Merchandising, Japanese-Style
During my two summers in the creative services department at Yves Saint Laurent, I was schooled in the art of visual merchandising. I learned to dress mannequins and set windows and do floor moves, but most importantly, I learned to really look at stores. When I visited Japan a couple of weeks of ago, I was curious to see if there were any distinctly Japanese ways of merchandising.
An afternoon walk down Takeshita Street in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood put me face-to-face with one of Japan’s weirder merchandising quirks: animal-head mannequins.
Horses and rabbits seem to be the most common quasi-anthropomorphized creatures, and they’re decked out in everything from boxer briefs to granny cardigans to punkish leather jackets. Harajuku isn’t the only place where beasts reign supreme — the beautiful new Shibuya outpost of Opening Ceremony has a mechanized horse-head mannequin that runs in place.
