a
The baffling
window displays
at John Lewis
Someone once said to a friend of mine that, "Nothing bad ever happens in JOHN LEWIS." This is not strictly true, as it was bombed during World War Il-though open for trading again as soon as the rubble had been cleared, in true 'stiff upper lip' fashion-but I know what that person meant. It's quite cosy and safe and you can just wander about, marvelling at their impressive selections of, for example, toasters and tellies, or at that legendary haberdashery department - always a firm favourite among many of the city's fashion-designing fraternity. Unlike the rest of Oxford Street, which is too crowded, tacky, noisy, smelly and like every provincial high street multiplied by one thousand, JOHN LEWIS conjures up a perfect shopping bubble in which all things obnoxious simply fade into the background.
The one aspect of JOHN LEWIS which most appeals, though, is its window displays. These never feel like the over-dressed, multi-media, wannabe-gallery installations increasingly favoured by other stores (one of which recently installed mock paparazzi photographers at its entrance doors, so its punters could be like 'celebs' — ahem!). Nor do they rely on an abundance of props or embellishments to 'dress up' the products being featured. Even the recent Christmas window displays at the front, sides and rear of the store were subtly accentuated with only a recurring star-shaped emblem, immaculately cut out in coloured spandex or Perspex. The products in this year's festive window scheme had all been sprayed or painted uniformly white, thus evoking a very MAISON MARTIN MARGIELA ambience. By comparison, other stores on Oxford Street had gone for full-on tinsel and glitter-strewn madness and felt suffocatingly trashy and somewhat depressing as a result.
In some ways, JOHN LEWIS' various window schemes, installed throughout the year, could be deemed as fairly plain. However, look a little closer and you sense a strong, precise discipline at work: a real sense of understated style and purpose in their construction and arrangements. Backdrops are generally simple banks of strong colour; products are given room to breathe and are placed with the type of aching precision that indicates any gaps between them have clearly been measured to the nearest millimetre, with a ruler and a whole lot of patience. Many years ago I used to work in display, or Visual Merchandising, as the profession is now known, dressing the windows of an equally famous London department store, SELFRIDGES. We were always envious of how immaculate and perfectly simple the JOHN LEWIS windows looked- in comparison to our own waywardly kitsch epics, complete with scuffmarks and greasy fingerprints all over the glass — and slightly awed at the much-fabled training its display team underwent in order to be able to create such pristine visions.
My all-time favourite JOHN LEWIS window display was one which American artist JEFF KOONS would have surely approved of, as it accidentally looked like some of his own work. I saw it about ten years ago, and it consisted of a line of identical vacuum cleaners, arranged throughout the main Oxford Street windows, with perfect symmetry and cunning blandness, each one illuminated by its own spotlight above. As a visual statement, it looked utterly modern then, and still would if it was recreated now. It also succeeded in convincing me that I should promptly invest in a new, state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner, without further ado.