The shop windows of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue are the biggest art gallery in the world: the daily spectators run into the hundreds of thousands. The artists who put on this show, and who work in every medium from paint and cardboard to shoes and underwear, are paid as high as $10,000 a year. Their technique, which keeps abreast of every newfangled idea, has become so tricky that window shoppers have to be smart to tell the merchandise from the scenery.
Last week Fifth Avenue's windows put on their big Easter show. Window-shopping critics, looking for trends rather than Easter finery, found this year's windows generally conservative and simple. Gone were the surrealist limbs and torsos of the past few years. Scarcer than usual were Easter bunnies, dyed eggs, live chicks and other such Pâque animals. Most notable trend was toward trickier methods of lighting: display designers lit their mannikins and props with multicolored spots and footlights from all angles, avoiding distracting sun glare, getting increased illusions of depth.
Bonwit Teller's ace, Costa Rica-born designer Tom Lee, most respected of all Fifth Avenue window-display men, inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's forthcoming China Trade show, filled his windows with elegant Chinoi-series, including two life-size rag-doll horses. Swank Jeweler Marcus' veteran designer, W. B. Okie Jr., surrounded a terra cotta madonna with Easter lilies and pearls. Macy's Irving Eldredge, who has 41 windows to fill, paraded his dummies before backdrops of Manhattan landmarks and the Central Park Zoo. Designer Walter Smith, who works for both I. Miller (shoes) and Jaeckel (furs), got Cellophane Easter bunnies into the windows of both. At Bergdorf-Goodman's, Designers Robert Riley and Mab Wilson used as backgrounds crowd scenes painted by famed Lithographer and Water Colorist Adolf Dehn. Saks-Fifth Avenue's Sidney Ring, with the help of a free-lance designer named Helen Watkins, found a new use for spaghetti. Designers Ring and Watkins got a huge assortment of spaghetti, far-falle, gnocchetti, scungilli and other uncooked Italian pasta, dyed it all colors of the rainbow and pasted it on the background of their windows in flower-like and treelike festoons.
But the window that tied up traffic last week was at Franklin Simon's. Designers Claire Lang, James Gosling and George Perkins reproduced the whole door of a church and an adjoining stained-glass window (made out of Cellophane and shoe dye), a lawn with real grass. Through the church door paraded a dozen live models, women in spring street clothes, men in frock coats, military uniforms and mufti. Once a day six choristers from the Paulist choir stepped into the window and caroled Gregorian chants, their shrill-sweet descant relayed by amplifier to the street outside. The Franklin Simon window attracted almost too much attention. Army authorities straightway protested against this unseemly display of the uniform, and Franklin Simon had to substitute a vaguely military garb. The New York Police Department served the store with a summons for broadcasting without a permit. After three days of it, Franklin Simon decided to call the whole thing off.