Window dresser

Window dressers arrange displays of goods in shop windows or within a shop itself. Such displays are themselves known as "window dressing". They may work for design companies contracted to work for clients or for department stores, independent retailers, airport or hotel shops.

Alone or in consultation with product manufacturers or shop managers they artistically design and arrange the displays and may put clothes on mannequins—or use the services of a mannequin dresser[1]—and display the prices on the products.

They may hire joiners and lighting engineers to augment their displays. When new displays are required they have to dismantle the existing ones, and they may have to maintain displays during their lifetimes. Some window dressers hold formal display design qualifications.

Notable window dressers

• Diane Arbus’s father David Nemerov was a window dresser at her mother Gertrude's Fifth Avenue department store, Russeks, before they married.
• Giorgio Armani, the fashion designer, once worked as a window dresser.[2]
• David Bailey, British photographer[3]
• Roseanne Barr worked as a waitress and a window dresser in Denver prior to her showbiz career.[4]
• L. Frank Baum, better known for his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published a treatise on the art of window dressing.[5]
• Karl Bissinger, American mid-century photographer of notable artists, was a window-dresser at Lord & Taylor earlier in his career.
• Henry Clarke, a Vogue photographer, first worked in the 1940s as a window dresser for I. Magnin, luxury department store in San Francisco before becoming a background and accessorising assistant at the Vogue New York studio, where he learned to photograph by observing the different styles of Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst.[6]
• Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, was commissioned by Bonwitt Teller in 1939 to do a store window installation, which made headlines.[7]
• George Dureau, an American photographer and artist who inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, began his career at D. H. Holmes department store[8]
• Simon Doonan, columnist for Slate, dressed windows for Barneys department store.[9]
• Lieutenant Hubert Gruber, a character from the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, was a window dresser before his spell in the army. This is frequently alluded to, mainly for comedic effect.
• Roy Halston Frowick, known simply as Halston, a 1970s American fashion designer, worked as a window dresser while taking a night course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.[10]
• David Hoey is famed for his work at Bergdorf Goodman, most notably on their Christmas season spectaculars.[11]
• Victor Hugo, a Venezuelan born artist, and one-time assistant to Andy Warhol, produced window dressings for Halston in the 1970s, becoming the first to transform windows and mannequins into Pop Art.[12]
• Don Imus, American radio personality once worked as a department store window dresser.[13]
• Ellen Jose, an Australian indigenous artist and photographer.[14]
• Alice Lex-Nerlinger, after graduation from art school, worked as a shop window decorator in the department store Tempelhof from 1916–18, an experience which brought her closer to sisters in the labour movement, the subjects of her early photography and montage.[15]
• Peter Lindbergh, German fashion photographer and film director, worked as a window dresser for the Karstadt and Horten department stores in Duisburg.[16]
• Raymond Loewy, early in his career, dressed windows for Macy's in New York.[17]
• Christine McVie worked as a window dresser in London in the 1960s.[18]
• American stage director and film director Vincente Minnelli's first job was at Marshall Field's department store in Chicago as a window dresser
• Gene Moore was a leading 20th century window dresser.[19][20]
• Molina, a fictional character, one of the principals of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, was a window dresser prior to his incarceration.[21]
• Rhoda Morgenstern, a fictional character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff Rhoda, makes her living as a window dresser in Minneapolis and New York City.[22]
• Walter Pfeiffer, Swiss photographer.[23]
• Terry Richardson, American fashion and portrait photographer, was a Bloomingdale's window dresser in the 1950s.[24]
• Jacques Rosas and Eric Steding, New York City window dressers, have done windows and exhibition designs for Armani Exchange, Yves Saint Laurent, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.[25][26]
• Henk Schiffmacher, Dutch tattoo artist, was a window dresser at the De Bijenkorf[27]
• Joel Schumacher, the film director, was once a window dresser employed by the store Henri Bendel.[28]
• E. C. Segar left his job as a projectionist and worked at decorating jobs including paper hanging, painting and window dressing, before deciding on a career as a cartoonist.[29]
• Henry Talbot worked as a department store window-dresser in London in the 1930s before being shipped to Australia on the Dunera, where he became was a fashion photographer.
• Hans Hermann Weyer, a German seller of fraudulent nobility and academics titles and flamboyant member of the international jet set who became an honorary consul of Bolivia in Luxembourg, was in youth an apprentice window dresser.[30]

References

1. Carol McKinley (30 December 2019). "Sculptors at a Lafayette mannequin factory are shaping more realistic body types for stores worldwide". Colorado Sun. Retrieved 30 December 2019.
2. Armstrong, Lisa (June 9, 2015). "Giorgio Armani celebrates 40 years in fashion with Cate and Leo". The Daily Telegraph. London.
3. Wroe, Nicholas (2001-02-10). "The king of prints". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2020-03-31.
4. Barr, Roseanne. "Roseanne Barr". Huffington Post.
5. Mosher, Max; Journal, from Worn Fashion. "Window Dressing: The Art and Artists - Media - Utne Reader". Utne.
6. Enid Nemymay (May 5, 1996). "Henry Clarke, 77, Photographer of High Fashion for Magazines - The New York Times". The New York Times.
7. Lague, Louise; Shopper, Window (November 12, 1989). "THE ULTIMATE MARKETPLACE; It's Not Just Window Dressing". The New York Times.
8. The new encyclopedia of Southern culture. Volume 21, Art & architecture. Bonner, Judith H.,, Pennington, Estill Curtis,, University of Mississippi. Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill. 14 January 2013. ISBN 978-0-8078-6994-9. OCLC 825970770.CS1 maint: others (link)
9. Simon Doonan (1 August 2001). Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales from a Life in Fashion. Viking Studio. ISBN 978-0-14-100362-7.
10. Kennedy, Alicia; Stoehrer, Emily Banis, (author.); Calderin, Jay, (author.) (2013), Fashion design, referenced : a visual guide to the history, language, & practice of fashion, Rockport Publishers, ISBN 978-1-59253-677-1CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
11. Matiash, Chelsea (November 17, 2014). "Behind the Scenes: Bergdorf Goodman's Holiday Window Display". The Wall Street Journal.
12. Kent, Rosemary (May 24, 1976). "Drama Department: Comedy, Sex and Violence In Store Windows". New York Magazine. New York Media, LLC. 9 (21): 85. ISSN 0028-7369.
13. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/don-imus-obituary-931797/
14. Allas, Tess (2011). "Ellen Jose biography". Design and Art Australia Online.
15. "LEX-NERLINGER, ALICE - Das Verborgene Museum". www.dasverborgenemuseum.de. Retrieved 2019-07-15.
16. https://medium.com/@sunglasscurator/the-extraordinaire-peter-lindbergh-baf9d70f9085
17. "raymod loewy biography". designboom.com. November 23, 2015. Archived from the original on November 23, 2015. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
18. Kevin Hackett (January 16, 2014). "Newsmaker: Christine McVie". thenational.ae. Archived from the original on May 25, 2014.
19. "Gene Moore, 88, Window Display Artist, Dies". The New York Times. November 26, 1998.
20. Moore, Gene; Goldman, Judith; Eisenstein, Ruth (1980), Windows at Tiffany's : the art of Gene Moore, H. N. Abrams, ISBN 978-0-8109-1655-5
21. Davis, Kimberly Chabot (2007-01-01). Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences. Purdue University Press. ISBN 9781557534798.
22. Trager, James (2010-09-07). The New York Chronology: The Ultimate Compendium of Events, People, and Anecdotes from the Dutch to the Present. Zondervan. ISBN 9780062018601.
23. "The Cult of Walter Pfeiffer". Aperture Foundation NY. 2017-12-16. Retrieved 2020-03-31.
24. Gross, Michael, 1952- (29 August 2017). Focus : the secret, sexy, sometimes sordid world of fashion photographers. New York. ISBN 978-1-4767-6347-7. OCLC 930364239.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
25. [e-mail]. "Armani Exchange Window Displays".
26. "Shop Studios: An Art Studio in Manhattan That Really Does It All". www.theepochtimes.com. 7 September 2014.
27. "Henk Schiffmacher". Kintaro Publishing. Retrieved 2020-03-31.
28. Johnston, Sheila (May 29, 1993). "FILM / Damaged goods in the shop window: He's upset America's Hispanics and Koreans, and he's not exactly the toast of Los Angeles. Is Joel Schumacher sorry? Is he hell. Sheila Johnston reports". The Independent. London.
29. Reynolds, Moira Davison (2003), Comic strip artists in American newspapers, 1945-1980, McFarland & Co, ISBN 978-0-7864-1551-9
30. John Vinocur, "For German Who ‘Awarded’ Titles, First Gold, Then Bars", The New York Times, March 16, 1978.