“Let’s light it up!”
the actress Jennifer Lawrence said on Monday night as she helped to reveal the holiday windows and kick off the annual lights show at Saks Fifth Avenue.
As is tradition, onlookers crammed behind barricades near 50th Street as performers — in this case from the Martha Graham Dance Company — flooded Fifth Avenue. Behind them, nearly 300,000 lights illuminated what is described as a “wheel of fortune” installation, which covered 10 stories of the Saks Fifth Avenue New York flagship facade. The wheel is adorned with zodiac signs and decorated with symbols related to the Dior brand, like the star and flowers (for Christian Dior’s love of gardens).
Ms. Lawrence, a longtime Dior ambassador, gathered alongside other actresses, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Rachel Zegler, Ashley Park, Alexandra Daddario, Lola Tung and Maya Hawke. They packed onto bleachers across the street for the show, which included fireworks launched from the roof of the department store.
The traditional and ornate holiday windows, a marketing stalwart that R.H. Macy has been credited with originating in 1874, are part of a storied tradition in New York City that has declined in recent years as department stores have closed or moved away from the practice.
The four widely known window displays that remain in Manhattan — Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Macy’s and Bergdorf Goodman — continue to exhibit elaborate scenes that can take months to conceive and build.
In interviews, the people who helped craft the displays discussed the themes this year and the inspiration behind each one.
David Hoey, the senior director of visual presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, said that every year the team looks for a theme that is “slightly oblique” but will still provide a surprise factor.
“It has to be just right,” he said. “Not too specific, not too broad. And related to holiday, if a little bit tangentially.”
For the seven windows at the company’s Fifth Avenue store, they came up with a theme of “Isn’t It Brilliant,” which Mr. Hoey described as “bright lights, bright ideas, bright horizons, everything brilliant.”
The displays each feature a mélange of sparkly props with subtitles. The window “First Light,” for example, refers to dawn and shows crystal balls hovering over farm animals — two roosters, a cow and a pig — covered in a similar sparkly exterior. Another window, called “Tripping the Light Fantastic,” features creatures resembling Pegasus, the flying horse in Greek mythology.
The mannequins were dressed in designer ensembles from Thom Browne, Balmain, Rodarte, Alexander McQueen, Christopher John Rogers and Paco Rabanne.
More than a hundred people worked on the displays, Mr. Hoey said, and the installation took about three weeks and 25 people.
For the third year in a row, Macy’s blue reindeer, Tiptoe, returns to Herald Square.
The theme for this year’s windows, “Give Love,” is splayed across the company’s storefront on Broadway near 34th Street. The displays focus on “togetherness and festive nostalgia,” said Manny Urquizo, the national windows director for Macy’s.
John Klimkowski, who is the senior director of visual merchandising at Bloomingdale’s and has worked on the store’s holiday windows for more than a decade, said that the team embraced a candyland-like theme, with a hint of Wonka, for the windows on Lexington Avenue near 59th Street.
Andrew Winton, who is the senior vice president of creative at Saks and oversees the window design, said, “It really has been this devoted group of people from around the world, just hundreds of artisans crafting the story.”
He added: “It’s something that’s always been this gift to the city.”