Behind the Glass

Along San Francisco's Grant Avenue, Manhattan's Fifth, Minneapolis' Nicollet Avenue, Dallas' Main Street, last-minute Christmas shoppers jostled and shoved. But sometimes they forgot to push, and pressed like moths to the lighted store windows, lost in synthetic wonderlands behind the glass.

The art of window display appears to hit a new peak each Christmas. Nowadays the best windows are as craftily arranged and lighted, and almost as convincing, as scenes from a play. "It could be great art," one of the best of its practitioners insisted last week. "It ain't, but it could be. I look forward to the day when we'll have nothing but display on the main floor. Then we can really create atmosphere, using everything--fire, water, why, we could even blow up a hurricane."

The man who hoped to blow up a hurricane was 35-year-old Gene Moore, a dapper Manhattanite who works with 14 assistants in a cluttered hideaway at Fifth Avenue's sleek Bonwit Teller's. Every week Moore designs 21 new windows.

Moore started worrying about Christmas windows in October, combed Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum for inspiration, finally decided to illustrate "some of those silly old sayings."

Among the sayings Moore decided on were "Fools Rush In . . ." (in the window a little lady braves a lion's den to win a fox furpiece), and "A Stitch in Time . . ." (a doll-size girl sews a rhinestone on to a life-size silk stocking). Another proverb, "People Who Live in Glass Houses" called for two figures under a glass bell in the center of a residential square (see cut). The giant hands accusing them from neighboring doors and windows were meant to advertise Bonwit's gloves.

Moore once wanted to be a portrait painter, but not any more. Says he: "I may have a tiny soul, but window display is soul-satisfying."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.