Tales of a Bergdorf Goodman Window Dresser: David Hoey, Bergdorf Goodman's resident window dresser, talks the ins and outs of creating new extravagant displays for the store each year.

In 1897, L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was the first to acknowledge window dressing as a fashion and art entity in and of itself. Baum created the monthly trade journal The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and the Professional, founded the National Association of Window Dressers, and published the first book dedicated to the subject in 1900, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors.

While Baum may have helped start the magic, it's David Hoey, Bergdorf Goodman's resident window dresser, who brings the holiday spectacle to life today.

Texas-native, Hoey, who started at the Fifth Avenue department store in the summer of 1996, laughs that no one deliberately wants to be a window dresser. "I have yet to meet anyone who set out that way. Have you ever heard of a degree in window display?" he asks. "It doesn't exist, because everyone comes at it sideways."

Sideways or not, Hoey's seventeen-year career at Bergdorf's is part-production, part-fantasy; part-art, part-fashion. "It's not an examined commercial art," Hoey explains, despite the fact that window dressing has existed since the early 20^th century. "The 1930's were interesting because there was a lot of surrealism. In the forties, windows tended to be very patriotic [with] World War II. The 1950's windows were very soigné."

It wasn't until the mid-seventies, however, that window dressers in New York broadened their horizons...