Lord & Taylor

Theme: “Wish for Tradition.”
This is the 75th anniversary of Lord & Taylor’s holiday windows, and they wanted them to be a “gift to NYC.” The windows start by depicting Santa in his workshop on a day off. The windows progress to a charming tableaux featuring a German ski town to Central Park Zoo at twilight.

How: Roe Palermo, the DVP of Visual Merchandising, started planning the windows shortly after the holidays last year. L&T is the only department store in NYC whose windows are on hydraulics, allowing the team to build the windows on premises. (Many stores build their windows off-site.) Most of the figures in the windows are dressed in tiny versions of outfits you can actually buy at Lord & Taylor.

Fun fact: Lord & Taylor was the first department store to do animated holiday windows in NYC. In the German town windows, there are 325 tiny nutcrackers. (It certainly looks like at least that many.) And that fake snow? The secret is kosher salt–hundreds of pounds of it–and glitter, all painstakingly mixed for a realistic snowy look.