A Window on Union Square

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Union Square retailers have taken a “simple but spare” approach to their holiday windows this year.

“Is it the economy?” asks reporter Sylvia Rubin. “Years of overseas strife? Or is San Francisco just not that into it?”

Saks Fifth Avenue on Post Street “has muted, minimal displays featuring mannequins in pretty dresses surrounded by large papier-mâché snowflakes and fake snow. The flagship New York Saks windows are more elaborate, with motorized ‘snow people’ riding the subway and stepping in and out of taxicabs.”

Taking their cue from New York, Saks’ San Francisco windows play up the snow theme but leave out the mechanics. “This year's windows are more streamlined, more minimal and more focused on fashion,” Lisa Ritterhoff, Saks’ San Francisco visual director, told the Chronicle.

Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus also focused on fashion this year. Neiman's Stockton Street windows are trimmed in green backgrounds and white graphic suspended butterfly panels, with special-order spring 2008 designer dresses in gold, silver and white.

Rubin writes that Barneys New York, in its first San Francisco holiday window, does a playful and ironic take on commercialism, with the first green holiday window in its history.

“It was conceived to coincide with the store's switch to eco-friendly catalogs and recycled shopping bags,” she reports, “so this year, the creative staff went pawing through piles of aluminum.”

It took six months for the visual staff to collect enough soda cans and bottle tops to create the giant, colorful “Rudolph the Recycling Reindeer” that graces the front entrance of the O'Farrell Street store.

Simon Doonan, Barney’s creative director, said the soda can displays were very labor intensive, but far more spare than New York's display. “The reason is, our windows are small here, that's all it is,” he said.

Rubin speculates that the staid-ness of the windows could be read as: We're just so trendy. The renewed interest in stream- lined mid-century home decor and architecture and a more streamlined fall fashion season with less embellishment and baubles could be the inspiration.

“Mid-century modern is modern again,” said Nancy Cresta, the visual communications program coordinator at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (San Francisco). “Window dressers have to be aware of current modes of style if they are doing their job well,” she says. “They are the eyes of the store.”