If you need to take a break from your holiday shopping this year while bustling around New York City, you’ll want to make a stop by Barneys, even if it’s just to take a look at the new holiday windows that went up last week. Baz Dazzled, a window collaboration between director Baz Luhrmann, his wife, costume designer Catherine Martin and Barneys creative director Dennis Freedman, was unveiled at an over-the-top soiree that included high profile fashion and film industry guests like Dakota Fanning, Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne of Public School, Aurelie Bidermann, Deborra-Lee Furness, Dennis Freedman, Giovanna Battaglia, Lily Kwong, and Michael Avedon. Opening night guests were treated to a holiday spectacle complete with singers, dancers, acrobats, women on stilts, step troupes, ice dancers and break-dancing elves before a dinner party hosted at the Central Park Zoo.
For those hoping to catch a little of Luhrmann’s pizazz, the theatrics will be going on long into December with spontaneous performances throughout the store like holiday opera singers and a “live-action Advent calendar.” The windows marry the magic of the season with the iconic aesthetics in Luhrmann’s films like The Great Gatsby and Moulin Rouge, and create a visual wonderland filled with mechanics, live actors and unique sets. “From the first time my wife Catherine Martin and I found ourselves in New York back in the ’80s, we always marveled at the way Barneys took the familiar and managed to turn it on its head. This way of seeing the world is somewhat akin to our own creative philosophy,” said Luhrmann. “Here we are now, so many years later in our adopted home, honored to join the pedigree of artists, performers, and creative organizations which have collaborated with Barneys, to take the familiar and turn it on its head.”
