseido Americas’ Midtown Manhattan headquarters, and is looking for a downtown office for its team, which is spread between Newport Beach, Calif, Houston and New York (Houston and West Coast employees won’t have to move).

Nor will the brand abandon its cruelty-free stance, even as it tries to build a Chinese business. Drunk Elephant entered Alibaba’s Tmall last September, a cross border e-commerce platform that helps brands avoid animal testing.

Meanwhile, Masterson will continue to create products, including a build-out of hair and body ranges that debut in the spring. She said everything that will launch through 2023 is already formulated. Hair and body products were completed before the acquisition.

Shiseido will steer the brand in other ways, namely an aggressive global expansion that will see Drunk Elephant sold in more countries, including France and other European countries. The brand is still unknown to many consumers in the US, the label’s biggest market, but Lucia Perdomo-Ruehlemann, chief marketing officer at Drunk Elephant, said a host of marketing initiatives will serve as awareness drivers. The line will increase its sampling spend, continue to actively engage with its social media following and open a pop-up in Los Angeles next month to promote new categories.

“The consumer base is super limited, even in the US… Within our distribution base at Sephora, I think we’re only reaching like 15 percent of the VIP consumers,” Rey said, adding that “Europe is going to be very quick, Asia is going to be slightly longer.” (Rey is referring to members of Sephora’s Beauty Insider Program.)

Rey called Drunk Elephant’s branding “powerful enough” to transcend global markets — except maybe in Korea, he quickly added, a global trend leader in beauty and home to the savviest skincare customers in the world.

“[It’s] bigger than just buying the operations from that company … these large companies are buying the smaller ones to scale the brand attributes,” said Laura Gurski, senior managing director and global lead for Accenture’s Consumer Goods & Services practice.

In Asia, the company has to find the right retail partners and influencers and may need to tweak formulas for regulatory reasons (the goal is to keep a formula as close to the original as possible). Unlike many beauty labels that adapt their brands locally, from a marketing and product assortment perspective, Drunk Elephant’s philosophy and messaging will remain consistent.

“When you start trying to change it [messaging] and say, ‘Oh in this market, they don’t do this,’ you’re convoluting the strategy,” said Tim Warner, chief executive of Drunk Elephant. “Then you just become vanilla like everyone else.”

This strategy has already been applied successfully to makeup label Nars, which Shiseido bought in 2000. Rey said the brand has remained true to its roots: founder François Nars is still creative director two decades later and the iconic “Orgasm” blush he conceived of in 1999 is the US best-selling blush in the prestige category, according to NPD data. Orgasm has since become a franchise that spans lipstick, loose powder, lip gloss, highlighters and more.

“You go to Nars and you’re in between orgasm and climax,” Rey said with a laugh, noting that the line’s global business grew by 24 percent last year. “That’s called brands. That’s called point of view.”

The addition of seven hair and body products, which will take the SKU count to 27, marks the first category extension since Masterson started Drunk Elephant in 2013. Items such as a tangle spray, scalp scrub and body lotion will go on sale April 3. Similar to skincare, everything is packaged in a white bottle or tube with a punchy coloured cap, some named after existing hero products. The “T.L.C. Happi Scalp Scrub” has the same neon pink cap as the “T.L.C. Framboos Glycolic Night Serum,” which both contain alpha and beta hydroxy acid blends to exfoliate the skin on one’s face and scalp. The hair assortment is a permanent collaboration with celebrity hairstylist Chris McMillan (Jennifer Aniston is a longtime client), a childhood friend of Masterson’s.

“Since we’re treating the skin on the body, the scalp, on the face — we’re still a skincare brand,” Masterson said. “You can call it ‘skinification’ of everything.”

She said she struggles with keeping the assortment tight (Peter Thomas Roth has over 50 items on Sephora’s e-commerce site, versus Drunk Elephant’s 20 products) while still adding newness for a consumer who expects frequent launches. Upcoming releases will range from new products to updates on existing formulas, Masterson said, where access to Shiseido’s R&D and 600,000 square foot Global Innovation Center in Japan, a half-billion-dollar investment, could be helpful.

“Now then the question for the consumer is: do the brand attributes hold up if they [the brand] moves to other categories?” Gurski said. “And if it does, are you able to be that clean in shampoo?”

Barneys New York will officially close its Madison Avenue store on Sunday. WWD goes inside retail's Roman ruins.

NEW YORK — Standing smack-dab in the middle of Barneys New York’s subterranean beauty floor at its Madison Avenue flagship, the onetime beacon of luxury commerce now resembles a set from the depths of a Space-Age horror film.

Light bounced off the stark white fixtures that once held tubes of luxury lipstick and antiaging potions as fluorescent track lighting flickered along a mirrored wall where perfume bottles had been displayed like prized whiskies. They were gone, as were all of the skin-care testers — save for a few straggler bottles of Augustinus Bader’s much fussed about $300 “miracle” cream, which seemed to have been strategically decanted of their contents.

What was once at the cutting edge of fashion, entertainment and consumption has quickly been rendered as a time capsule from grander, off-line times. Barneys’ famed flagship will close on Sunday, sold through of its last stained velvet chair and scratched steel display case.

“This is Stanley Kubrick-esque for sure,” said a stationery designer, who once sold at Barneys and had returned to document its final days with a series of cell-phone photos. Over the last week, the dissolution of one of New York’s top retail icons became a spectator sport for all walks of life — including WWD’s cab driver home from the store one recent evening, who had gone to comb through the sale.

Fashion publicists, luxury retail store managers and design students made their final pilgrimages to the store, rubbing shoulders at any given hour with Chinese resellers, self-described eBay connoisseurs, Russian tourists and a revolving door of rumpled types seeking out a deal during their lunch breaks from banking offices nearby.

Their collective anticipation recalled the days of Barneys’ famed warehouse sales, but instead of walking into the back stock of its Chelsea store, shoppers were bargain-hunting on Madison Avenue — picking from the remains of an institution where employees with decades of tenure were facing down a quick path to unemployment.

Where the store went wrong has been well documented. It will now fall into the hands of Authentic Brands Group, which will utilize the 275,000-square-foot Madison Avenue space for a series of pop-up shops and activations until the building’s landlord, Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., finds a new tenant. All of Barneys’ remaining seven stores — a combination of flagship and outlet locations – will have closed by the end of this week.

Gene Pressman, a member of Barneys’ founding family and the store’s co-chief executive officer and creative director from 1972 to 1998, helped grow the retailer from what he described as a “men’s discount store” to an “emporium” of the cool and cutting-edge.

Under Pressman’s direction, Barneys was the fist store to import Prada, Versace, Comme des Garçons, Giorgio Armani, Azzedine Alaïa and Helmut Lang to the U.S. The store’s reputation as a leader in on-the-cusp design was further cemented when longtime fashion director Julie Gilhart helped establish Barneys as a launchpad for young talent — giving designers like Proenza Schouler, Joseph Altuzarra and Olivier Theyskens their first orders.

It was a clubhouse for creative minds and wealthy aesthetes in the days when shoppers had to visit a store to see what was in stock. But to Pressman, Barneys’ success lay in how “my family never considered Barneys a department store, maybe in size but not in stature. We were a specialty store with a unique point of view.

“It felt like we were in the theatrical business, creating theater, because in those days fashion was the leader — it influenced music, motion pictures, it influenced art — it was the impetus of everything,” Pressman said.

But his flair for extravagance helped lead the company into its first bankruptcy in 1996, five years after the retailer expanded from its longtime home downtown in Chelsea uptown onto Madison Avenue.

Fashion’s favorite architect Peter Marino designed the Madison Avenue flagship with the idea that, “it would be like Liberty London. I thought it would be there 150 years. I put mosaic tile floors that I thought would last for 100 years. Nothing shocked me more than Barneys filing for bankruptcy [in 1996] and the new owners ripping out those floors. I never put my big toe into the store after that.”

For Marino, the writing was on the wall. “They made it look like every other department store. One of those fund guys purchased their debt and thought, ‘Let’s change the flooring to white marble material, that will certainly increase sales.’”

Fast-forward and the Pressman’s family business has crumbled under years of mismanagement, putting thousands of employees out of jobs and leaving designers both big and small unpaid and in danger of bankruptcy themselves.

Giacomo Piazza, cofounder of the showroom 247, which represents some of the world’s most promising young talents, said Barneys “came to my showroom demanding exclusivity, knowing that they were going to close in six months…it was irrational and they overordered — putting people in serious trouble. The pressure on designers was big because Barneys was a big name and they knew they were going to screw the designers over. I know so many brands that have been almost put out of business from this.”

Over the last month, Barneys’ rig of precious goods was fast depleted by corporate liquidation company Great American Group. Supply ran so low earlier this week that the store began selling Barneys gift boxes and ribbon spools for $2 a piece — memorabilia that drew a 20-minute checkout line. Less enticing were bins of shoe peds, empty sunglass boxes and ripped friendship bracelets. Single Gianvito Rossi and Balenciaga shoes with no mate to be found were on offer at $5 apiece.

In the weeks before, Great American Group had used Barneys as a catchall to sell off the remnants of other failed fashion enterprises. Merchandise from Roberto Cavalli (the American subsidiary of which went bankrupt in April), Zac Posen (ceased operations in November) and Calypso St. Barth (liquidated in 2017) flooded the store’s selling space — offered at more than 90 percent off.

This week, the store was scraped clean, down to its contemporary dregs. A dark irony came in seeing Sixties revival skirts from the Lisa Perry label — created by the wife of Barneys’ final owner Richard Perry — among the final castaways. They hung alongside relics from fad movements that had long been stowed away within Barneys’ inventory — remnants of the early-Aughts designer denim movement, flotsam chiffon gowns for prerecession Upper East Side shoppers who ran in New York’s gala scene and pre-#MeToo-era stilettos.

Garment racks suspended from ceilings — a display concept that originated at Barneys — hung empty, like gymnasium monkey bars. Merchandise may be gone but the names of top designers — many of them still with outstanding invoices — remain etched onto walls. An auxiliary dry wall emblazoned with “Dries van Noten” that had been used to display the designer’s seasonal highlights was on sale for $75.

Last week the store’s coed shoe floor that WWD labeled as a “gleaming…light-filled loft setting,” when it was unveiled in 2012 had more shoes scattered on the floor than shelves. Over the weekend this, too, was fully cleaned out, with only beat-up sofas and chairs left to sell off (starting price $1,000). Fixtures that had been cleverly placed to hide garish carpet stains were moved around, revealing wreckage likely caused by wealthy shoppers’ children and aprés-brunch spills.

Sales associates, some with two decades of Barneys tenure, were left to sell off damaged or random merchandise, which in the final days included expensive fur coats and rugs. They packed purchases into plastic grocery bags, continuously nagged about original prices by hawkers looking for attractive comparisons to post on their eBay listings.

For sales associates, the pomp and circumstance of luxury retail was understandably over. The divide between wealthy shoppers and those who serve them was palpable on the ninth floor, where employees retreated to a staff break room without closing the door behind them. Loud venting and the smell of microwave lunches filled the hallway outside of Fred’s, where a dozen or so patrons were still dining on $30 Cobb salads and $15 shallow bowls of chicken consommé. Many union employees say it is unclear how much court-mandated severance pay they will receive.

Piazza said the shock of seeing Barneys in ruins is “a big wake-up call for everyone, all of the stores are now saying ‘How can we avoid being the next Barneys?’ and adapt for this new global marketplace?’ It’s sad to say, but maybe Barneys was the sacrifice to put everyone back on track to making a healthy business that supports the industry.”

For Pressman, the art of shopping is over. “The energy is weak,” he said of runway collections and the stores that sell them. “There will be other things,” he said. “I think everything has its day. Going to concerts or the theater, event spaces and parks is more exciting now. People are getting out and enjoying experiences of life other than just being in a store.”