Iconic Australian director Baz Luhrmann and his Oscar-winning costume designer wife Catherine Martin are putting on a show for Christmas – but you don’t have to buy tickets. You just have to be a shopper in iconic New York department store Barney’s.
The Australian twosome have teamed up with stage costumer Zaldy, who’s produced performance looks for Gwen Stefani, Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, to produce an interactive extravaganza celebrating the spirit of Christmas.
It’s not the first time a department store has brought in famous visionaries to promote the Christmas spirit (and it won’t be the last). Dolce & Gabbana will be designing the epic Christmas tree, complete with bespoke ornaments, for legendary London store Claridge’s for the second year in a row in 2014. But this isn’t your ordinary array of reindeer, big trees and baubles.
Like any Luhrmann creation, it’s big, bold and full of drama – real life drama, as it happens. Rather than displays in shop windows or ordinary trees, the Barney’s show, called A Life Lived In Fear Is A Life Half Lived, will contain a Mugler-wearing Rockette ice dancer, a breakdancing golden elf, and an hourly performance of a wintery song by two divas on the second floor of the store.
But they haven’t forgotten the background. Women’s Wear Daily reports that the store has been transformed into a wonderland with American woodland creatures, huge candy canes and snow owls. (Obviously.)
There won’t be any Australian influence, though – Luhrmann and Martin both said they were trying to create a very New York Christmas, and that coming from a place “without woodland creatures or snow” made it all the more special to celebrate the classic yuletide North American spirit.
The two opera singers, who are the Queen Of The Night and the Queen Of The Light, apparently presented particular challenges to Zaldy: they emerge from the building as if they’re breaking through its glass, so their costumes had to be both resilient and warm.
Barney’s has a history of fashion-inspired dynamic window displays: they put Daphne Guinness, the eccentric fashionista, in their window this year as she dressed for the Met Ball, the yearly extravaganza of fashion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. But this will be their first multi-layered, wide-range performance.
The main issue? How the performers will get through it: the opera singers will be on call every two hours, every weekend until Christmas. The Baz Dazzled theme is for a good cause, though. Barney’s is also producing a branded range of gifts inspired by the performances, and 25% of the sales will go to Room To Read, a literacy organisation.
We hope this starts a trend. Next year, we’d quite like Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton to take over Tiffany’s and do a dramatic play of Guy De Maupassant’s The Necklace with some glittering props…
Speaking of glitz and glamour, check out Baz’s signature breathtaking work for the new Chanel No5 campaign starring the incomparable Gisele Bunchen.
Images: Baz Luhrmann for Barney’s.
