Window dressers arrange displays of goods in shop windows or within a shop itself. Such displays are themselves known as "window dressing". They may work for design companies contracted to work for clients or for department stores, independent retailers, airport or hotel shops. Alone or in consultation with product manufacturers or shop managers they artistically design and arrange the displays and may put clothes on mannequins—or use the services of a mannequin dresser—and display the prices on the products. They may hire joiners and lighting engineers to augment their displays. When new displays are required they have to dismantle the existing ones, and they may have to maintain displays during their lifetimes. Some window dressers hold formal display design qualifications.
Notable window dressers
Diane Arbus’s father David Nemerov was a window dresser at her mother Gertrude's Fifth Avenue department store, Russeks, before they married.
Giorgio Armani, the fashion designer, once worked as a window dresser.
Karl Bissinger, American mid-century photographer of notable artists, was a window-dresser at Lord & Taylor earlier in his career.
Henry Clarke, a Vogue photographer, first worked in the 1940s as a window dresser for I. Magnin, luxury department store in San Francisco before becoming a background and accessorising assistant at the Vogue New York studio, where he learned to photograph by observing the different styles of Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Horst P. Horst.
Salvador Dali, the surrealist artist, was commissioned by Bonwitt Teller in 1939 to do a store window installation, which made headlines.
George Dureau, an American photographer and artist who inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, began his career at D. H. Holmes department store
Simon Doonan, columnist for Slate, dressed windows for Barneys department store.
Lieutenant Hubert Gruber, a character from the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, was a window dresser before his spell in the army. This is frequently alluded to, mainly for comedic effect.
Roy Halston Frowick, known simply as Halston, a 1970s American fashion designer, worked as a window dresser while taking a night course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
David Hoey is famed for his work at Bergdorf Goodman, most notably on their Christmas season spectaculars.
Victor Hugo, a Venezuelan born artist, and one-time assistant to Andy Warhol, produced window dressings for Halston in the 1970s, becoming the first to transform windows and mannequins into Pop Art.
Don Imus, American radio personality once worked as a department store window dresser.
Ellen Jose, an Australian indigenous artist and photographer.
Alice Lex-Nerlinger, after graduation from art school, worked as a shop window decorator in the department store Tempelhof from 1916–18, an experience which brought her closer to sisters in the labour movement, the subjects of her early photography and montage.
Henk Schiffmacher, Dutch tattoo artist, was a window dresser at the De Bijenkorf
Joel Schumacher, the film director, was once a window dresser employed by the store Henri Bendel.
E. C. Segar left his job as a projectionist and worked at decorating jobs including paper hanging, painting and window dressing, before deciding on a career as a cartoonist.
Henry Talbot worked as a department store window-dresser in London in the 1930s before being shipped to Australia on the Dunera, where he became was a fashion photographer.
Hans Hermann Weyer, a German seller of fraudulent nobility and academics titles and flamboyant member of the international jet set who became an honorary consul of Bolivia in Luxembourg, was in youth an apprentice window dresser.
