You can normally rely upon Harvey Nichols to do something special with its windows: it’s part of the way the brand works. However, the Knightsbridge flagship has a scheme at the moment that is likely to stop even the most fashion-hardened Sloane in her tracks.

Using long strips of bent wood that have been bolted together, the visual display team and artist Charlie Whinney have created a swirling series of fixtures over which mannequins are draped in poses that the remaining ladies (and men) who lunch in the area might be hard-pushed to imitate. In itself, this might sound relatively straightforward, but the sheer complexity of the curving wooden jigsaw is staggering.

And Harvey Nichols has not contented itself with containing the display within the store windows. This wooden Gordian knot extends beyond the interior, wrapping itself around the main entrance.

In taking a scheme of this kind to the exterior of the building, the department store follows a path that has been trodden only occasionally - Laura Ashley did something of this kind with its Oxford Street store two Christmases ago, but in a much more modest fashion.

This installation is of a different order to what has been tried previously when melding exterior with window interiors and the outcome is a display that forces almost every tourist emerging from the nearby tube station to get out the camera phone.

While this is certainly not the kind of thing that most retailers would have the time or budget to create, it is among the most arresting storefronts in the capital at the moment.

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