Window Wonderland

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

While not every department store has its windows ready, the ones that do are good enough to make one thing clear: This year’s windows are as good as any I’ve seen in the 30 or so Christmases I’ve spent in New York.

For years, Bergdorf Goodman has been renowned for its inventive displays, whether at holiday time or any other time. This year the store, on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th streets, does not disappoint. The windows are a tribute to the famous designer Tony Duquette, who died in 1999. Duquette was a protégé of Elsie de Wolfe, from her Lady Mendl days when she spent much of her time in Hollywood. He designed jewelry, interiors, film and stage sets, costumes, and just about anything you could think of, for such clients as de Wolfe, the Duchess of Windsor, and Greta Garbo. He evolved a kind of Hollywood rococo style, sensuous, colorful, gilded, layered, and — the phrase pops up whenever anyone writes about Duquette — over the top. In other words, it is a perfect inspiration for Bergdorf’s windows. The overall theme is “The Elements.” “Air” features a jewel-studded levitating elephant carrying an equally bejeweled woman, likely an empress. (I know that’s just what I think of when I think of Christmas.) “Water” has, naturally, nautical motifs, including bejeweled ship models, crustaceans, a thousand shells, a fabulous gold-wire trident-bearing water god, and — though it’s the central element, it may take you a moment to focus— an elegant woman dancing with a tuxedoed alligator. “Light” uses countless mirrored or reflective elements — it’s the most shimmering window in New York — as a setting for items and motifs drawn from or suggestive of South Asian art. It is grandly inventive. “Earth” gives us a great green-and-white giraffe, a lady in a white sequined gown, snails, grasshoppers, and slithery creatures galore.

Barney’s, at Madison Avenue between 60th and 61st streets, began making a splash several years ago with windows that contain topical cheekiness and bows to those “in the know.” With their theme of a “green Christmas,” the windows are as au courant as ever, but they are also more accessible, less snarky, and more cheerful than in the past. Last year’s Andy Warhol-themed windows did not do it for me, to say the least. This year, maybe for the first time, Barney’s windows vie for the best in the city. Pulsing green lights feature in all of the windows, which comprise countless recyclable objects such as bottles, cans, bottle caps and, in one window, a huge number of MetroCards. The windows bear titles like “12 Green Days of Christmas,” “Green Is the New Black,” and “Heroes of Green,” the last a tribute to crusading environmentalists like Daryl Hannah and Thomas L. Friedman. (I’m not making that up.)

Long the gold standard of New York’s holiday windows, Lord & Taylor’s this year are as fine as any I remember at the grand old store. As usual, they are period vignettes, although not, as is often the case, all New York-based. From what I can make of them, they are all early 20th-century scenes — from Vienna, Venice, Paris, Copenhagen, and New York and, as usual, they are superbly crafted and supremely sentimental evocations of a fantastical past.

A few weeks ago, Lord & Taylor’s building, on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 38th and 39th streets, became a designated city landmark. The windows celebrate the senses. “Taste” shows us the interior of a Fifth Avenue mansion with a table spread with holiday goodies and the Metropolitan Museum of Art visible across the street out the front window. “Aroma,” my favorite, takes us to an Art Nouveau patisserie in Paris, with Notre Dame visible out the window. The details form as charming a storybook evocation of Paris as you will ever see. “Feel” gives us Copenhagen. On the left is the inside of a cozy cottage and on the right is the snowy outdoors with frolicking children, a snowman, a horse, a dog, and so on. “Sight” is almost Bergdorfian in its Venice scene of Santa Claus on a gondola, all scrumptiously rendered. “Sound” is a classic Lord & Taylor tableau, a family making its own music in its home in old Vienna. Finally, “Spirit of Christmas” brings children from around the world together in a magical forest of enchanted Christmas trees. I’m not sure this is politically correct. A lot of these kids don’t come from Christmas-celebrating cultures. Yet somehow it seems apposite and even joyous in Lord & Taylor’s landmark season, when for perhaps the first time in a while their windows are again the very best.

These windows and the holiday decorations that line the midtown streets are an integral part of New York. It’s what draws visitors here — a festive atmosphere so rich that other places can never quite replicate it. New York is where the modern Christmas came together. It is here that the department store, the Christmas tree, iron construction, affordable plate glass, gas (and then electric) lighting, mechanization, newspapers, and the very cult of Christmas itself — refined in the writings of Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore — all emerged around the same time or in strict sequence in the 19th century. And all of that adds up to the sound reasoning that if you can’t be at home, there’s no place like New York for the holidays.


The New York Sun

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