Jay Z's Collection Launch At Barneys Is A Flop

This whole Barneys/Jay Z “shop-and-frisk” circus is becoming a parody of itself.

Here I am on Wednesday at lunchtime wandering the Jay Z collection on the third floor of Barneys up on Madison Ave., pricing a white T-shirt with leather epaulets — $995. Black jeans — $365. En Noir leather shorts — $2,590. An En Noir hoodie — $3,100. If the price doesn’t kill you, George Zimmerman might.



I’m wandering through this darkened room of the Jay Z collection with rap music blaring and a six-minute film projected on the walls of a subway roaring out of Brooklyn into Manhattan.

Which is comical because no sane New Yorker would wear any of this overpriced junk on the subway without an armed guard.
So I wander out onto the street following two white guys who pass a lone black protester who berates Barneys shoppers. I ask the white guys if they’d heard about racial profiling at Barneys.

“Of course,” says Joanie Lemercier, from France. “I am the art director of the Jay Z display. This is my associate, Boris Edelstein, the artist. We designed these three Barneys windows, too. I cannot understand why the press makes such a big deal out of two incidents. In Europe this wouldn’t happen.”

He says he conceived the show with Jay Z. “Barneys hired us and put us together with Jay Z,” he says. “We collaborated with Jay Z on the theme and look of the show.”

What’s the theme and look?

“It’s about black and white,” he says.

No kidding.

“It’s about Jay Z coming from the Marcy projects, from the darkness of Brooklyn, and into the bright city of light of Manhattan,” he says. “So we took a film crew to Brooklyn to shoot on the streets and in the subway and we project that on the walls behind the merchandise, which is also mostly black and white.” So did Jay Z go with you to deep, dark Brooklyn?

“No, he just approved the story boards,” says Lemercier.

So Jay Z’s show is autobiographical, about a poor projects kid from Brooklyn who rides the rails and discovers himself in the bright lights of Manhattan.

Nice.

Except that when two black shoppers, one from Brooklyn, one from Corona, Queens, came by subway to the bright lights of Barneys and spent hard-earned money and got profiled by the store and the cops and detained for being black in a white store, Jay Z decided, “The show must go on.”

That’s called forgetting where you come from.

Had the cops detained the two shoppers for psychiatric evaluation for paying the insane Barneys prices it might be understandable. Anyone who spends $3,100 on a duffel bag clearly needs his head examined. But, face it, these black people were detained for being “uppity.”

So Barneys hired its own “civil rights” lawyer to investigate itself. The mouthpiece took the king’s shilling and pointed his money-stained finger at the NYPD. Which is like A-Rod’s lawyer blaming MLB for the slugger taking PEDs.

A joke.

A bad joke like Jay Z’s decision to keep doing business with Barneys as long as he gets a seat on the panel that investigates the “shop-and-frisk” allegations at Barneys. To his credit, Jay Z also upped the proceeds that would go to his own scholarship fund from 25% to 100% of everything earned from this royal rummage sale.

But the joke falls flatter.

As the Jay Z show opened without lines uptown, the City Council held hearings downtown on racial profiling by Barneys, Macy’s and the NYPD. Good idea. Except that Barneys, Macy’s, NYPD and Jay Z didn’t show up.

Which means the City Council had a show trial.

“Jay Z has made more money off the N-word more than the KKK,” said Darrel (Brother Tazar) Smith, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, protesting outside Barneys. “He said he’d stop using the B-word after his daughter was born. I guess we’ll have to wait till he has a son before he stops using the N-word. And it’s a disgrace that he still associates himself with this store.”

And a bad joke.




Written By Denis Hamill


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