Meet Faye McLeod, The Mastermind Behind Louis Vuitton’s Famous Window Displays

Window installation by Faye Mcleod for Louis Vuitton at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris. Photo: Louis Vuitton

Not to get too deep here, but can the windows of a store also be the windows to the soul of a brand? Creative director Nicolas Ghesquière seems to think so, expounding on the subject at the unveiling of Louis Vuitton’s new windows for Le Bon Marché in Paris, where the grand department store rolled out a black carpet for visitors taking in the digital installations.

So is Ghesquière a bit of a high-tech geek? “I was always very curious about anticipation and technology so, yes, I am. I love the new tools and new ways of communicating with digital images, lights… I think it’s a big part of the world, reality and the digital world are crossing over, and I’m curious about that.”
He’s not the only one. Helping push the boundaries of Vuitton’s window displays over the past six years is LVMH Image Director Faye McLeod, who releases a hefty tome on the subject in November: Louis Vuitton Windows. We grabbed the windows whiz, who was born in Glasgow and lives between Paris and New York, slipped behind an empty Clinique counter and – after some beauty role-playing – talked windows and rock concerts.

Yahoo Style: The windows tonight have a very high-tech feel.

Faye McLeod: The whole idea of doing the Le Bon Marché windows was that it’s Fashion Week, it’s a presentation of Nicolas’ show, and we wanted to do it in a way that… everybody wants the windows to be theater, and I wanted the windows to be like rock concerts. So basically we researched it and a lot of our inspiration came from the Grateful Dead. It was kind of really looking at a rock concert – and a rock concert is really gritty – but making it really polished and making it really Vuitton. And we worked with Michel Gaubert, who did a special mix for the sound outside.

YS: So is what you’re doing here, with the visuals and sound, something new for windows?

FM: A lot of department stores have been doing it for a long time – you know, super-cheesy windows – but it’s trying to do that with a level of taste. Everybody right now is wanting their brand to be modern and be innovative in digital forms. Those screens that we’re using are just as good in daylight as they are at night, though they’re always going to be better at night. But they’re the same screens we use in the show sets. Technology is changing all the time, it’s moving so fast that you can never invest in screens for windows.

YS: Can you share any tidbits from your upcoming book on Louis Vuitton’s windows?

FM: It’s basically celebrating the savoir-faire of windows and looking at how we’ve evolved and how Louis Vuitton has a playful spirit and the storytelling that comes with it. With Marc Jacobs [the house’s former Creative Director], it was much more about cabinet of curiosities, ostriches… We did Sofia Coppola windows for Le Bon Marché, we’ve done so many different creations and they were all quite fun and bold and pop, and then with Nicolas Ghesquière it’s been a more sophisticated elegance. He really wants it to be youthful in spirit and modern, yet keeping the heritage of the brand, so it’s been a learning process. I would say these windows are some of the good ones but they won’t be in the book – we’ve missed that deadline.

YS: Can you pull out anything in the book that’s particularly special to you?

FM: I would say the Yayoi Kusama collaboration, when we took over every Louis Vuitton store in the world. It was a pretty amazing experience working with that artist. She’s amazing. There were all these myths around her and really she was the most amazing, bright, articulate person. Such an amazing energy, it was kind of like one of those ones where you pinch yourself after the meeting, like, ‘Did we really do that? Did we really have that day lost in her studio?’

YS: The holiday season is the biggest season for windows. Is it the most fun season for you?

FM: No, it’s the one you know you always have to do, and there’s so much pressure on you to do it… I think for this holiday season we’ve nailed it. We took a lot of inspiration from Nicolas’ show, kind of what you see tonight, the [Petite] Malle, just everything about Vuitton and we’ve made it super modern and I’d say maybe a little sci-fi. It’s fun.

YS: No little elves?

FM: Definitely no little elves.

YS: What’s particular to Vuitton’s windows compared to other brands?

FM: We produce design from start to finish in-house, the idea to end result and installation. When you make a Vuitton bag it’s beauty in repetition so, no matter if you’re making a lot of them, each one has to be as perfect as the next – that’s how I treated the windows. No matter where you go, you have that consistent experience from a window. We’ve managed to work with amazing production companies and I have a phenomenal in-house production team. We challenged them in the first few years, they kept saying ‘No, no, no, not possible’, and now everyone’s pushing the bar further and further and I’ve made a really rebellious team.

YS: Has anything weird ever happened to you when you’re in a window? Like, has anyone ever flashed at you or something?

FM: No…I’m sure there’s been people flashing at us but I don’t look, I try to concentrate on the job at hand.

YS: You grew up in Glasgow; did you develop a fetish for this window thing at an early age?

FM: Yeah, as a kid I always used to like watching the windows, and the animation behind them. I used to see all these people dressing windows and I’d wonder what they were doing and I ended up getting asked by someone to do a window once and I really liked it because you can’t control your viewer, so it’s super democratic. You can’t be like, ‘Oh, you can see it and you can’t.’ And you have to take criticism: people like it, people hate it. I love when you get a reaction from it. And I love when you do a window and you’ve got iPhones being whipped out outside and you kind of know – that butterflies in the stomach thing of, like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome’. You know when you’ve done a good window.

YS: So do you regard windows as theater sets?

FM: I do, and it’s public theater. And I really, really love Joe Public. For Kusama we had to get the window cleaners in every hour to clean the nose and handprints off the glass. For me, it was like, ‘Nailed it!’

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