This past November, an exhibit at the Museums Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) launched focusing on Myer’s (Melbourne, Australia) fabled holiday windows.
Entitled “Make Believe: The Story of Myer’s Christmas Windows,” the exhibition features a bevy of characters and figurines (about 250) from the department store’s popular holiday windows, which are handcrafted each year by a team of artists who create the molds, sculpt the characters and fashion their costumes, according to ABC Radio Melbourne.
Other sights include animatronics, sketches, props and prototypes, providing visitors a true “behind-the-scenes” look at the elements that comprise the retailer’s annual windows.
The exhibition also includes a replica of Myer’s first Christmas windows that were crafted in 1956, according to a press release, as well as a semi 3-D window recreation that guests can crawl inside (shown in the photos above).
The department store’s window tradition is now 62 years old, according to another Museums Victoria press release, and still, one million people reportedly line up along Bourke Street Mall each year to view the unveiled displays.
John Kerr, Creative and Technical Director of Stage One, has been in charge of crafting the windows for the past 25 years. (He was featured in VMSD’s May 2018 issue.)
“People were just coming up and saying ‘thank you’ … I didn’t expect that because I’m paid as a contractor to do a job, but they were thanking me for all those memories,” Kerr told ABC Radio Melbourne about the public response to the exhibit.
VMSD will be showing off Myer’s 2018 holiday windows, as well as a range of other retailers’ designs, in the January/February 2019 “Look Book” issue, which will be available online and in print. Be sure to check vmsd.com throughout the month of February for photos of this past year’s best and brightest annual displays. (To subscribe to VMSD, please visit vmsd.com/subscribe.)
For more information about the exhibit, please visit Museums Victoria’s website.