Doonan & the Ladies

First of all, there is an Absolut Doonan. It is a bouteille collective of grotesque mannequins, in homage to Barney's New York's celebrity window dresser. Point is, he's made it. He's an Absolut ad. Next of all, there is an Doonan Absolut. It is a window display staging the making of vodka by scantily-clad mannequins in a gleaming factory cell. Point is, Absolut's made it. It's in a Doonan window. Everybody's happy, fame stacks on fame, cash registers go manic, and my heart is racing-take me to this high-speed, brite-lite, kitschball arena of window dressing.

It is a very simple and seductive world presented in Confessions of a Window Dresser: you are either the window dresser, the hip collaborating artiste, the iconic figure caricatured in the display, or you are nobody. That's why you read a book like this. There might be your requisite trendoids, your sprinkle of window dresser aspirants, your misguided cultural studies concentrator who wants to derive a thesis on window displays, but the real readers-and lovers-of this book will be your drab, gray non-aesthete nobodies of life. For them, Doonan, with the aid of 200 full color illustrations and a glossary of exotic terms like "whomp" and "nelly," whips up in print the sort of kinky, macabre fairealism which has made his name in Madison Avenue windows. It is a big-money, high-luxury alternate reality stripped of those issues which "haunt those with more down-to-earth concerns."

Born in 1952 in Reading, England, Simon Doonan began trimming windows on London's Savile Row. Really, Doonan began by hanging out with lunatic relations and dressing up like the queen. This set the stage for his mod-chic and poofy youth, during which period he had time and opportunity to establish his signature punkcore and camp aesthetic. It was clear he would never sell insurance. Although, give him a window, some marabou and froufrou, and he could probably sell it by the box. Give him stuffed cats, trash cans, smashed televisions, 15,000 Q-tips, and he could become the other big tourist attraction of New York City. Which he has.

Leaping the Atlantic in the '70s, Doonan ventured into the continent that was to prove his postmodern paradise. There was a stint doing the storefronts of avant-garde Maxfield in L.A. and a collaboration with the legendary Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Met. Then in 1986, his notoriety well-established, Doonan was snatched by Barney's New York, where he has graduated from window dresser to creative director. His justification for being is in creating windows which inhabit the realm somewhere "beyond the valley of gorgeousity."

Doonan comes across at the start as being tastelessly self-important. Dig: "What kind of neurotic, exhibitionist psychopathology made me choose a career cavorting around arranging merchandise and props in full view of the rest of humanity?" You enter the book with a decided intention to dislike him. But give yourself about five pages, and you will be more than won over, you will want to intern for him-for free. In an atmosphere rife with political correctness, Doonan never veers from the unapologetic identity of, as he puts it confidently, "a pansy." The difficulty of being gay and the terror of possibly dying of AIDS are smothered under the same ecstatic "je ne sais quoi" which spikes his window threatrics.

At the same time, he is not just smooth, flippant glibness. Under his literate, articulate mode of referential expression, there is genuine heart for goodness and sincere adulation for genius. Even though he describes his work as camp/kitsch/pastiche-and yes, it looks it, when it does not look like the apocalypse-there is much that is life-affirming about Doonan which denies the emotional death of kitsch.

But enough of this pseudo-intellectualism. That's just the sort of trap which Doonan side-steps. His writing is anecdotal and utterly charming, and the occasional simile-that-tried only adds to the authenticity of the book. Doonan name-drops like a crazed jetbomber, but you have to realize that these people are really his friends. If Doonan makes much of himself, it is only because everyone else in the world has and is qualified by the fact that he is also ever-ready to be self-critical. Today, after 25 years, millions of fashion windows, messy windows, live windows and even windows with live-stock and transvestites, he wonders at his fortune in being gainfully employed at all, he declines the title of an artiste, and he is constantly more delighted than deprecating. Not fame, not fortune, not even cliche, will change the remembrance that in Reading, England, he was "a gay half-wit with no future."

Doonan is with Barney's still and couldn't kiss enough ass, but the "inordinate amount of complimentary text," he leads us to believe, is more a function of the "fabulousness" of Barney's on every scale than his need to stay on the payroll. In an aside, Doonan alerts us to the impending effusive text, and writes, "This disclaimer... is designed to forewarn critics and urbane sophisticates who are not used to people saying nice things." Before you can even say anything smartass, you snap your jaws shut in shame.

This is not just a window dresser's manual; we come away with wonderful wisdoms for living today's life rightly. Ultimately, this is a book of the lives of people who dare and try and do. From Barney Pressman to Rei Kawabuko (of Comme Des Garcons) to his own grandmother, Doonan barrels through a life of extraordinary somebodies, from whom he rubs off a heady, giddy, and invincible euphoria which is both playfully irreverent as well as healthily capitalistic.

Oh, and I meant to say this a long time ago: his windows are phenomenal.