Panes and Pleasures

Wait a minute! Is that a stuffed coyote in Maxfield’s window, about to pounce on a baby whose unaware mother is hosing the lawn wearing a really cute jumpsuit? Omigod! Cars are screeching to a stop on Santa Monica Boulevard just to look at the frozen drama taking place in the window of a clothing store.

What twisted, bizarrely inventive mind would think to entice shoppers by depicting coyote abductions, Malibu landslides, wacko caricatures of the Carter family and superbly costumed smog alerts?

Simon Doonan, of course. Simon Doonan? Why, every dummy knows he’s the emperor of window dressers, Michelangelo with a glue gun, a wizard able to make mannequins look smart. As creative director of Barneys New York, the Energizer Bunny of a store that just keeps chicly going and going through Chapter 11, fashion slumps and Dow Jones funks, he has made a career of deftly straddling the worlds of art and commerce, then adding shock value, comedy and a connoisseur’s understanding of fashion to his presentations.

But before he helped cement the Barneys image as a temple of style, Doonan spent eight years in Los Angeles creating diabolical dioramas for Maxfield’s, which from its inception in 1969 managed to project an invincible image of cool. The Doonan windows, both here and in New York, were so memorable that Penguin Books asked him to compile his photographs of them into a book. It was to be a coffee table-worthy retrospective of dummies wearing bloated happy-face heads, alligators crawling out of toilets and a phantasmagoric Octopus Barbie, all in the presence and the service of fabulous clothes. The editors were so taken with an early draft of his introduction that they realized Simon had a story to tell, and the book became this year’s “Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales From a Life in Fashion (Penguin Studio),” an irreverent memoir chronicling Doonan’s adventures in front of and behind glass.

“They saw that it wasn’t just about windows,” Doonan says. “It was about this gay Irish half-wit who grew up in a gritty, black-and-white social-realist movie surrounded by insane relatives who, miraculously, found his metier.”

Although hyperbole and self-deprecatory humor are part of Doonan’s charm, he is more like a wit and a half. His take on fashion is so perspicacious that he has become a sought-after pundit. If proof of his celebrity were needed, the Absolut ad created in his honor would suffice: “Absolut Doonan” features an assemblage of dummy heads and body parts in the shape of a vodka bottle.

“People call me for quotes, and it’s flattering that they’re interested in my opinion about things,” he says. “Fashion needs handles, interpretation and explanation. You need to have someone say, ‘It’s all front and no back.’ And people will hear that and say, ‘Right. That’s exactly what it is.’ I think I have a sound-bitey mind. Even if I can’t think of anything to say, I can always think of something to say.”

William Norwich, editor at large of House & Garden and an arbiter of style himself, says, “Simon gets the joke. He understands the comedy of fashion, and in a funny sort of way, he’s made some clothes that could be considered arty more accessible to people.”

Stumbled Into

Window Dressing

After studying art history and psychology at Manchester University and contemplating suicide at a succession of dreary jobs in Reading, the dreary English town of his birth, he stumbled into window dressing while working at the local department store. He moved to London in 1973, where he “schlepped, szhooshed and whomped up” displays in windows from Savile Row to Regent Street. By the late ‘70s, punk reigned, and Doonan embraced it for the first window he did for Nutters, an avant garde shop freethinking enough to feature tuxedos sitting amid trash cans with taxidermied rats sporting diamond chokers scampering over them.

Tommy Perse, who traveled from L.A. to London on buying trips for his Maxfield’s store, admired the psyche that could employ bejeweled rodents.

“My newly developed penchant for infantile, offensive window displays meshed with Tommy’s subversive aesthetic,” Doonan writes. Perse offered him a job, sponsored his green card, so at 26, Simon settled in Los Angeles.

“I was just so blown away by the way L.A. looked,” Doonan remembers. “In 1978 it had a rattiness to it that was incredible--telephone poles everywhere and train tracks going down the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. It was good ratty. There was something so grim about London, and L.A. was the antithesis of that. I lived above Dukes, the coffee shop at the Tropicana Motel, where all the punk bands used to stay. And I had a car! I thought, ‘God, I actually have a life.’ ”

Life centered around Maxfield’s, then on Santa Monica Boulevard between Abigail’s Florist and a karate studio, hard by the already legendary Troubadour. Perse, a fearless and clever merchant, was coaxing his clientele out of their Corkees and flared jeans and into the creations of a pantheon of international design talents no other store in California was taking chances on. To Simon, “the Maxfield customers, entertainment industry stars and executives were an endless source of fascination and inspiration: aggressive, powerful, anorexic, hypoglycemic, compulsive--and that was just the men.”

Pedestrians being an endangered species in L.A., the Maxfield’s windows had to be blunt sight gags people could see from their cars.

“You had to get it immediately, in the time you waited at the stoplight,” Doonan explains. “It was all right then to put coffins in windows, to have people hanging themselves. There was a completely different permissiveness about the ‘70s that lasted into the ‘80s. Politically correct dogma hadn’t taken hold yet, so you could get away with stuff.”

Doonan had so much fun getting away with misdemeanors like mannequin dismemberment that he stayed, helping Perse introduce Giorgio Armani to L.A., then abetting Maxfield’s black period, when Japanese designers shared space in the store with whatever black objects captured Perse’s fancy.

“Tommy would have me go to the Pleasure Chest and buy these high-tech black vibrators because they had the right Braun kind of look,” Doonan says.

Today, Perse admits to liking even the windows he said he hated.

“Simon knew how to transcend and translate fashion and put it forward in ways that are in line with what the designers had in mind, even if he might take alternate routes to get there,” Perse says. “Simon made me realize there was a whole new dimension to clothing that I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know about ‘szhooshing’ or all those things he does.”

Window Dressing

Has Own Lexicon

Few do. Doonan’s book includes a glossary, in which the uninitiated can find definitions of such indispensable window-dressing terms as “szhoosh,” which means to arrange into an appealing display, as in “szhoosh that wig up a bit!”

Such instructions are now directed to a squad of art students who hire on to create Barneys’ Christmas windows. On a windy day early in November, Doonan passes through a door marked Barneys Display in a dank office building in midtown Manhattan and enters the closest thing to Santa’s workshop south of the snowy Pole. Wearing a gray suit, flowered shirt and Gucci loafers, he’s checking up on the progress of sets that will be installed uptown before Thanksgiving, after a frame of orange feather dusters is applied around the orange window and a door in the yellow window has been encrusted with rows of butterscotch candies and lemon drops.

Surveying the work of his highly dexterous elves, he says, “The windows have to be interesting and nutty and quirky and intriguing, but they should never be offensive. It’s a fine line, especially with Christmas. My philosophy is you have to stay away from the real meaning of Christmas. A store is an inappropriate context for that. Therefore, what are you left with? Some very overplayed iconography. Snowmen. Reindeer. So you have to make the windows just celebratory, upbeat, fun.”

Utilizing TicTacs

and Candy Wrappers

That philosophy would explain why the workers are engaged in projects Martha Stewart would only attempt after being struck in the head by lightning. One is decoupaging a guitar with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappers. Another is covering a chandelier with a mosaic of colored TicTacs while finishing touches are applied to a tree made of blue and green feather dusters.

Since the Christmas windows are sponsored by InStyle magazine, the floor of every window will be paved with color-coordinated magazine covers. Eight mannequins will pose in each window, wearing clothes specially designed by John Bartlett, Dries Van Noten, Vera Wang, Donna Karan, Gucci, Pucci and others. In the purple window, a dummy will hold a bottle of purple Windex.

“Because it’s purple,” Doonan says. “We were going to cover something with Prozac in the yellow window, but the Prozac people didn’t want to do it. We try to address every surface in a unique way. People love that. They say, ‘Oh, look, a chandelier made of TicTacs, the drawer pulls on that vanity are Mallomars!’ ”

So densely textured are the environments that just when you think you’ve seen everything, you focus on another ingenious element--a wreath composed of blond wiglets and yellow curlers! “God forbid we’d ever have to do minimalist windows. I’d have a nervous breakdown. Layering, layering, layering. The bonbons are working, guys. Gorgeous.”

Doonan’s repetition compulsion is central to his style. Everyday objects are used over and over until they cease to resemble their original form and become a new visual statement. Warhol operated from a similar sensibility.

“I don’t have a thing that Prada is good, Kmart is bad,” Doonan says. “It’s all the same, just stuff for people to buy, and Andy felt the same way. Stuff is stuff. There’s a sweetness and a familiarity to household products that’s borderline Hallmark, but it takes on a kind of pop sensibility too. Most of my career I’ve been around incredible, luxurious merchandise and that’s what I know best. But stuff is stuff.”

The workers willing to go cross-eyed gluing Velveeta labels on furniture know they are engaged in a dying art.

“There aren’t many people left who do windows the way we do them at Barneys,” Doonan points out. “It’s like an old-fashioned form of corporate largess, free entertainment that we give the public. I watch good customers arrive at the store and they fly in the front door. The vast majority of people who are appreciating and enjoying the windows may not be customers. But that doesn’t mean the windows don’t have an intrinsic value to the company.”

Earlier in this century, department stores were centers of the community, places where people congregated.

“People still want that,” Doonan says. “Bloomingdale’s in the ‘70s, cattle auctions in the 1890s. People still want to gather. And they’re not gathering on the Internet.”

With windows he describes as alternately “arty, busy, messy, anal and pretentious,” Doonan is giving them a reason to come together. He has done so so brilliantly that it is rumored he would be an inspired choice to pack crowds into museum exhibitions, which seldom have the impact of his best windows. Former window dressers Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Giorgio Armani and Joel Schumacher moved successfully into other fields. Simon’s future could be as bright as the rhinestone collar on a stuffed rat.

But before he can szhoosh any dinosaurs or mummies, he must critique two large wreaths constructed of everyday objects, destined for Barneys branch stores. The clusters of plastic grapes, green violins, green feathers and cans of green Comet all look terrific to him. Then he pauses, addressing the elves who seem to have caught his wicked spirit like a winter cold. “You know, guys, the toilet seat glued on there needs to go.”

Simon Doonan will be signing books from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at Barneys; from 5 to 6 p.m. at Maxfield’s; and at 7 p.m. Monday at Book Soup in West Hollywood.