I really didn’t know I wanted to work in fashion. I was an art girl, and my dream was to come to New York. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I couldn’t wait to leave the Midwest. My art form was found objects. I knew I had a real rapport with assemblage and repurposing things. I just didn’t really know how to become a fine artist.
The first job I got was at Macy’s in the display department. For my interview, I bought a vintage 1940s skirt suit at one of the shops on 8th Street and wore it with vintage heels, my hair styled in a French twist. I carried my massive art school portfolio, and I went the wrong way on the subway and ended up on the other side of the river in Brooklyn, with my interview in 20 minutes and no money to take a taxi. Somehow, I made it, and I became the production manager for the window director, and then within four years — by that point it was 1984 — I became Macy’s window director.
Now, let me give you a little bit of a picture of Macy’s at the time. It was full-on designer. Matsuda, Kansai Yamamoto, Claude Montana, Armani. They had tiers, they had contemporary — but they had designer. And I knew the Broadway windows could only be designer. So that first job was somewhere between a crash course and a masterclass immersion into designer fashion. In art school, some of the pieces I made were under glass, and I would build worlds in them. So the windows were like a big, real-life version of that. I think, in my lifetime, I’ve designed thousands of windows. It always interested me that there’s a half-inch sheet of glass that separates the everyday sidewalk from a fantasy world.
I could talk about the windows forever. Each one has a story behind it. We did a Perry Ellis window where we turned mannequins into falconers, with birds perched on their hoisted-up arms. I once, for an American Ballet Theater window, took a cab out to a Brooklyn warehouse, lifted a huge metal door, and it was like Citizen Kane. There was crate after crate, stamped with “Nutcracker” or “La Bayadère”, full of tutus stacked like pancakes, and they were kind of dirty. That’s how they store them; only the prima ballerinas get the new ones.
