I can’t believe that it took this long for Dress Barn to go out of business, a move that was announced the week of May 19th. I mean, was there a worse name in all of retail than Dress Barn?

Dress Emporium—fancy.

Dress Collection—solid.

Dress Store—boring, but accurate.

Dress Barn?

I would love to have been in the board room when Dress Barn was being named. What were they thinking? It must have been some man who said, “Our research department feels that a bovine reference will really moooove the ladies to graze—I mean shop—in our stores. Can anyone think of a name that will make women feel like heifers?”

“Stockyard of Dresses?”

“No . . .”

“Dress Pasture?”

“No . . .”

“How about Dress Barn?”

“Perfect.”

Whenever I walked by, I always expected a sales girl to be standing at the door with a cattle prod going, “Move it along, Bossy, the sales are in the back.”

“Lumber on back to our leisure wear, ladies!”

I wonder how they missed the tagline, It’ll behoove you to shop at Dress Barn? . . .

Anyway, it had to be a man who came up with the name, because women are word sensitive: Command the language and you command the ladies. Clearly, Victoria’s Secret, for example, was named by a woman, and not by whoever came up with Dress Barn; otherwise it would have been called Grandma’s Underwear Barn.

By the way, if anyone out there knows the guy—and it was a guy—who named a line of J. C. Penny’s clothing Sag Harbor, please pass along this post.