Just occasionally, you come across a store window that makes you smile and that moment is carried through into the shop. Diesel is well known for its subversive take on visual merchandising and this store, in Dallas’ NorthPark mall, certainly stops shoppers.
Power-dressing, with all of its female dominatrix implications, is writ large in the left-hand window display where a curiously headless female form, sporting a little black number, has a number of boxer-shorted male figures on dog leads.
Above this is the legend “Women make the world go round” - with no explanation for the assemblage, but nevertheless, a thought-provoking scene.
Now look at the other window and a giant decal of a hungry-looking Basset hound has been applied to the window, restrained by a dog lead that goes from glass into the hand of a similarly headless male mannequin. The power here is all with the animal, with the male seemingly being controlled once more.
It’s all rather disturbing and designed perhaps to make you think about the relations between the sexes and even the pets they keep. But it does make you look through the door, where the balance is marginally restored by a display, positioned just inside the entrance, featuring a male without any encumbrances.
There are probably many things you could read into all of this, not least of which is why such an anarchic shop window has been placed in the bland, anodyne setting of a large US mall? The answer is simple: attracting attention, in a way that many of its competitors in the centre signally fail to do.
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