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April Glassborow, senior buyer for international designer collections at Harvey Nichols, drifted into her career by accident. ‘I’d left university having done a French degree and took a temporary job at Liberty, working in the jewellery department,’ she recalls. ‘At one point the buyer fell ill, so I took over her job for a while. Later, when she moved departments, I took over full-time. Subsequently I bought accessories; then I moved to Harvey Nichols to buy jewellery and womenswear.’ Glassborow says buying for Harvey Nichols involves something of a balancing act: ‘We’re expected to be a step ahead, so we are constantly looking for new labels. We take risks with young designers who may not sell a great deal for three or four seasons, until a buzz generates around them. But at the same time, we want to reflect the demands of our customers, so we stock the more commercial designers too. In general, though, I don’t think our type of customer is content to blindly follow the herd.’
As well as monitoring all the usual sources – magazines, the Web, mutterings on the fashion grapevine – Glassborow receives intelligence from the store’s representatives around the world, who are often its first point of contact with young designers, forwarding photographs and background information. Crucially, she decides where each brand will be located in the store.
‘The amount of space you are going to give to each designer clearly dictates the buying, so it’s impossible to separate the two. Once again, you have to evaluate the “hot” aspect of a designer compared with the commercial reality: just how well is this label going to sell? And then, of course, the decisions you make about placing the clothes affect sales. You are aware that a certain type of customer goes for a certain type of designer, so the idea is to keep them flowing from one boutique to another, almost unconsciously, because they keep seeing things that catch their eye. I can’t tell you how I do that – it becomes instinctive.’ Instinct also drives the work of Janet Wardley, the store’s visual merchandizing controller, who handles window displays as well as interior mannequins and display points. ‘I’m lucky because, at Harvey Nichols, the display function is separated from the marketing department, which is not the case in many places. It means there is no pressure on me to favour certain brands, or to give the entire window display over to one brand because a deal has been struck. We ensure that the Harvey Nichols brand comes out on top. That situation gives me a lot of freedom.’
To celebrate one London Fashion Week, Wardley filled the windows with 15 archive pieces from previous Alexander McQueen collections – in other words, the windows were displaying items that were not even on sale inside the store. ‘Fashion students came and took pictures of it,’ she recalls.
In more usual circumstances, she endeavours to evoke an atmosphere that enhances the clothes, rather than being led by them. At the time I interview her, she’s just created a dark, autumnal theme with Halloween overtones, featuring giant metal insects. ‘For spring I’m picking up on blue, which is going to be big next season. You have to be on-trend, not just in terms of fashion magazines and runaway shows – which of course I study – but also in terms of the general feel of the times. You’re reading newspapers and listening to the radio, soaking up influences. One of the interesting things about Harvey Nichols is that it is considered a trendsetter, so we can’t really get it “wrong”, so to speak.’ Interestingly, Wardley never receives official feedback about whether her displays have driven sales inside the store. ‘It’s considered one of the last artistic professions, so to be monitored in that way would take away our freedom and the ability to take risks. It’s precisely because we don’t have to answer to commercial concerns that we can do something entirely different. After all, we’re supposed to be the leaders in our field.’
Wardley heads a team of ten, including five prop builders and two graphic designers (who take care of signage). Harvey Nichols has its own workshop and, on the rare occasions it sources materials from outside the company, it tends to use the same trusted suppliers. Mannequins get to travel, as they are rotated around the group’s stores. Occasionally they are renovated. Wardley – who rarely looks at the windows of rival stores in case she is ‘inspired by someone else without realizing it’ – has none the less noticed the return of the mannequin, the humble shop-window dummy, as a display device.
‘There was a time when all the chain stores were using posters and bust forms in their windows. I imagine it was because they’d spent so much money on their advertising that they wanted to squeeze maximum value out of it, so they put the posters in the window, too. It was a classic case of what happens when the marketing department drives the display side. Now it seems to be swinging back the other way – you’re seeing mannequins again and more creative displays.’ Of all the marketing tricks in the retail book, window displays are the oldest and, still, the most alluring. Every year in the run-up to Christmas, crowds jostle in front of breath-fogged windows in Regent Street, Boulevard Haussmann and Fifth Avenue. ‘Brightly lit, they. . . exercise their powers of attraction even at night,’ writes Gérard Laizé, in Repères Mode 2003. He adds that, historically, French fashion houses were judged by the sophistication of their window displays. In Paris, the house of Hermès on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré has long been famed for its enchanting fairy-tale displays created by Leïla Menchari – who has been with Hermès since 1977 – which combine silk and leather goods with jewellery, flowers, sculptures, and even leaves and seashells. And all this from a company that claims with a straight face that it does not do ‘marketing’.
But in a world where luxury is big business, even the most exclusive brands rely on marketing – and their stores are the most spectacular manifestations of their ambition.

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