The holiday season is a magical time in New York City, with its lights and decorations on brownstone buildings, trees and streetlights, and annual celebrations like the Thanksgiving Parade and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting. Bergdorf Goodman kicks off the holiday festivities every year with the unveiling of its holiday windows, and this year, the Fifth Avenue retailer devotes its iconic window displays to New York City, its home for nearly 120 years.
The Bergdorf Goodman holiday windows continue their tradition of fantastical storytelling while celebrating New Yorks world re-owned cultural institutions. The 2017 windows, entitled To New York With Love capture the citys appreciation for the visual arts, history, music, film, and more showcasing seven local organizations: American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Museum of the Moving Image, The New York Botanical Garden, New York Philharmonic, New-York Historical Society, and UrbanGlass.
David Hoey, Senior Director of Visual Presentation, enchants visitors this season with a multilayered experience to bring each institution to life. Ten months in production, Hoey and his team of artists and artisans have orchestrated a wondrous spectacle that features a range of media, such as paper-mâché, neon, video, resin casting, and the fiber arts. ”Our institutional partners provided an array of subject matter to inspire us, so we crafted a completely different type of window for each organization. And since we love putting on a show, we have made the windows kaleidoscopic and entertaining. While exploring this theme, we knew the windows had to be dynamic and multilayered to evoke the excitement of New York today, while simultaneously celebrating the city’s past,” says Hoey.
The museum’s window features dinosaur skeletons encrusted in 1.5 million individual Swarovski crystals covering them all took 350 hours of work.
Artist Mark Gagnon created paper-mâché versions of New Yorkers from eras past.
Against a backdrop of screens showing old movies, Hoey and team created an ode to Old Hollywood glamour in an Art Deco style.
In this showstopping scene, a force of red neon musical instruments toast to New York Philharmonic and also puts the spotlight on a custom Zac Posen scarlet gown.
Two imagined gardeners sit in a psychedelic botanical library surrounded by flora created by Brooklyn-based fiber artists Burke & Pryde Studio.
The Brooklyn institution responsible for some of today’s hottest glasswork talents enlisted four artists to create works for sale and display.
Across the street at the men’s store, men’s Visual Director Shane Ruth created a celebration of music with dancing mannequins against perfectly symmetrical backdrops.
Watch how Bergdorf Goodmans Holiday Windows were made: