Let’s get lit!said actress Jennifer Lawrence when she helped reveal Christmas stained glass and started the annual light show at Saks 5th AvenueIn New York.
As is traditional, spectators crowded behind fences near 50th Street while performers – in this case from the Martha Graham Dance Company – flood 5th Avenue.
Behind them, near 300,000 lights illuminate what is described as a “ferris wheel” installation, covering ten stories of the flagship facade of Saks Fifth Avenue. The wheel is adorned with signs of the zodiac and decorated with symbols related to the Dior brand, such as the star and flowers (since Christian Dior is a garden lover).
Lawrence, a long-time Dior ambassador, is reunited with other actors including Tracee Ellis Ross, Rachel Zegler, Ashley Park, Alexandra Daddario, Lola Tung and Maya Hawkr. They are grouped on stands along the street for the spectacle that included fires launched from the terrace of the store’s department.
Las traditional and flowered stained glass windows of the Holidaysa piece of marketing that RH Macy credited with originality in 1874, are part of a historical tradition already in New Yorkwhich declined in recent years as big box stores closed or moved away from this practice.
Las four stained glass windows well-known shows that remain in Manhattan – Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman – and continue to display elaborate scenes that can lead months of creation and assembly.
In interviews, the people who helped create the displays talked about this year’s themes and the inspiration behind each of them.
Bergdorf Goodman
David Hoey, executive director of visual presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, said that each year the team looks for a theme that is “slightly tangential” but still provides a surprise factor.
“It must be done properly,” he said. “Not too specific, not too broad. And related to the Holidays, even if it is a bit tangential.”
Las seven stained glass windows in the Fifth Avenue company store They come with a theme “Isn’t It Brilliant?” (Isn’t it brilliant?), which Hoey described as “bright lights, bright ideas, bright horizons and bright everything.” Each of the screens features a mix of bright props with subtitles.
The window “First Light” (First Light), for example, refers to dawn and shows crystal balls over farm animals – two roosters, a cow and a pig – covered in a similar glowing exterior.
Another stained glass window, called “Tripping the Light Fantastic” (Journey through the fantastic light), characterizes creatures similar to Pegasus, the flying horse of Greek mythology. The mannequins were dressed by design ensembles from Thom Browne, Balmain, Rodarte, Alexander McQueen, Cristopher John Rogers and Paco Rabanne. More than a hundred people worked on the samples, Hoey said, and the installations took about three weeks and 25 people.
Describing the craftsmanship of the Holiday stained glass display, Hoey, who worked on the Bergdorf windows for about two decades, said: “It’s a little theater, a little fashion. It is a bit of commercial art, it is an exhibition space, but it is definitely public.”
Macy’s
For the third year in a row, Macy’s blue reindeer, Tiptoe, returns to Herald Square.
The theme for this year’s windows, “Give Love” (Give Love), runs along the front of the company, on Broadway near 34th Street. The display focuses on “holiday togetherness and nostalgia,” said Manny Urquizo, national window director for Macy’s.
The centerpiece of Tiptoe and Friends’ stained glass windows are scenes depicting their favorite themes of the Holiday season. Like a page from a storybook, a short narrative describes the samples and an interactive component animates each one.
In a musical-themed stained glass window, piano keys snake around a trumpet-playing polar bear. Visitors can play the piano by pressing a group of keys on the glass. And in a window with a bright pink carousel of candy, visitors can scan a QR code that directs them to a reindeer filter on the Instagram app.
Urquizo, who worked in the windows at Macy’s for the past four years, said: “I really I want that tradition to continue.”. And he added: “I brought my children every year. They are my toughest critics. But you know, they really enjoy it.”
Bloomingdale’s
This year, Bloomingdale’s partnered with Warner Bros. to create scenes inspired by the movie Wonkain which Timothée Chalamet plays young Willy Wonka.
“We look at everything through two lenses: How does this dazzle a child? And how does this appeal and delight an adult? said John Klimkowski, who is the executive director of visual merchandising at Bloomingdale’s and has worked in the stores’ Holiday windows for more than a decade.
Klimkowski said the team embraced the candy land as a themewith a Wonka clue, for the windows on Lexington Avenue near 59th Street.
One shows the facade of the candy store (a core for the 1971 Wonka film, starring Gene Wilder), with bright interiors, giant cakes and swirling lollipops. A six step chocolate fountain that works, is located in the center of the sample. A mannequin, dressed as Wonka with a galley, a cane and a purple outfit, moves onlookers to entice them to enter the store.
In another window, mannequins with curly hair show the effects of designer candy in making people fly or helping their hair grow fast, another reference to the fantastical creations of fictional chocolate shops.
A display with a “Candy Wonderlandscape” theme was produced in collaboration with Abby Modell, an artist who specializes in hand blown glass. Lollipops and rock candy covered in Swarovski crystals They float on the glass of sticky gummy worms next to giant chocolate blobs on top of the marshmallows.
“I just hope that for a few minutes, no matter what’s going on in the world and in someone’s personal life,” Klimkowski said, “they can relax and enjoy the beauty of the holiday spirit because it’s only once a year.”
Saks Fifth Avenue
This year, the window display at Saks explores Dior’s first visit to the United States and New York, in 1947a trip that would ignite his fascination with the city.
The collaboration was the first time Saks had a luxury fashion house as a partner for its Holiday show.
In the samples, with the theme of “Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks(Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks), miniature figurines of Dior, who died in 1957, are located in various settings in shop windows along Fifth Avenue.
The Windows They track Dior’s travels from Paris to New Yorkfusing references to the fashion house with miniature versions of notable landmarks, such as the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, wrapped in Dior’s Bar jacket, and the Rockefeller Center ice rink, featuring Dior and his beloved dog, Bobby, on a sleigh full of perfume bottles.
And a model of Times Square on Christmas Eve showing Dior standing next to a figure of a woman dressed by the fashion house’s New Look signature from 1947, which he introduced in his first collection and which helped shape his career.
In a window, a replica of the Saks Fifth Avenue New York flag is complete with light installed on the façade, a change of lights, a hot dog standing in the corner and steam rising from the grates.
Andrew Winton, executive vice president, creative at Saks is overseeing the stained glass design, and said, “It’s really been a dedicated group of people from around the world, hundreds of artisans crafting the story.”
He added: “It is something that has always been a gift for the city”.
The New York Times / Special for Clarín