When you think about fashion and about "displaying it", your mind easily conjures up some of the thoughts, quotes and ideas featured in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, a collection of writings about life in Paris and its iron-and-glass covered "arcades". Early centres of consumerism, these glass-roofed rows of shops were also fashion stages where the act of displaying (and triggering desire in the passers-by...) was performed.
You may argue that nowadays we have created further and very different arcades: the screens of our computers, smartphones and other devices can indeed act as windows that guarantee us access to all sorts of things.
Yet brick and mortar shops are still playing a big part in generating desire and attracting the attention of consumers via collaborations with artists and exclusive installations at times worthy of museum spaces.
A few months ago Barneys in New York worked with artist Margaret Lee for example. Lee designed and created two windows at Barneys Downtown Flagship and four windows at Madison Avenue that focused on the concepts of desire and consumption and that had a surreal touch about them.
One window featured a polished stainless steel baby crib with a motorized swinging pendulum swinging from above and Rimowa luggage; another opened onto a custom metal refrigerator filled with watermelons and a Maison Margiela 5AC bag in Silver Tape.
A third window included a visually striking gold prismatic upholstered couch and a pair of Maison Margiela gold sneakers.
At the moment - in time for New York Fashion Week (and on display through October 2, 2016) - Barneys has partnered with Margiela, creating in its Madison Avenue windows four surreal tableaux.
The windows are the result of a conversation between the department store's Creative Director Dennis Freedman, his team and the current Margiela Creative Director, John Galliano.
The main starting points for the windows were the house's Spring 2016 Artisanal and Fall 2016 ready-to-wear collections, but once Freedman and Galliano met in the latter's atelier in Paris, conversation led them to talk about deconstruction, juxtapositions (between time periods, materials, techniques, and colours), surrealism and the creative process behind a collection.
This theme is tackled in the first window, featuring an invisible model walking through a field of waving sea grass wearing a plaid blazer, a black leather skirt and a knit muff covering her hands.
Enormous 3D models of the hands of God and Adam from Michelangelo's painting "The Creation of Adam" from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel emerge from the bushes.
In another window a shearling aviator cape on another invisible model is surrounded by knee-high riding boots (sculpted replicas cast from those seen on the runway), while a conveyor belt with five identical wigs (again based on the hairstyles from the Maison Margiela runway show) revolve around it, hinting at order and disorder, originality and replication.
Flight is celebrated in the third window with a draped metallic gown floating in the space and sprouting a pair of kinetic and mechanical cold-rolled steel wings that extend out almost 15 feet from the dress.
The fourth and final window includes two designs from the house's "Artisanal" couture line. Couture (this is the first time Barneys shows pieces from a couture collection) often features the seeds of the ready-to-wear collections and the designs included here are a sort of introduction to the themes distilled in the other pieces.
The off-white trench coat that falls into a pleated skirt and the black blazer layered with a pink jacquard dress with bright orange lining were inspired by birds and they are displayed inside revolving brick structures that call to mind dovecotes.
The clothes or accessories on display are not the most interesting features in these windows: the most striking thing is indeed the fact that the windows attract passers-by, and generate desire, but they do not necessarily force people to buy the pieces on display (by the way, even if you could afford them, the pieces from the "Artisanal" collection aren't even available in the store).
So the windows become almost museum installations (especially the Margaret Lee and Margiela windows featuring mechanical/kinetic machines) and while in the past we have seen fashion houses commissioning artists to create backdrops for shop windows, in these cases the windows turn into stages where imaginary worlds are created and where a story unravels (passers-by are invited to come up with their own story in a way...).
Considering the skills, techniques and mechanical elements featured in these windows and thinking about how fashion runways are currently being radically transformed in a more commercial key by the "see-now-buy-now" trend, it's easy to wonder if in future the "window as installation" will become more and more popular. After all, we have already seen some intriguing examples of this trend during Milan Design Week.
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