STYLE: DESIGN : Window Dressing, 90210

It’s an ephemeral art form often overlooked as Angelenos whiz past in their cars, glimpsing only a bit of color or shape in their peripheral vision. But designing store windows is more than sticking a dress on a mannequin and hoping someone will notice. When done well, window displays create a stage for the merchandise, an identity for the store. They may entertain or inform, shock or charm, so they’re seldom boring. Here, along a four-block stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, are a few windows worth watching.

NEIMAN MARCUS

That red dress,” the caller says, fuzzy reception giving away the fact that she’s on her car phone. “How much is it and what size is it?” Drive-by shopping isn’t unusual at Neiman Marcus. In fact, creative director Kenneth Downing designs the store windows for just this kind of honk-if-you-love-Valentino response, and rarely does a week go by without a call from a cellular phone. Many outfits, particularly Richard Tyler creations, he says, are bought this way. And at the moment, he’s replacing a Thierry Mugler suit for the third time.

Downing calls his four large windows “the billboards” and says: “We design for viewing at 35 miles per hour.” A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, he takes a broad-stroke, painterly approach that makes use of the fine arts degrees of his staff. “I don’t believe in props and cha-cha. That’s not what we’re selling,” he says. At Neiman’s, fashion is exhibited like art, usually in spare windows with a painted backdrop and plenty of negative space.

The 31-year-old Seattle native built his reputation at his hometown I. Magnin and at the Magnin store in San Francisco before coming to Neiman’s almost four years ago; he is respected by his competition and loved by clothing designers for staying true to their vision. Downing studies videotape of designers’ runway shows, and if they show a dress on the runway with firefighter’s boots and greasy hair, or tennis shoes and a French twist, then that’s how it will appear here.

“God knows I should be second-guessing Karl Lagerfeld,” says the man who loves fashion, as he gestures with his cuffs, fashionably and impractically long enough to cover his knuckles. “Our bible is the video screen. We try to bring a slice of the collection to customers. Who would want to drive by and see how you would really wear it? They want the fantasy. We leave the mixing to them.”

I. MAGNIN

Magnin’s windows are often sophisticated sight gags that demand a double take. The Jean Paul Gaultier or Giorgio Armani clothes are beautifully displayed, of course, but next to them might be a bikini fashioned from plastic fruit or a bustier decorated with wax asparagus. Likewise, the perfect bride wears a lavish wedding gown, but she might also be wearing the wedding cake as a headdress.

“When I was a kid in Chicago, I’d go and see the windows in the Loop,” says Diane Gatterdam, 40, vice president of visual for all I. Magnin stores. “I was so overwhelmed. I wanted to be in that world. I wanted to live in those windows.” What sparked her imagination most were the Christmas windows, especially the ones with animated mice living in fantasy rooms.

After studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, the tall redhead took a stroll down Michigan Avenue, and I. Magnin was the first store whose windows drew her in. She got a job there and has been with the company for 16 years, moving first to L.A. and then to San Francisco, where she’s now based.

“The windows are the eyes of the store. They’re the first vision of what the store is about. You know immediately what you’re going to see inside,” she says. “It’s like painting, but you start with four white walls. When you pull the screen up at the end of the day, it’s so exciting.” Gatterdam’s windows are typically witty and breezy, often alluding to literary classics, with props from, say, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” or to pop culture, with backdrops of celebrity caricatures.

Her sense of humor appeals to many, it seems. Quite a few shoppers called to see if they could buy her fruit bustiers.

SAKS FIFTH AVENUE

Michael Bewley never pretends to be anything he isn’t--”I’m not an artist,” he insists--yet he might concede that he’s a bit of a quick-change artist. Saks Fifth Avenue’s windows are typically event-related and change frequently. They’re up for as few as three days when an Oscar de la Renta or an Ellen Tracy buzzes through town, then they’re down again and filled with something else, maybe the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards or the holidays. “Sometimes there are three trunk shows within a two-week period,” says the 30-year-old visual director, a San Francisco native and one of the youngest designers on the boulevard.

Perhaps less quirky than other store windows, Saks windows are always pretty, quiet and sophisticated showcases. In the “Sunset Boulevard”-themed windows, for instance, mischievous allusions to various vices (drinking, smoking, gambling) were included but tucked discreetly into the window designs. Explains Bewley: “I like subtlety.”

The windows also often give the fashion cognoscenti something to chew on, a detail that the average shopper might miss. “Geoffrey Beene had a circus theme on the runway, but we didn’t use an elephant,” Bewley says. “I did a gold-leaf floor and made three rings like a three-ring circus. It was pretty and beautiful for every viewer, but our customer who knows Beene was able to understand the tie-in.”

Never straying from Saks’ classic image, he prefers the real to the fake. So genuine gold leaf is applied instead of spray paint, real blossoms are brought in instead of artificial flowers and actual period furnishings are assembled instead of mere replicas. He also uses the department store’s tried-and-true lighting techniques and mannequins that were once modeled after actress Frances Farmer.

Even with the 1938 store undergoing renovation to be completed next spring, the Saks look will continue to appear in two unboarded windows. “Like the store itself,” Bewley says, “we move forward, but remember the lessons we’ve learned.”

TIFFANY & CO.

It’s no surprise that Tiffany & Co.’s free-lance window designer, Scott D. Latendresse, views the store’s six small silver-framed windows as tiny theaters. The 38-year-old South Dakotan earned a master’s degree in theater design at the University of Minnesota and worked as a scenic artist at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. In 1989, he moved to L.A. as a TV art director and has moonlighted for the last year and a half at Tiffany, where storytelling takes place within Lilliputian proscenium arches.

Whether the theme is “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which won Latendresse the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce’s holiday window award last year, or a tribute to George Gershwin to coincide with the opening of “Crazy for You,” Tiffany windows are strictly G-rated. This is family-oriented stuff, as simple and clean as a Tiffany-set diamond.

Unwritten taboos of window dressing here include phony flowers, price tags, jewelry forms (those fuzzy finger and neck displays other stores use), mannequins and clothing. Latendresse instead makes inventive use of unexpected media--candy, hardware and organic materials. The simple graphic or nature-oriented windows that result strike a chord with shoppers and other designers: The day after he threw his birch-trunk display in the trash, it showed up in a nearby store’s window.

His earthly props are simple backdrops to more ethereal items, like $5,000 vases or $85,000 rings. “My job is to get people walking by to stop,” says Latendresse, who is quite fond of the store’s big rocks, especially sapphires and emeralds. Luckily, he’s allowed to put any merchandise he pleases in the windows--as long as he handles everything with white gloves and signs it out with the proper mountain of paperwork.

BARNEYS NEW YORK

Barneys New York’s wonderfully offbeat display windows are part of the flagship store’s presence in Manhattan, but most of the windows in Beverly Hills simply look into the store itself. Only one is a traditional enclosed showcase, and only recently has it begun to reach the provocative heights of New York.

Simon Doonan, a fashionably dressed 42-year-old Englishman with a wicked sense of humor, is Barneys’ fearless senior vice president of advertising and display. Based in New York, he’s known to Angelenos for his work at Maxfield in the late 1970s. That was the era of shocking “Eyes of Laura Mars” scenes, in which mannequins were shown being mugged or involved in other violence. Since then, he has designed sets for films (including the art gallery in the original “Beverly Hills Cop”) and worked with Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In March, his first few Barneys windows in Beverly Hills were deliberately tame. For instance, mannequins stood stick-straight, like members of a church choir. Later, as Doonan edged closer to the store’s signature look, one design included conglomerations of bizarre light fixtures; another, rolls of toilet paper. And for Memorial Day, the mannequins loosened up, setting Weber grills on “fire.”

“At Christmastime, I like to titillate and intrigue people,” Doonan says. “This is harder and harder in the present-day world of MTV and tabloid TV. It’s not enough to throw a couple of reindeer in the window.” Instead, he’s more likely to throw in a couple of condoms as tree ornaments. After all, he’s designed windows re-creating scenes from Madonna’s “Sex” book, as well as others depicting Jesse Helms looking at a Mapplethorpe book and Margaret Thatcher dressed as a dominatrix.

“Perhaps one shouldn’t scare the neighbors right away. But just wait a bit,” he says, “we have plenty of naughty windows coming up.”