Whose Window is it Anyway?

Displays created by fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his fall collection will debut in the Madison Avenue windows of Barneys New York next week. It will be the first time that Barneys creative director Simon Doonan has let a designer have a hand in the store's windows.

The McQueen concept was characterized by Doonan as “dark and mythical.” “It will combine influences from 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,'a National Geographic picture of a jellyfish and S&M,” Doonan told the New York Times.

And Robert Wilson, the avant garde artist and experimental operatic and theater designer and director, has been chosen to create the 2002 Christmas window displays for all 300 Louis Vuitton stores around the world. It's the first time the European fashion house has turned to an outside artist for its windows and the first time Wilson — who has been involved in various aspects of the art world for 40 years — has ever dabbled in visual merchandising.

LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton chairman Bernard Arnault says he has long been influenced by Wilson's design and direction of the 1976 Philip Glass opera “Einstein on the Beach.” LVMH has been a sponsor of the annual summer benefit for Wilson's Watermill Center, a multi-disciplinary collaborative arts laboratory in Water Mill, N.Y.