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Christmas 2013

Selfridges are justly famous for their Christmas windows. An annual treat for passersby, they are without a doubt the highlight of the calendar for many shoppers, who in bygone times might have made the trip to London especially to see them.

During my time at Selfridges these became increasingly commercial prospects, and in 2013 the in-house window display team were presented with the information that all of the Christmas windows that year had been pre-sold to brands, who were also told that they would have their product featured, giant-size, in the windows.

After some thought I came across the idea of a miniature alpine landscape where these giant products had dropped from the sky. It quickly became obvious that to have these succeed, we would need to be very careful with the fabrication of each individual giant product. Likewise with the miniature figures, which we quickly narrrowed down to Santa Claus, elves, reindeer, and a select few civilian and animal inhabitants of the landscapes.

The in-house window production team at the time said that this was the hardest window installation that they ever had to put together. I worked closely with the production manager in particular to make sure that my designs were feasible, making many compositional changes to balance the budget and ensure the physical possibility of all of our scenarios.

The scheme was very well received, especially by kids passing by the windows that Christmas, who appreciated all of the detail and humour that we poured into every square centimetre of space. What could have been a soulless commercial exercise managed to retain that Christmas magic for one more year.

Visuals in Adobe Photoshop.

All photography  ©Andrew Meredith

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Mighty Real Ltd.
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