Window To The Holidays 2014

In an elegant crepe suit encrusted with pearls, diamonds and bugle beads, a lithe, raven-haired beauty peers awestruck into the firmament above her. Atop an ebony lacquered podium, encircled by a truncated glass bell jar, she remains mystifyingly oblivious to her cacophonous surroundings. Wall to wall stacks of polished nickel tubas, silvered French horns and steel trumpets blare for attention, their glaring mirrored surfaces blinding the passerby. The subtitle of this Bergdorf Christmas window is subtly and cheekily entitled, “Music.”

Every passerby stops to marvel at this astonishing assemblage of musical instruments, imagining that behind this impenetrable wall of glass there is a raucous orchestral jamboree setting the silver night on fire! How do they think these things up? These windows that intrigue, amuse, tantalize, shock and fascinate us?Window dressers in New York are a cut above any in the world—and this year, several stores have broken new boundaries. For free, we mere mortals can witness extraordinary talent along Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue and Lexington too. This is a rarified world, a visual feast, where much time, great resources and deep pockets have been thoroughly tapped, all for our amazement and our ensnarement.

Bergdorf’s has always been the benchmark of Christmas window dressing. They show great dedication, given that they have a department dedicated to it and they commence the following year’s holiday window design as soon as the current holiday windows come down. Conceptually, Bergdorf’s window designers are “collagists” assembling dazzling numbers of the same items—hundreds of nickel-plated musical instruments or scores of architectural model buildings—constructed with actual blueprints.

Bergdorf’s windows conjure up otherworldly environments and Lilliputian characters demanding face time with carved wooden giants. This year, one refreshing out-of-character window showcases a kaleidoscope starburst of neon patterns, a Broadway proscenium razzle-dazzle quite centered on an extroverted mannequin. The complicated machinations of the showbiz neon patterns seem mind-numbingly unachievable. But here it performs in all its glory and fantasy.

Though Bergdorf’s is always the aspirational window dresser’s Valhalla, Saks, surprisingly, has created windows of great wit and complexity, pleasing not only the enthralled youngster but also the jaded New Yorker. Fairy tales with a twist: Red Riding Hood, upon discovering her large wolfen grandmother ensconced in a luxurious bed in the Plaza Hotel, remarks, “Why grandmaw, how big your suite is!”

Spectacular gowns and tuxedos populate the remaining glamorous windows—well worth swimming upstream through the Rockefeller Christmas tree pageant of gobsmacked tourists.

If boarding the LIRR only to plow through throngs of bemuffed, begloved and bescarfed tourists is not your cup of mulled red wine, consider boarding the LIRR and traipsing through the more sedate, though no less creative, Madison Avenue for your Christmas window viewing.

Barney’s windows, orchestrated by Baz Luhrmann, have a bit of a mechanical moving metal horror show which is as scary, otherworldly and whimsical as his movies. An automated metal owl peers terrifyingly out of a steel nest and anenomelike spiral claws open, close, swirl and undulate like evil jellyfish. The exterior of Barney’s is swallowed up in a golden encrustation of ribbons, mushrooms, balls and stringy what-nots. In fact, Christmas windows can no longer contain the holiday exuberance. Harry Winston’s building is decked out like a formal French topiary bush and Tiffany’s has become a fireworks display.

Louis Vuitton’s windows are a parade of vibrant floating ribbons. Hermes takes it down a cerebral notch, plugging into quartz crystal mysticism interspersed with rather spectacular purses.

Other windows of note are quite black, gray and white. Berlutti’s cartooned interiors are charming in their two-dimensionality. Diesel’s are “What were they thinking?” off-putting—a black teddy bear patchworked with leather rickrack, pierced and strung in biker chain (“have a hard-core holiday”). Hmmmm? Michael Kors snows the viewer with a mannequin posed in front of a waterfall of white wisteria. And a not-to-be-missed window of a giant black and white backgammon board is a graphic triumph.

Tiffany’s small world windows showcase moving stylized cartoons of New York scenes, replete with a pricey bauble here and there.

And, of course, at the upper end of Madison Avenue, Ralph Lauren’s cucumber cool mannequins sniff chillingly into an industrial air, sleek in their silver gray satins and wraps of shimmering ostrich feathers. Draped on girders and leaning on festooned balconies, these siren goddesses defy the grit, traffic and cold about them.

As I returned home on the LIRR’s Cannonball, I looked longingly over my photos, wishing I could have lingered a while more in front of these windows to take in their wit, their detail and their effortless celebration of visual design. Had my yearly tour not coincided with the snowy nor’easter and my over-coated persona not resembled a character from the wintery Steppes of “Dr. Zhivago,” I would have stayed staring for hours into these magical worlds. Hopefully you will have better weather than I and can sally forth into the miraculous, wondrous world of New York’s holiday windows.