Window 7
Window 7

NEW YORK, Dec 22, 2009 / FW/ — Is it a coincidence or was it planned that the store windows will be based on Lewis Caroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” when the SyFy Channel premieres its miniseries “Alice?”

Before you say that I subscribe to the conspiracy theory, my question is not really far-fetched.

New York is a big city, yet it is also small if we follow the “six person rule” which basically says we are only 6 persons away from someone.

At most times, in New York, in an industry which based on an art form – from fashion design to television all the way to visual merchandising, there are so many chances that personalities are subsets of different groups.

Pop culture had already recognized that in “Lipstick Jungle,” a TV series based on the lives of three women who are BFFs – a fashion designer, a magazine editor and a head of a movie studio.

The short-lived TV series did not have time to develop the characters but the book actually explained how these three women are power movers and shakers in Manhattan simply because of who they are.

Of course, both the book and the TV series are works of fiction and had to be dramatized to be interesting to the audience. In real life, it is more mundane, just friends bouncing ideas to one another and next thing you know, there is a TV miniseries (Alice) and store windows based on Alice in Wonderland.

Quite frankly, I really don’t know if it was planned that way. It might be just a coincidence after all. The reason why I mentioned it here is so that visual merchandisers will realize that they are not islands. Store windows, whether VMs realize it or not are part of pop culture; and the people who design them are as much as part of the society as the musician or the scriptwriter.

[MARI DAVIS]
Photo by Rudy Pospisil / www.anothernormal.com