Selfridges blends traditional with futurism as it unveils Christmas theme

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Oct 17, 2019

Selfridges revealed its Christmas windows and full in-store displays on Thursday, claiming to be the first department store in the world to have done so. The company has chosen the theme of Future Fantasy: A Christmas For Modern Times, across all its stores (London, Birmingham, Manchester Exchange Square and Manchester Trafford), as well as online.

It said that at the London flagship alone, it has taken a multi-specialist team over 500 hours to produce the scheme during the past year, and over 100 people to put together the windows, working non-stop rotated shifts for the past 10 days.

So what can we find there? A futuristic vision of Christmas that “rethinks traditional, beloved festive stories and re-tells tales as old as time, but through a modern lens. This is a next-generation Christmas, an interplay of old and new.”

And from that point of view it should hit the target with the firm’s customers who are increasingly next-generation themselves with Selfridges having a huge customer base in the Millennial demographic.

The colour palette explores silver, white, blue and green along with mirror, crystal and transparency.

The Oxford Street windows fuse together a “balance of a futuristic vision and the magic of Christmas and fairy tales.” We’re told. Each window has an element from a much-loved fairytale, contrasting with “a futuristic aesthetic treatment and a softer magical narrative.”

The store's biggest triple-sided window at the corner of Oxford Street and Orchard Street features a shipwrecked feast among the waves, with giant magical moon and moving boat and oars. 

The company is hanging over 85,000 Christmas baubles, with many reused from existing displays across the stores’ balconies and ceilings while snow globes across all stores each contain over 40kg of biodegradable confetti. There are also 13,000 paper decorations hung across the stores’ ceilings and a giant 1.5 tonne, 13-metre-high mirrored Christmas tree hanging in the central atrium. The company said “it will come alive through a dazzling lighting show projected on its surface.”