With more and more holiday shopping happening online—Cyber Monday has been around since 2005—it’s hard to believe holiday windows are still important. A November 21, 2018 New York Times article gives a brief rundown of holiday windows past and present and explains why they still matter, although there are some stores that are closing. For some this will be their last Christmas. It’s a sad end to a tradition that dates back to at least 1874 when Macy’s created a Christmas window. More than half a century later in the 1926 Handbook Of Window Display, author William Nelson Taft (no relation to the president and Supreme Court justice that I can tell) said, “A number of stores have found that the mere fact of displaying appropriate Christmas goods, attractively boxed, not only stimulates buying but starts the holiday rush considerably earlier.” He’s a bit prosaic. Jean Shepherd, in his book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which was partly the basis for A Christmas Story, gets a little more poetic reminiscing about a holiday window from the year he got his Red Ryder BB gun, with a Santa’s workshop display so elaborate it “made Salvador Dali look like Norman Rockwell.”
Window displays aren’t limited to the holidays, though. For more than forty years Gene Moore created elaborate setups for windows at Tiffany’s in New York. In June 1971 he created a series that told the story of a jewel thief with papier-mache mice. The president of Tiffany’s, Walter Hoving, got an angry letter from the president of Cartier for making light of the “hazards of owning fine jewelry”. Hoving’s reply: “Nuts.” He was right. If you can afford a Cartier watch you can afford a sense of humor, but that’s another story.
This is one of the scenes, from the book Windows at Tiffany’s : the art of Gene Moore (H. N. Abrams, 1980).
Window displays aren’t all fun and games, though. This is from the article:
“We track how many people are taking their photographs and sharing them back out,” said Frank Berman, an executive vice president and the chief marketing officer of Bloomingdale’s. “We also have methods in place to track how many people are passing by the windows, stopping and engaging. We also track the amount of traffic coming into the store and the conversion rates. We’re up in terms of traffic this holiday season.”
Is it weird that I’m creeped out by that? I know marketing is the reason for the season, but it bothers me that when I’m looking at store windows they might be looking back.
That’s partly why I put a picture of Parnassus Books at the top of this post, and here’s another of their main window.
Their window displays of books, I hope, draw people in. Bookstores are probably the most endangered of retail stores, and yet bookstores are places where the whole idea is to browse without necessarily knowing what you might find, and books open windows in your mind. There was an event at Parnassus the night I took that picture, and that’s one of the great contradictions of bookstores: they’re public spaces where people can get together to share the private experience of reading. And also every year my Christmas wish list is pretty much all books.
Thanks, Chris, for creating this wonderful public space where people can get together to share the private experience of reading your fabulous blog.
I’m continually thankful for the internet which not only allows me my own space but also spaces like yours.