Speed Dial

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It was a gigantic black Bakelite thing with a brown woven cord that was bolted into one corner of one room," says Simon Doonan, executive vice president of creative services at Barneys New York (and the man behind the retailer's legendarily clever window displays), describing the phone of his childhood in Reading, England. His family used the phone, he says, basically "just for calling the hospital if you were having a hemorrhage. Nobody yenta'd."

While the Bakelite has been upgraded to a Rolm with an 18-number speed dial, the 46-year-old Doonan still uses the phone for "making arrangements rather than shooting the shit." The top dogs at his employer of 12 years (he's just re-upped for three more), Barneys co-chairman Gene Pressman and president and C.E.O. Tom Shull, occupy Nos. 1 and 2, followed by his "ceramicist boyfriend," Jonathan Adler (3). The publication this month of Doonan's Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales from a Life in Fashion (Penguin Studio/Callaway Editions) accounts for Sterling Lord Literistic (9), where agent Jody Hotchkiss is handling movie rights.

Though Doonan isn't a big one for chatting—"Most people would be well advised to not pick up the phone when they have the impulse"—he's not averse to other uses for telephones. When Barneys installed a new system a few years ago, he displayed the old phones for Madison Avenue's cutting-edge shoppers. "We dangled them in the window," he says, "and had them all in huge mounds." A

kind of fashion wake-up call.

BETSEY OSBORNE