Visit New York and there are times when it seems every other street has a branch of Sweden’s best-known retail export, but the flagship branch at Times Square offers something different.
In place of the usual outsize billboards and mannequins there is a massive LED screen above the main entrance that shows fashion content and a version of the H&M logo that fragments and then reforms before the onlooker’s eyes.
That is probably par for the course in a location where if you don’t have neon, LED screens and movement in some form or another then you probably don’t count.
The outsize screen in this store is backed up by a window display that features more of the same in the shape of smaller screens that show somewhat worrying eyes gazing back at the window-shopper.
Looking a little like a high-tech version of what a surrealist filmmaker might have dreamt up a few decades ago, the screens are attached, seemingly, to piles of cabling and circuit boards that litter the lower portion of the window. A black backdrop has been provided, which means that, although the shopper may be aware that this is a store, seeing in from this angle is not possible.
The aim seems to be to create a high-tech scrap heap with blinking eyes staring out from it. All of which probably has little to do with the business of shifting value-conscious fashion, but it does have the effect that any good window should of making passersby stop and take a look at what’s being done. Standing out when every other retailer is trying to do the same is increasingly challenging. In Times Square, H&M has pulled it off.
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