Licking the windows

May 18, 2010

My friend Edwina lived in Paris for a while and told me that Frenchwomen call window shopping ‘window licking’. Sounds a bit grubby to me, especially in NY, like licking your kitchen floor clean (no, haven’t tried it). I licked more than a few windows on my jaunts around NY but preferred the translation – faire du leché vitrine - much more ladylike.

I used to dress windows in my 20s. The guy I worked for let me run free – I’d come up with an idea, draw it for him on a piece of butcher’s paper, collect the materials I needed and confine myself behind glass for as long as I had to make work. Sell more alcohol, to be precise. The day progressed and in came offerings of snacks, eventually followed by wine. Drunk windows? No. But I did love the company of those around me and for the weeks those little vignettes lived within those windows I loved walking past, quietly knowing that I’d created the worlds within them (we did sometimes sell more wine, apparently).

The windows in NY are like little universes. There’s an art to seduction, I shamelessly succumb to the potency of a good merchandising and — good lord — do the New Yorkers know how to create a stir up front. Falling in lust with the retail zoo — tick. Abstaining…a relatively new experience but, mostly, imagination behind the glass was (mostly) pleasure enough. Lust for yourselves…