Larry Leathers: More Than Just A Window Dresser

Pity the poor window dresser. On Monday, the boss at the department store tells him to get a display ready for the new Armani collection. Make it sing! the boss demands. Make it art! Feverishly, through the night, the window dresser works-twisting mannequin figures

this way or that, giving just the right tuck to the clothes, and adding the perfect background: maybe a street scene, or even a grand Italian villa. Then: voila! He shows it to his boss. Great, shouts the boss! It’ll sell! Have it torn down by Friday so we can put up a new display for the Versace collection!

In the great scheme of retailing, credit is rarely given to the person who decides what goes in those little boxes behind the windowpanes. The masses trudge by, mostly oblivious; for them, it’s just another batch of clothes. This month, however, as part of its elaborate “Visions of Christmas Past” celebration, Neiman-Marcus is taking the art of window dressing into a new realm.

As part of its new Christmas theme (replacing the old, worn-out Fortnight), Neiman’s is spending thousands of dollars on the kind of holiday window displays that are a tradition in the big New York department stores. The man in charge is Larry Leathers, the thirty-one-year-old “window director” (would you expect Neiman’s to call him a mere window dresser?). Leathers has come up with an elaborate, minutely detailed series of window scenes for the downtown store, depicting Christmas settings of the last eight decades.

Described by Leathers as “edited vignettes of a child’s home life,” the six-by-eight displays feature life-sized, animated figures in various Christmas scenes. The 1910 window, for example, shows a brother and sister playing Christmas carols on a pump organ in their Victorian parlor. Over in the 1980 window, the boy is filming the window shoppers with video equipment. Besides those eight windows, Leathers has created, in another window, an entire 1927 street scene with miniature figures. His final window shows a glamorous ballroom dancing scene.

Leathers knows many people will look at his Christmas windows and wonder why in the world someone went to so much trouble. “What they don’t understand,” he says, “is that window display is, in essence, public art. At the least, people should realize that windows don’t just convey clothes, but a message about our times.”