Back to Projects Design and Visualisation No Noise
Spring 2013

Traditionally the windows for January at Selfridges would be intended as a soothing palette cleanser after Christmas excess. The storewide scheme No Noise took this idea and extrapolated it to its fullest extent.

Centred around mindfulness, which was a fairly new concept at the time outside of the meditation community, the store commissioned events and spaces that would embody stillness, quiet, and calm.

The windows were designed to complement these ideas, but with humorous and artistic twists. Taking inspiration from Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, as well as the composer and thinker John Cage, the pared down, thoughtful, but also playful windows for this scheme were a joy to compose. 
The Selfridges de-branded bag
Five white t-shirts by different brands
Beats Headphones sketch
The window designs quickly took off in two directions.  First, plays on words or on ‘quiet’ situations, such as ‘some breathing space’ or the act of just sitting and reading a book. These were brought to life with existing Selfridges products, or with elaborate sculptural builds with no product included within them at all.  A heavily restricted colour and material palette was crucial to the minimal feel of the installations.

The second strand of windows were designed around specially commissioned ‘de-branded’ product for the scheme from traditionally branding-heavy fashion, technology, and homeware heavy-hitters such as Beats by Dre, Heinz, and Selfridges themselves, with their de-branded shopping bag.

For Beats, I remember sitting at my desk late one night and thinking, OK, what amazing experience has no sound. Channelling Yoko Ono, I had my answer - a sunrise. Our production team got to work filming assorted sunrises to be shown on monitors in a window, with de-branded Beats By Dre headphones plugged into them.

Initial sketches of windows by hand.

Fallen Selfridges bag logo letters on the floor was the idea of
James Barnett, and is the buttoner on this entire window scheme.


All photography ©Andrew Meredith
Beats Headphones detail
Some Breathing Space detail
Assorted jewellery on moving metronomes detail
Sit down and read detail
Five white t-shirts detail
Selfridges de-branded bag sketch
Mighty Real Ltd.
London


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