My Big Debut

December 14th, 2008

I half jokingly hatched this plan several months ago, but after seeing the same window display at the Salvation Army since this summer, I got serious. I volunteered to dress the window display. And it's a win-win: hopefully, it will attract customers, and I get to practice styling and composition, and also play with clothes and decorations that I otherwise have no way to include in my collection. It took about 2 hours to strip the window and find the clothes and objects I wanted to use, and then about 4 hours, with the help of The Fiance, to dress it completely. And the results:

Once I had permission from the store manager, I thought for a while about a couple of themes, and finally went with an Enchanted Winter Woodland (the losing theme was a sort of Nutcracker-New Year's Eve party melange). Ultimately, it was determined by what I could find among the clothes and bric-a-brac, and the dress selection was woefully slim. Anyhoo, on the left hand side, we have the Faerie Queen in green, with one of her attendants in red, and 3 wood nymphs in the background (worst mannequins ever!); and on the right is the Woodsman and his Wife– I really wanted to get a Red Riding Hood-like character in there, but no child-size mannequins :( I was influenced by, like, all of the picture books, fairy tales and fantasy novels I read over and over as a child, Celtic mythology, British literature, and Alexander McQueen's Fall '08 collection (although it was much more Russian than Celtic). And I was looking again recently at this beautiful paper fashion by Violise Lunn– we have similar influences also.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out, what with limited resources and for a first try. Ideally, there would have been a lot more fabric on the backdrop, with more of the brown ribbons-suggesting-trees. And, conveniently not in the pictures, the far right hand side is pretty bare.

Some more highlights: