Window shopping: behind the curtain of art and retail

There is a shop on a road near where I live that looks like it’s been closed for years, even when the front door is open. It belongs to a tailor. In the windows, there are jackets with pink price labels pinned on their lapels, suspended straw hats lined up like commuters on a summer’s day. The awning is faded red, the various fonts proclaiming its name and services not quite as old as the year the business was established (1952) but still resolutely of another era. Sometimes when I stop to stare, I realise I am looking at it less as a container of wares or skills than as a kind of art installation – a memorial to, perhaps even a pastiche of, shop windows from decades gone by.

Something similar happens in the presence of Atelier E.B.’s displays, though here that dislocating feeling of having stepped out of time is very deliberate. A duo comprised of Edinburgh designer Beca Lipscombe and Brussels-based artist Lucy McKenzie, under the umbrella of Atelier E.B. the pair fuse art, fashion, and the nuts and bolts of commerce – selling luxurious, limited-run garments direct to consumers by staging them in temporary exhibitions. Having previously set up in spaces including the Serpentine and Fondazione Prada, now they have thrown open the doors to a ‘faux sports shop’ at Cromwell Place in Kensington. There, until 25th February, one can browse pieces from their latest collection Big Tobacco: a women’s tennis-inspired offering featuring cashmere jumpers, knitted skirt suits, ribbon bracelets, felt hats and more, many pieces created in collaboration with other labels and various Scottish manufacturers including Hawico and Alex Begg.

Atelier E.B. make an art of window shopping. Their bespoke installations usually involve mannequins and elaborate vitrines in which the clothes are at once prop and product. Their latest faux shop has been made with the help of artist and furniture maker Steff Norwood, and window dressers Barbara Kelly and Howard Tong. In appearance, it harks back to an earlier era of retail, a stripped-back simplicity to the arrangement of wares behind glass. In method, it taps into the deep, complicated pleasures of browsing and buying, providing a sly meta-narrative on the relationship between looking and consuming. These exhibitions are ones you can enjoy without spending anything, but if you find yourself sufficiently enticed – by the designs, by the ethos, by the immersive experience of seeing, selecting, trying, and purchasing – then you can take away a piece of it or order it for future delivery, yours forever.

The shop display has always been fertile ground for artists, from the days of German Expressionist August Macke painting women in fur-trimmed coats staring at goods behind glass to Swedish-American pop artist Claes Oldenburg sculpting lingerie and pastries from enamel-painted plaster. Sometimes, it’s offered a reliable source of income: Warhol and Dalí, among others, earning some extra bread and butter by creating scenes dazzling enough to seduce would-be shoppers and entertain passing idlers. In the late 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns collaborated under the strait-laced moniker of Maston-Jones Custom Display, designing theatrical windows for Tiffany & Co’s grand Fifth Avenue store, staging pearl bracelets on dusty desert roads and diamonds dangling from waxed leaves.

Others have taken matters directly into their own hands. When Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas opened a shop together near Brick Lane at the beginning of 1993, inspired, in part, by Oldenberg’s The Store (1961), they sold a range of items including ash-trays, dildos and t-shirts with statements like ‘Complete Arsehole’ and ‘I’m So Fucky’. During its short-lived tenure, it was a place that simultaneously functioned as a studio, party venue, gallery and method of making quick cash (certain artefacts were priced at £3.10 – the same as the next pack of cigarettes they wanted to buy). It was silly and spontaneous and shapeshifting, the windows painted with text or decked out in bunting and photos, inviting those drifting by to step inside.

A shop window can be a wonderful provocation: a way to cut through the art world’s shiftiness about money, whether by nixing the middleman or highlighting the thin-to-non-existent line between art and commodity with a shrug and a little objet made from an empty fag box. In its transparency, its commercial frankness, a window is an easy, instantly recognisable way to send up consumer culture – though it can run the risk of reinforcing it (think of Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa store, what was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek critique of luxury shopping now reading more like a permanent, Instagrammable advert).

Many of these projects suggest a certain cynicism, a weariness both with commercial galleries (which are, after all, storefronts of a sort) and the hollow, rapacious cycles of acquisition that fashion and other industries encourage. Although there’s some truth there – buying Atelier E.B., for example, is also an investment in smaller-scale, creatively exciting goods produced with integrity – it ignores the stranger, more playful side of these creations.

A shop window is also the site of desires and judgements, a place where people may stop and eye what they see with longing or curiosity or even violent dislike. With Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Store Fronts series in the mid-sixties, the joke was that there was nothing visible behind the glass. Produced at scale, these fronts had windows obscured with paper or fabric, lit from behind as if to suggest that there might still be something exciting in there that was off-limits to the viewer. The perspective shift was thrilling and mysterious, the look-don’t-touch maxim of the window transformed into a don’t-look-don’t-touch set of impenetrable surfaces. Atelier E.B. is the opposite. Everything is to be looked at, potentially touched, even owned. But in their stylings, clothes hovering on invisible wires, there’s a pleasing touch of eeriness, a feeling of nostalgia for a place, or a time you’ve never been before.

 

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