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NEW YORK — Macy’s is the latest retailer to combine the worlds of fashion and art.
The retailer sees the potential to bring fine art photographs to the public and suggest connections between those works and the products inside the store. An installation will fill all 12 windows wrapping around Macy’s flagship in Herald Square, where 54 photographs curated by Beatrice Dupire, founding editor of art bookazine Th(e) Influencer, will be displayed with a smattering of spring fashions.
“It is an invitation to visit Macy’s in a different way,” Dupire said, noting that putting the art in the windows lining 34th Street and Broadway makes it both accessible and free to view. “Macy’s is a long loved department store in New York, but times are more competitive,” she continued. “This may make Macy’s attractive to people who think ‘Macy’s is not for me’ or ‘I don’t have time to go there.'”
Each window will showcase two to four works of a single photographer. They will be pieces Nicole Fischelis, vice president and fashion director at Macy’s East, sees as “very light, dreamlike, surrealistic, humorous” — making for a ready tie-in with spring items from a range of designers, including Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, Michael Kors and Vivienne Tam. The store plans to choose those goods next week and unveil the windows by March 9 for the exhibit titled “Macy’s Presents the Art of Happiness.”
“Today, you cannot ignore the cultural currents going on in the art world,” Fischelis said. “Sometimes art relates to fashion and sometimes fashion relates to art.”
This is not the first time she has worked with Dupire. In 1999, when Fischelis was fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, the two mounted an exhibition of then-contemporary and vintage photographs of iconic Yves Saint Laurent pieces in the flagship’s windows concurrent with the show “Yves Saint Laurent’s 40 Years of Creation,” held here and curated by Dupire. Fischelis had lost touch with Dupire and reconnected with her after seeing media reports of Th(e) Influencer’s publication in July.
The whimsy and softness Fischelis perceives in some of the photographs to be shown (“a soft floral, a pale color, a mood”) will probably be reflected in themes like “going green” and “femininity” in Macy’s spring catalogue, as well.
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The art of happiness concept symbolizes one way in which people experience living in New York, Dupire said. By associating itself with the fine art photographs, she contended, a “big company becomes part of dreaming,” which for some includes the consumerism that provides them with a “level of comfort.”
“We are a store that is linked to the culture of our city,” said Fischelis, who projected half a million people or so will see the works during the two-week show — roughly the number who typically visit Macy’s street-level men’s store in a 14-day stretch. (The 34th Street Partnership estimates an average of 25,248 people pass by Macy’s on 34th Street and Broadway each weekday.)
Fischelis expects her idea to put art on display at Macy’s will inform the store’s identity, as do annual events such as its Flower Show, Fourth of July fireworks and Thanksgiving Day parade. Already in the works are plans to feature the ceramic art of Kathy Ruttenberg in the Herald Square flagship during the flower show, March 25 to April 8, and to devote all the store’s windows to an installation in early July called “Art Under Glass,” encompassing paintings, sculpture and video. The latter would be the second such enterprise, following the store’s “Art Under Glass” show last spring.
“Macy’s Presents the Art of Happiness” is costing more than $50,000 to mount, Dupire said. The largest photographs displayed will be 20 feet by 11 feet: one each from Cati Gonzalez, Wendelien Daan, Dietmar Busse, and Stijn Ghijsen and Marie-Jose Jongerius. Smaller photographs of wheat grass and flowers by Gonzalez will form backdrops in some of the windows.
Also displaying their works in Macy’s windows next month will be photographers Jason Akira, Anne Hall, Carmen Freudenthal, Kevin Macintosh, Marlene Marino, Elle Verhagen and Nigel Scott. The photos of Scott, Daan, Ghijsen and Jongerius have been published in Th(e) Influencer.