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Louis Vuitton pop-up headed to former Barneys space
Luxury retailer bringing traveling exhibition to Madison Avenue
Nearly three years after Barneys New York closed its doors, the site of its former Madison Avenue flagship will once again be filled with designer goods.
Luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton is bringing its “200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries” traveling exhibition to the space at 660 Madison Avenue from October 13 through December 21, The Real Deal has learned.
The exhibition, which showcases trunks designed by Frank Gehry, Marc Jacobs and the toy brand Lego, among several-dozen others, ran this summer on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive after earlier stops in France and Singapore.
Ben Ashkenazy’s Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation, which owns 600 Madison Avenue, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did a representative for Louis Vuitton.
Robin Zendell & Associates represented Louis Vuitton, while the ownership of 660 Madison was repped by Aurora Capital Associates, which owns a stake in the property.
Barneys’ 2019 bankruptcy and 2020 closure followed a high-profile dispute with Ashkenazy over the rent on its 275,000-square-foot flagship location.
After Ashkenazy attempted to more than triple the annual rent from $16 million to $60 million, an arbitrator in 2018 gave the landlord the go-ahead to increase Barneys’ rent to $30 million.
When Barneys went bankrupt the following year, then-CEO Daniella Vitale partially attributed the company’s demise to its “excessively high” rents while also acknowledging a difficult retail environment brought on by consumers’ changing shopping habits.
Ashkenazy was blamed by some for the iconic retailer’s failure — a characterization he has bristled at, according to associates. The billionaire investor has struggled recently with several of his properties, including his Union Station retail and office property in Washington, D.C., where he is locked in an eminent-domain dispute with both his lender and Amtrak.
In New York, Ashkenazy lost the original Barneys building at 115 Seventh Avenue in Chelsea earlier this year to a foreclosure.