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With only a few days left in the year, it's time to look back on 2011 with the annual (five years running!) Racked Recap. This week, we'll be reliving our biggest and brightest (and saddest and darkest) moments, from the best sample sales to the biggest retail conquistadors. Take a deep breath of the sweet, sweet nostalgia, with a look back at this year's The Year in Windows.
Before the year is officially up, let's take a look at one thing that made New York City's retail scene really great this year: store window displays. We've put together up a bunch of our favorites—and a bunch that weren't our favorites—in our final roundup, the Year in Windows.
The Good
The winner of this year's best windows—basically, year round—has to go to Barneys, but we'll get to that later. For the non-Barneys windows this year, we had an amazing paper dress at Anthropologie, Bloomingdale's Soho trash-bag spoof on our Snowpocalypse, and Ted Baker's stripping Russian nesting dolls. Man Repeller repelled men and dressed mannequins in Tibi at Bloomingdales in Midtown, and Bergdorf put a ton of McQueen on display as well as Harper's Bazaar's Greatest Hits. We also saw a disco rollerderby show at Marc Jacobs after the Same-Sex Marriage Law was passed, and perhaps the most adorable, Moschino stuffed its windows with fashionable penguins. See them all in the gallery above.
The Bad
But this year had some bad windows too. Macy's put sleepwalking comedian Mike Birbiglia in its Herald Square windows to promote Downy fabric softener, Bergdorf invited sculptor Jason Hackenwerth inside, who said he made balloon sculptures based around YSL's "dramatic colorways," but really they looked like boobs (others were more phallic), and Adam went wild with macramé, of all things. In similar crimes of fashion, Daffy's announced its new Times Square store would have a virtual peepshow, and then there was Fishs Eddy, who pushed its housewares with an Occupy Wall Street theme.
And Everything that Happened at Barneys
Barneys was not playing around this year with its windows. Let's just say really crazy things happened. We excluded holiday windows from this roundup (we already featured them here), but the Lady Gaga windows were so nuts they deserve a second post. Then there were the Christian Louboutin windows, that featured metal spikes, shoes scooting along a track, and red wigs. Lest we leave out the stunt, Daphne Guinness got dressed for the MET Ball in there, and two weeks later, Barneys displayed Guinness' clothing collection, much of which was composed of clothes purchased from the estate of the late Isabella Blow. Needless to say, there was a lot of McQueen. And then of course there was the mega tribute to Carine Roitfeld, which proved beyond a doubt that she is indeed having one hell of a year.
· All Racked 2011 Recaps [Racked NY]