Famous Artists & Their Creative (Window) Displays

This material aims at bringing into discussion some of the most appealing ways to ensure a higher visibility of your store. It is necessary to understand the fact that a real investment on visually improving the image of your brand / collection / store doesn’t mean only financial input, but also some strategies focused on visual merchandising, on the actual aesthetical principles that are to be used in the process.

We know that the “online threat” is forcing retailers to exploit the advantage of being able to provide a genuine shopping experience through their stores and this is the area we should be working on. Maintaining a strong connection with our customers and gaining new ones is a challenge that troubles the mind of every store owner. This is the reason for which we must develop creative displays and interior arrangements in order to make customers feel the pleasure of the entire experience of shopping.

We already know studies suggest that 70 to 80 per cent of the shopping decisions are made on the spot, the decisions being influenced by the overall impression people fell about the place, the staff and the products. If we don’t deliver a quality background for our products, we jeopardize not only the financial benefits, but also the image that customers get about our products and the brand we represent. Being careless in this matter may determine negative results on a large scale.

For the reasons mentioned above, we have gathered some ideas that can help you improve the aesthetical aspect of your store. We will focus mostly on window displays, but the interior arrangements won’t be forgotten. It is of no doubt that thematic displays are probably the best choice when it comes to provide an appealing look for your store. The possibilities being enormous, it is clear that you won’t get caught into the situation of not being able to come up with something new. Movies, films, books, artistic movements can be exploited and re-contextualized in multiple ways.

There is this postmodern way of thinking that everything can be reinterpreted in order to achieve something original. It might seem paradoxically, but this is the trend that has been guiding the artistic representations for more than fifty years. Tradition or classicism are no longer set aside as it happened during the modernist period, but exploited with interesting and fascinating results.

To narrow down this approach, we have chosen to present you some artists (painters mainly) whose work had a certain point some connections with fashion or creative displays, in the intention of bringing art closer to the world of fashion and to demonstrate its potential. Mass cultures, including window display, had become subject matter for artists such as Léger, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol long ago.

But two of the previously mentioned artists are really famous and some things should be taken into account as some of them were the first to actually develop the so-called “the art of mannequins” that contemporary manufacturers, such as Ralph Pucci, are now talking about.

First of them is Salvador Dali whose artistic approaches oscillated among different areas, like painting, movies, writing. He succeeded in bringing the best of surrealism in every artistic representation. Without taking into account some far-fetched, bizarre and shocking depictions in his art, we all know the impact this artist had on everything that meant artistic representations at the beginning of the 20^th century and long after that. In some mannequins that he created (as it can be seen in the first picture) there is an explicit influence of Picasso's work (on a mannequin displayed in 1926, called “Barcelona Mannequin”).

Andy Warhol is another very popular artist that had some connections with window displays. He is a prominent figure of pop-art, an artistic movement that was and still is very popular among youngsters. His artwork is popular also for the depictions of many celebrities of the time, such as Marilyn Monroe. In essence, Andy Warhol’s woks exploit the possible connections between art, celebrity and advertisement; the entire imagery that Warhol depicted in his artistic representations is taken from the cultural background of the 1960s America. As a proof of his popularity, Warhol has been dedicated the largest museum in the USA that was ever dedicated to a single artist.