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The store window developed in the late 1890s with the widespread availability of plate glass. Along with advertising posters, electrical signs, and painted billboards, the window quickly emerged as a fresh way to attract and persuade urban shoppers. For the millions who flocked to cities like Chicago and New York in pursuit of the good life, store windows embodied in microcosm the variety and glamour of the
modern metropolis. Early store windows were nothing more than overly abundant displays of products. Mountains of
fur coats, cascading dishware, and parading dolls echoed the Victorian taste for excess.
Technological innovation encouraged theatrical
imagination. Electric lights replaced gas and kerosene lamps. Silver-plated reflectors allowed designers to focus and direct light, transforming the windows' shallow architectural space into dramatic settings. Prior to writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), L. Frank Baum founded the influential magazine The Show Window and also founded the National Association of Window Trimmers. Through the magazine, Baum urged American retailers to abandon the "cornucopia" style of
window display and to encourage more imaginative selection and presentation of objects, advocating greater animation
and heightened lighting effects. Store windows became a
powerful medium for modern design education. Bright store windows on dark city streets also fostered the social custom
of nighttime window shopping and provided passersby with
an experience similar to theater- or movie-going.
Proportionally and structurally, the window mimicked the shape of the proscenium stage or the movie screen. Framed by elaborate architectural settings and protected by sheets of glass, merchandise displayed in these "landscapes of desire," according to social historian William Leach, was fully in view but, for most people, out of reach. Like the world of movies, the store window had its own cast of performers: mannequins.
Wax mannequins were introduced in 1894 at the Paris Exposition and soon replaced the simple dressmakers' forms
in store windows. These mannequins were heavy and difficult
to manipulate; they melted in summer and cracked in winter. Subsequent mannequins--constructed of materials such as
plastic and papier-mâché--were more durable, lightweight,
and flexible, making them easier to imbue with lifelike gestures. To complete the ensemble, designers began to drape windows with ephemeral, disposable materials. Whimsical and luxurious materials such as cellophane, cotton wool, and gold lamé captured the light and cast a movielike aura of glamour.
The collaboration between retailers and moviemakers hit a peak in the 1930s. Store windows provided the perfect
setting for fashion that was inspired by the costumes of Joan Crawford and Carole Lombard. Macy's presented Colonial Revival furniture in scenes that resembled Gone With The Wind in dress and decor. (This tradition evolved into contemporary studio stores such as Disney and Warner Brothers.) But it
was not just movie merchandise that flooded store windows. Designers appropriated cinematic techniques.
Gene Moore, legendary designer for Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and Tiffany & Co., created "close-ups" of
disembodied, sometimes isolated, and out-of-context forms to
provoke passersby.
Modern art provided inspiration for designers, such
as Robert Currie and Candy Pratts-Price, who injected surrealist elements of violence, sex, and macabre humor into their 1970s windows. Artists like Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, as well
as industrial designers like Donald Deskey and Henry Dreyfuss, also played major roles in transmitting twentieth-century
movements such as minimalism and pop art to the audience
on the street.
Leonard Marcus noted in The American Store Window that the scene behind the window reinforces the notion of the
city as a "sphere of public performance." This idea is persuasively dramatized in the opening credits of the 1960s sitcom That Girl,
in which the camera follows an aspiring actress (played by
Marlo Thomas) throughout Manhattan to a fashionable store
window. There, she is startled when her gaze is returned by a
mannequin who has become her double. The mannequin winks
at her in recognition.
This wink acknowledges the complicity between the passerby as audience and the window as stage. In this psychodrama, reenacted every day in cities around the world, the
mannequin serves as our double, representing the impulse to
pass through the glass and step into the store window's realm
of drama, fantasy, and desire.
Donald Albrecht and Barbara Livenstein
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