Last week I was asked to design a window display for Muji as a part of their 25th birthday celebrations. The brief was to create a tabletop containing five Muji items of my choice, along with some of my personal possessions, to give a sense of how Muji fits into my life. They didn’t ask me to blog about it, but I so enjoyed doing it I thought I’d give you a look at what I created.
Shop windows always present their own challenges in terms of space and height (long-term readers may remember this one that I did for Dolce & Gabbana back in 2011), and the challenge here was to produce a tabletop display that didn’t just work when you looked down at it. To give it some height I decided to re-create my office desk, so there would be interest from the front as well as above. I also thought it would give me an opportunity to add in lots of my personality, as well as hinting at all my work interests – writing, digital, travel, food, cookery, reading and beauty.
Once I’d made that decision it all fell into place:
I chose one of Muji’s indispensible acrylic drawer units, and filled it with my personalised Smythson stationery and books of stamps. There was a packet of five classic Muji notebooks and a bunch of their great gel pens, which I use all the time for lists.
I brought along a miniature metal Empire State Building to reference my life in New York, along with a Marc Jacobs compact, a personalised bottle of Coca-Cola, and a gold USB stick. Into an acrylic pot (the ones I usually use for pens and eyeliners) went a bunch of beautiful autumnal dahlias, and into a second acrylic pot went some of dried verbena that I had brought back from Mykonos this summer, to match the lovely Muji white teapot that I had chosen.
Of course I had to include a pile of my cookbooks – the really lovely American edition, as I do not like the UK cover at all.
Obviously there had to be a pile of novels. I chose some of my all-time favourites:
The Provincial Lady in London by E.M. Delafield
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Of course, in its beautiful dove grey Persephone edition)
Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer
Muji asked me to include their travel pillow because I fly so much, so I matched it with the pale blue alpaca scarf that my sister bought me when we were in Peru earlier this year. I added a bottle of scent – Diptyque’s heavenly L’Ombre dans L’Eau, and a scarlet Charlotte Tillbury lipstick (in the very appropriate shade Love Liberty), along with a blue and white vintage ginger jar for height, and the photograph of my grandmother that usually sits on my dressing table.
Of course one can’t install window designs alone, so I brought my tiny canine sidekick along for helping purposes.
