As the Holidays are approaching, it makes you think about the process that stores and brands go through to create the perfect holiday experience for their customers. These windows are a huge deal to fashion retailers all around the world. The design teams from numerous retailers start working on their holiday windows in January and continue to work on them all year long.
As of today, it is estimated that more than 500,000 people view these special windows a day. People visit from all over the world to see the magic that these windows create.
In 1874, Macy’s had one of the first major holiday window displays in New York, featuring a collection of porcelain dolls, as well as, scenes from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In 1914, Lord & Taylor started ‘unveiling events’ for their display windows at their flagship store on Fifth Avenue. In order to do this, they had Hydraulic lifts beneath the windows that allowed a team of window dressers to create their masterpieces without the public seeing the process. They are also the real pioneer behind the holiday window displays. In 1938, the owners decided to display the windows in a purely decorative way, instead of presenting store merchandise.
According to Lord & Taylor, more than eight million people will visit the store between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day after seeing their displays in the past.
All this magic does not come easy. Many stores and brands spent all year long preparing their holiday window displays. Their is a million and a half pair of eyes that see their windows a week so they spend the majority of the year planning their holiday windows. Approximately eleven months a year is spent creating sets, fabricating the props and finding the outfits to make each window perfect. The only month that is taken off from the holidays is January, but come February 1st, they are back in the planning mode. Sometimes the job isn’t always glamorous either, sometimes these workers will spend all day painting fake leaves for a prop or clearing out a previous window. It takes hard work and patience for this type of job, but the finished product always makes it worthwhile. The 15-day installation process starts at the beginning of November. Bergdorf has a small team of window dressers that work on creating the theme of each window and they also hire freelancers each year to do the more intricate pieces. For instance, if they have a prop that needs to be made out of paper, they would hire several paper sculptors to create that prop. Being located in New York gives them a great advantage when it comes to the pool of artists working on the art that is placed into their windows. They use a mixture of all materials to create their art too, so the many different artists helping are extremely important. They use new props and new materials every year but they love to reuse old props in a new way as well.
