The Worst Store Windows of the Year

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With only a few days left in 2009, it's time to look back at a year of dizzying highs and crushing lows, a year when every empty storefront held a pop-up shop and every sidewalk a sample sale line. Folks, it's the annual (three years running!) Racked Recap. This week, we'll be reliving our biggest and brightest (and saddest and darkest) moments, from the best collabs to the worst pop-up shops. Take a deep breath of the sweet, sweet nostalgia.

Yes, there were scores of gorgeous window displays in 2009—we already shared our six favorites. But for each good one there was at least one bad one; so we couldn't resist following up with the six worst window displays of 2009.

6.) Ungaro Just Plain Sucks: They didn't even need Lindsay Lohan to produce this crap—and it begs the question: if the best is in the window what horrors hang in the store?

5.) Marc's Got No Pride in Pride: Someone let all the gay knickknack shops in Chelsea, Provincetown and West Hollywood know that Marc Jacobs is totally poaching their questionable collective aesthetic.

4.) Saks Bores: Brunello and Saks were trying to teach us a bit about Italian history—but with windows this staid no-one's going to even bother looking.

3.) Barney's Exposes the Overexposed: We love Barneys, we love Simon Doonan—in fact, his troop of Mr. Potato Heads, his homage to American designers, and his ribbon portrait of the queen all nearly made our list of best windows. But, we can not forgive the hallowed house for shoving more of the Sartorialist down our throats with a boring display of products we already knew about (and, we weren't fond of the bloody dresses either).

2.) Juicy's Circus of Cheese: The circus itself was silly but inoffensive (although we thought it was a waste of popcorn and cotton candy)—but the slogans ("Mini-Me for babies who like stuff") really got to us. And, seriously, if you're going to torture a horse with shoe-bootie-sock-things shouldn't they at least be cute?

1.) A Christmas Nightmare from Bloomingdale's: Bloomingdale's technicolor holiday hell was garish, dated and cheap—enough to put their mess at the top (or bottom) of our list. Then we noticed the attacking snow Santa and the little girl-eating bear?Really, Bloomingdale's? Pull it together.