Storytelling is an art and it can be practiced using both words and images. Even window shops can tell stories, especially when they are carefully thought and put together like the ones at Bergdorf Goodman.
A recently published volume by Assouline, Windows at Bergdorf Goodman, celebrates the grand, glamorous, extravagant and at times minimalist displays that every fifteen days attract the attention of crowds of locals and tourists in New York.
Founded by master tailors Edwin Goodman and Herman Bergdorf around the corner of New York's Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eight Street, the department store has been going since 1901, becoming well-known for its imaginatively magnetic windows.
Finding an idea and the proper objects to develop it is certainly not easy, but the tradition of orchestrating the perfect window shop goes a long way, having started in Paris in 1894 with wax dummies. Bergdorf Goodman transformed and innovated this art taking it to the next level.
Conceived as a theatre stage, the displays are put together with the same care a set designer would have in creating the perfect backdrop for a movie: in a way clothes and accessories complement a puzzle-like scene, becoming the punctuation marks in the story told by the windows.
One of the secrets of the Bergdorf Goodman team is coming up with a “silly yet scholarly” display that integrates real objects (sometimes the team even looks on eBay for rare pieces to complete a window) in an entertaining way.
Marcel Duchamps in 1913 said that gazing through a store window at a desirable object was “coition through a sheet of glass”, and this volume proves he was right.
The windows included in the Assouline volume go from minimal to maxi-maximalist: they may feature a dummy in a designer dress staring in a bare set at a gorilla, at an alien, at Frankenstein's monster or at a dinosaur; they may be tackling phobias or evoking dreams and visions; they may be crammed with exotic animals, gigantic sewing machines, musical instruments, kitsch crystal or mosaic-encrusted creatures, maps, candies and popcorn, vintage dummies and marionettes, porcelain tea sets, carousel horses, wheels of fortune, gigantic insects, wood veneer sculptures, balloon artworks, Halloween masks and cabinets of curiosities; they may include installations made out of hair, beards, moustaches, or be decorated with thousands of Barbie outfits hanging from laundry lines, foamcore or paper sculptures, polar bear boxing or wolves playing billiards.
Some of these scenes may celebrate festive periods such as Christmas, others are tributes to specific fashion, art, history or photographic exhibitions, they may be honouring institutions such as the American Folk Art Museum, or marking a book release; they may be conceived as mini-retrospectives made in collaboration with other institutions such as the International Center for Photography in New York, or may be inspired by pre-auction exhibits of fine art and therefore include works by Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.
The key to the perfect and most successful window is revealed in the preface by David Hoey. As Senior Director of Visual Presentation, Hoey states that he draws from different sources including Frank Baum's (of Wizard of Oz fame) monthly trade journal The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and the Professional, that the author started in 1897 (before turning into a children's author, Baum designed phantasmagoric store windows...), MGM musicals, the architectures of Robert Venturi and circus shows.
This becomes clear as you leaf through the volume and look at displays inspired by astronomy and travelling, Salvador Dalí or Georges Méliès and including oversized sculptures, rotating backdrops or mind-altering long corridors and impossibly steep staircases, skeleton animals stopping outside the door of a mysterious mansion, time machines or entire upside down displays to mark the Dada exhibition at the Moma (2006).
The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator in Charge Harold Koda makes a point when he states in the book that the windows engage the mind and the eye: while the display as a whole is usually amazing, the micro-details including real artworks, rare books or photographs elevate the windows from the product of a capitalistic society producing desire in the name of profit to musem display.
The windows dedicated to Hollywood's designer Edith Head are excellent examples as they included original pieces from films such as Sabrina, The Rear Window and The Birds, while the ones that homage Bill Cunningham are perfect tributes to a local artist and photojournalist.
Windows at Bergdorf Goodman - published on the 111th anniversary of the department store - is highly recommended to students of any fashion-related subject, but also to museum curators and installation designers: the visual information and inspirations featured (though you wish they had added more texts and at least a couple of essays about the making of some of the most beautiful windows...) will indeed inspire many ideas and solutions for further striking displays.
Image credits:
Random Words, Stencil, Show Dogs, Beards and Moustaches, Billiards Game, Cotton Candy, Kicking Up Heels, Carnival of the Animals, Strange Bedfellows, Vintage Display Heads, A Compendium of Curiosities II- Reflected and Meticulous Metronomes. All images by Ricky Zehavi & John Cordes, courtesy of Assouline.
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