Between Thanksgiving and New Year's, Manhattan's most popular off-Broadway show is Fifth Avenue's Christmas decorations.
Accompanied by the background jingle of bells rung by Volunteers of America Santas, 125,000 people a day—mostly adults—cluster to view Christmas display windows of major department stores, where the merchandise has been replaced with spectacular holiday scenes. "I go for pure pleasure," says Cindy Williams, who commutes an hour and a half from New Jersey with her six-year-old son to view them. "For a magical moment, the stores' Christmas window take you out of what's really happening."
Department store windows are planned a year in advance; they require time-consuming workmanship and large, undisclosed budgets. While window admirers are not immediate shoppers, stores such as Bloomingdale's, Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, and Tiffany's put on their best face for their dedicated audience, who often must stand in long lines to see the pageants.
A friendly competition
"Display directors have a friendly competition to see which store wins the most popular window contest," says David Milutin, creative director for Altman's. "However, in reality, each store plays its own part, as in a symphony orchestra, to produce an overall festive effect."
This year, Altman's six-window display celebrates village life in eighteenth-century America with animated figures. A jumping jack and a wooden doll peer through windows of shops and homes to observe a toymaker, a baker preparing cookies, a seamstress spinning yarn, a woman creating Della Robbia-style Christmas wreaths, a music teacher conducting students on the mandolin and violin, and couples dancing to a fiddler's tunes.
"We work with historic themes," Milutin says, "because people look for nostalgia at Christmas. As a designer, my challenge is to be true to history while making it exciting to audiences in the 1980s.
A "hands-on" director, Milutin (who holds an MFA in painting and sculpture) researches the subject, sketches each set, drafts mechanical specifications, makes molds for the dolls' heads, and designs all their clothes and wigs. He exemplifies Altman's in-house approach to display—all sets are built in their basement workrooms.
Altman's carpentry crew begin constructing holiday window sets in the summer, between their biweekly merchandise settings. After Christmas, everything is dismantled and stored for eventual recycling.
Lord & Taylor loves New York
"Television cameras are here … there's always a hullabaloo when we open our holiday windows," says Kenneth B. Schliemann, a divisional vice president who is creative director for the Christmas windows at Lord & Taylor. "The themes reflect my personal prejudice," he says. "I'm an urban architecture buff as well as a frustrated teacher. I want these displays to be a lively learning experience".
Lord & Taylor had displayed
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