Window into the most cut-throat Christmas battle of all
680 bags of fake snow. 56 miles of fairy lights. 18 months of planning. Trial runs in a secret bunker. SARAH RAINEY steps behind the glass at John Lewis for a tantalising...
FIREWORKS have only just ceased crackling, pumpkins still litter compost heaps and some people haven’t even got round to putting the summer suitcases back in the loft yet. But here I am, ankle-deep in crisp white snow, arranging glittery pine cones and red baubles on the branches of a giant Christmas tree. Twinkly fairy lights dangle from the ceiling and by my feet are piles of beautifully wrapped presents tied with cream bows.
No, I’m not one of those Christmas obsessives who race their neighbours to turn their house into a winter wonderland the minute the clocks go back.
The beautiful Yuletide display is the showpiece of John Lewis’s Peter Jones store in Sloane Square, Central London, and I’ve spent an exhausting night helping the team with the finishing touches.
As far as retailers go, I’m very late to the party. Lucy Lines, visual merchandising manager at the store and the brains behind its festive decorations, started planning this display in the summer of 2016. In fact, she’s already three months into preparations for Christmas 2018.
These days, Christmas comes not in December but in September, when department stores up and down the country stock up on baubles and wrapping paper, string lights over their front doors and start flogging mince pies whose best-before date expires long before December 25.
Selfridges made a big song and dance about being the first shop in the world to unveil its Christmas windows this year — a dubious honour, which many shoppers branded ‘crazy’ and ‘ridiculous’.
Its displays were launched on October 20, Harrods followed on November 2 and a few days later John Lewis stores from Croydon to Carlisle unveiled their windows to the world. The grand finale happened last Friday, with the unveiling of the display in the flagship store in Oxford Street on the same day the John Lewis Christmas advert — about a little boy with a monster under his bed — went on TV.
‘There is a certain kudos to being the first, but early November feels right for us,’ says Lucy. ‘We tend to finish just before Bonfire Night, so we’re somewhere in the middle in terms of timing. If you push it too early, people feel uncomfortable — they’re just not in the Christmas frame of mind.’
For make no mistake, a shop’s Christmas window display is a very big deal indeed. The timing is critical.
THOugHJohn Lewis refuses to disclose its budget, this is big business — with tens of thousands of pounds poured into each window. Experts estimate single displays can cost between £ 15,000 and £ 75,000. With 302 windows across its shops, even a conservative estimate would put John Lewis’s costs at £4.5 million.
In a world so geared towards online shopping, it might seem odd to put so much effort — and money — into physical displays. But the aim of Christmas windows is t o get shoppers t o open their wallets.
An estimated 500,000 people pass by London department store windows every day over the festive season, and if they can lure even a small proportion of them inside, that will put money in the tills.
‘The point of the displays is to show off our best products and to entice people to come inside,’ explains Lucy. ‘ They’re also designed to make people feel excited this time of year. Everyone really ups their game at Christmas — it’s like the whole High Street puts on its best frock.’
John Lewis’s best frock this year, for its 30 massive windows, is ‘folk- lore’ — inspired by the snuggly winter knits and embroidered fabrics popular across Europe at this time of year.
The shop is already brimming with themed decorations, cushions, throws and ornaments (and I swear in the Christmas section upstairs I heard an assistant merrily humming Frosty The Snowman).
unlike other stores, whose festive displays are often wacky and overthe-top, John Lewis is proud to veer towards the traditional. This year’s windows feature a homely Christmas scene: a tree, presents and an immaculately decorated festive table with quirky touches — baubles in a KitchenAid food mixer, golden Brazil nuts in a jar, and a Le Creuset casserole dish bubbling over with fake snow.
The snow, made f rom ti ny ‘crumbs’ of recycled plastic, is everywhere you look. There are 680 bags of it across its shops nationwide, along with 2,258 red and teal cone Christmas trees, 3,000 metres of card, 600 lengths of metal tubing and 100 litres of white paint.
They’ve gone to town on fairy lights which frame the displays and cascade down the atrium inside the store, with nearly 90,000 metres of them — or 56 miles — across the 49 shops. ‘That’s enough to light the distance from London to Canterbury,’ Lucy proudly informs me.
Stepping inside the windows is not as straightforward as it sounds. There are cables to leap over, cone trees to dodge and cardboard snowflakes propped at awkward angles, leaving me to hopscotch my way from one side to the other.
Window dressers have to be surefooted, nimble — and, above all, slim, so they can squeeze between the props. All around me, blackclad window dressers are scurrying noiselessly to and fro, arranging this and adjusting that, with even the subtlest of changes requiring a trip outside to see the window as a whole and get the shopper’s-eye view.
Meanwhile, I’m standing as still as a mannequin, focusing all my efforts on not knocking anything over.
Lucy has been here for 27 years and worked in windows for the past six. She thinks about Christmas all day, every day, 365 days a
year. ‘My friends and family think it’s the best job in the world,’ she laughs. ‘I honestly don’t get sick of it. I’m very lucky.’
It may sound like living in a fairy tale, but competition can be cutthroat. Every year, department stores, j ewellers and designer shops compete to come up with the best, most innovative and attention- grabbing displays. Dressers work long hours around the clock and through the night, and secrecy is paramount, although ‘moles’ do exist.
‘Suppliers would know what’s going on, so we’d probably get wind of it in advance if someone was doing exactly the same thing as us,’ she says.
Nevertheless, there’s a concerted effort to keep the display under wraps. The design team often operates at night, after closing time, and there’s a secret underground bunker — located underneath one of John Lewis’s shops – where they have life-sized windows in which to build mock displays.
‘It’s fully locked up so nobody can get in. Everyone working on the windows is sworn to secrecy — it’s all part of the fun.’
Once upon a time, window displays were far from the competitive sport they are today. It all started in the days of the Industrial Revolution, when retailers began installing large plate glass shop fronts – the ideal location to showcase their festive wares.
By the 1880s, it was a Christmas Eve tradition for working-class families to travel to London’s West End and gaze at the extravagant displays in the windows of shops they couldn’t afford. At first, they featured only food and drink — hams, puddings, bottles of sherry and port — but after World War I department stores started displaying toys, presents and fashion as well.
The trend f or l avish f estive windows really took off in New York in the Thirties, when artists including Salvador Dali were called upon to create surreal and dazzling winter scenes.
By the Sixties, Andy Warhol was designing windows for Tiffany’s – he was so proud of one display that he autographed the glass. Increasingly ambitious creations became commonplace here in the Fifties.
ARChIvESrecall John Lewis’s range of magical themes over the years — from fairy tales to woodland creatures — all designed to inspire awe and wonder.
In 1973, when the national electricity supply was restricted, window dressers at the store weren’t deterred, using portable camping lanterns to light their displays.
This year’s theme started life as a series of pencil drawings, which Lucy and her three- strong team drafted in August last year.
Inspiration, she explains, comes from ‘ anywhere and everywhere: art exhibitions, foreign travel, fashion shows, seeing something on Pinterest or reading about it in a magazine’.
Once the drawings are perfected, around April or May, they send them to harlequin Design — the London- based agency responsible for the practical aspects of the display — to build a scale model window, just 50 cm (20 in) long, so Lucy can see it in 3D and carry it to meetings.
The next challenge is choosing colours and materials, which sounds simple but is often incredibly complex. ‘We looked at over 100 different shades to get the teal colour just right,’ explains Lucy. ‘The snowflake patterns took 1,400 hours — or 35 days — to cut out. It was all done by one man, who sat there cutting with a blade and then popping them out by hand.’
Once the mock windows have been approved, the team at harlequin starts making the parts for the real-life installations across the country. These are couriered, under cover of darkness, to John Lewis shops, along with a list of detailed instructions, so the 200 in-store dressers are working to the same brief.
They started putting them in place three weeks ago: snowflakes first, then the l i ghts, l arge f urniture, smaller products, and — finally — bags and bags of snow.
Unlike other stores, John Lewis doesn’t cover over its half-built displays, except for a few windows at its Oxford Street branch which are themed to match its much-anticipated Christmas advert.
‘My instinct is that as long as it’s not really messy in there, it’s nice for shoppers to see the windows being assembled,’ says Lucy. ‘ People get more invested — they look, then come back for another look, and they love to see the process from start to finish.
The highlight of her year, she says, is seeing the final piece of the display going in — and watching the enchanted smiles of passers-by as they admire her handiwork.
‘There’s nothing nicer than seeing a little girl or boy with their nose pressed up against the glass,’ Lucy smiles. ‘Every year I want to do something bigger and better than before.’ Next year’s display, she assures me, will be the most showstopping yet.
As the night creeps into the small hours, the window dressers put the final polish on the baubles and tweak the angle of a couple of biscuit tins, and their job is done.
Ever-so-slowly, I shuffle my way towards the real world on the other side of the glass, dodging precariously balanced mannequins dressed in Santa red.
I leave with glitter on my hands, fake snow i n my hair — and, though I’m loath to admit it, a head full of unseasonably early Christmas cheer.