Holiday Window Review: Inspecting This Year's Displays

“That is fantastic. That costs a lot of money,” Bentley told me with an elevated voice.

So then I stopped trying to examine each window one at a time and looked at the set as a whole and realized he was right. The neon window just way out-pizzazzed toute les autres.

I was going to show the Christmas lights inside Rotisserie Georgette. She did simple small white lights up the high, high columns of the dining room. But I forgot to put Georgette on the shot list. Bentley had offered to come back next year with a dimmer, so that is the plan.

After we said goodnight to Georgette—Bentley loves the main lighting there, including and maybe especially the austere entry (pictured)—we were rolling.

First stop always has to be Bergorf Goodman. The team there has a formula that works for me, more is more.

Some windows are brash and shiny, but one is kind of ephemeral. I couldn’t for the life of me say what the proposed narrative for it is (Roman goddess Diana? Greek deity Artemis? The stag and the discus thrower gave me that notion). But who cares? So dreamy.

I was just noticing that there was an ice poodle on a table, and wondering why, when Bentley interrupted my reverie with, “Wow check out that neon!”

Not even one block down is yet another neon wonder. This one much simpler, but nearly as dramatic. Neon cursive renderings of the word “Peace,” “Paix,” you get the idea.

I asked Bentley to go over to the other side of the avenue so we could see it from afar. “So neon is a thing this year,” Bentley observed. We agreed the window is beautifully framed.

Less successful is a two-story mishmash of everything. Uniqlo has boxes and boxes, some with neon garment line art, some with mannequins, some with giant gaudy price tags offering every percent off imaginable. Some windows have all those elements going on at once.

“The neon still looks good,”  Bentley said after I was finished going off about the price tags.

You decide.

The concept was straight-forward enough. Giant swaths of green with little white and blue lights, but oh so spectacular. The lights seem somehow different...

Bentley explained, “It’s because it is LED and not incandescent bulbs, which your eye is trained to associate with greens. The LED technology is so amazing and keeps developing. Now they have really tiny but really powerful LEDs that are so versatile.”

I don’t even remember what was in the actual window. Real diamonds have to go to sleep in the vault at night, sadly.

I had the exact same impression at Tommy Hilfiger. The predicted mannequins in their color blocked cubes seem competent enough. But the real star is the LED/greens framing.

It is the vividness of the individual LED lights (much more wattage per bulb?) at Tiffany's fireworks/bursty kind of display that make the design stand out.

Perhaps it is pretentious to use the word “apotheosis” to describe a window display, but hey, I am nothing if not pretentious.

Harry Winston combines the mini-mini carpet of LED on greens trick with carefully calculated punches of lights in different shapes and sizes.

Bentley and I pulled over to take a closer look.

Here is a close-up view of one of the diamond fixtures. Check out how the center of each diamond is a deeper blue.

And then closer still, each little brick of light has prongs like jewelry. Such great detail. Hats off to Harry Winston for best window of the year as decided by a committee of two.

At first the Topman store struck me as a little dull, but Bentley pointed out: “Those hanging lit lightbulbs—that is something special going on there.”  Unfortunately this picture is a little farther away than I’d like, but if you take a look at the three clear bulbs hanging to the right, you’ll see tiny dots of light. The next day I walked back to take a look. Within each bulb was a spiral of dozens of little silver spikes with a tiny little bulb at the end. I gots to get me some of those!

I’m really turned off by the brand usually, and that is not just because it was a lousy and mean client of mine many party moons ago, but because its bread and butter Louis Vuitton LV brown “leather” is actually just impregnated vinyl, and I resent that it gets away with being thought of as a great leather company.

But its windows have been really light-hearted and whimsical the last few years.

Hard to know what anything was actually made of, but the gold looked better than real gold and the balloons looked super balloon-y. (Balloon note to event planners: I heard on NPR that we need to stop using rare and precious helium in balloons and switch to hydrogen-filled ones and save the helium for medical procedures. Hydrogen we can extract from anything, but when the world runs out of helium we are just out.)

Bentley’s and my journey had taken us out of the orchestra seating as we made our way downtown, but for some reason the block-long façade of Bank of America really captures the imagination.

On the glass there is a fir/evergreen frosty stencil. Then behind it are these colored, gently textured panels—no telling what the material is—and then spots of hot blue light.

I am ending on this display because it has been my favorite for more than 30 years.

When I was a copywriter-trainee at Fortune magazine (my first job after college), I would walk by this on my way home every night. I never get tired of looking at it.

I always thought it was a Claes Oldenburg design. He did giant pop art things I knew from college in Philadelphia: a giant clothespin downtown, a big white broken button on the Penn Campus in front of the main library. He is still alive. 

The rendering of the hooks, the one discarded ball off to one side, as if the sculptor of the pyramid was keeping some extras on hand in case one broke, the scale. What’s not to like? And the fact it has been around so long makes it all the more amazing to me. Do they have individual boxes for the the balls in winter? Or is just one giant thing that they come in the middle of the night and plop down with a crane?

The mystery will have to wait, Google and Wikipedia have so far turned up nothing of the provenance of this display, and by the time the column gets published it will be Christmas.

Thank you, Bentley Meeker, for the annotated drive, and Merry Christmas to all.