Window dresser

Window dressers arrange displays of goods in shop windows or within a shop itself. Such displays are themselves known as "window dressing". They may work for design companies contracted to work for clients or for department stores, independent retailers, airport or hotel shops.

Alone or in consultation with product manufacturers or shop managers they artistically design and arrange the displays and may put clothes on mannequins—or use the services of a mannequin dresser—and display the prices on the products.

They may hire joiners and lighting engineers to augment their displays. When new displays are required they have to dismantle the existing ones, and they may have to maintain displays during their lifetimes. Some window dressers hold formal display design qualifications.

Notable window dressers

• In 1919, Diane Arbus’s mother, Gertrude, married a young window dresser at the store named David Nemerov.
• Giorgio Armani, the fashion designer, once worked as a window dresser.
• Roseanne Barr worked as a waitress and a window dresser in Denver prior to her showbiz career.
• L. Frank Baum, better known for his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published a treatise on the art of window dressing.
• Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, was commissioned by Bonwitt Teller in 1939 to do a store window installation, which made headlines.
• Simon Doonan, columnist for Slate, dressed windows for Barneys department store.
• Lieutenant Hubert Gruber, a character from the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, was a window dresser before his spell in the army. This is frequently alluded to, mainly for comedic effect.
• Roy Halston Frowick (April 23, 1932 – March 26, 1990), known simply as Halston, 1970s American fashion designer worked as a window dresser while taking a night course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
• David Hoey is famed for his work at Bergdorf Goodman, most notably on their Christmas season spectaculars.
• Victor Hugo, a Venezuelan born artist, and one-time assistant to Andy Warhol, produced window dressings for Halston in the 1970s, becoming the first to transform windows and mannequins into Pop Art.
• Don Imus, American radio personality once worked as a department store window dresser.
• Alice Lex-Nerlinger, after graduation from art school, worked as a shop window decorator in the department store Tempelhof from 1916–18, an experience which brought her closer to sisters in the labour movement, the subjects of her early photography and montage.
• Peter Lindbergh, German fashion photographer and film director, worked as a window dresser for the Karstadt and Horten department stores in Duisburg.
• Raymond Loewy, early in his career, dressed windows for Macy's in New York.
• Christine McVie worked as a window dresser in London in the 1960s.
• American stage director and film director Vincente Minnelli's first job was at Marshall Field's department store in Chicago as a window dresser
• Gene Moore was a leading 20th century window dresser.
• Molina, a fictional character, one of the principals of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, was a window dresser prior to his incarceration.
• Rhoda Morgenstern, a fictional character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff Rhoda, makes her living as a window dresser in Minneapolis and New York City.
• Jacques Rosas and Eric Steding, New York City window dressers, have done windows and exhibition designs for Armani Exchange, Yves Saint Laurent, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.
• Joel Schumacher, the film director, was once a window dresser employed by the store Henri Bendel.
• E. C. Segar left his job as a projectionist and worked at decorating jobs including paper hanging, painting and window dressing, before deciding on a career as a cartoonist.
• Hans Hermann Weyer, a German seller of fraudulent nobility and academics titles and flamboyant member of the international jet set who became an honorary consul of Bolivia in Luxembourg, was in youth an apprentice window dresser.