Holiday Season Begins in New York
Bergdorf Goodman is one of the true New York institutions, and Christmas in the city demands a trip to see the department store’s meticulously crafted holiday windows.
This year, creative director David Hoey turned those world-renowned Fifth Avenue portals into a true spectacle with the first- ever public reveal. “We’ve noticed the interest in holiday windows has increased exponentially in the last five or six years, so we decided to get in on the action and have fun with it,” he tells us.
While bundled up outside, observers sipped the hot cocoa being passed through the throngs. Acrobats flew over the crowd suspended on ropes from the legendary building, sprinkling glitter as the “Holidays on Ice” theme was revealed. But as Hoey points out, there wasn’t just one holiday in mind. “We thought, nobody has done all the holidays in review. Our secret to the choice of Holidays on Ice was plural. It’s not just the January and December holidays, it’s all year of holidays in review, reimagined as frozen dioramas. So we’ve got traditional American holidays and obscure ones too: Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July, April Fool’s, Thanksgiving, New Year’s are all represented—as well as Arbor Day. What we’re going for is a timeless time warp.”
The displays, naturally, are an extension Bergdorf’s careful curated presence. “These windows take a year to produce and even longer to decide on the theme,” Hoey explains. “So you pick a theme and get inspired by that and you just obsess over that and we put layers of meaning within those windows. It means everything, because what these windows are are our opportunity to pretend like we’re in show business.”
