Christmas window displays 2026: Dior, Castelbajac and the Gruffalo sign the department stores. What about the window dresser?

Today, 12 November, Galeries Lafayette Haussmann unveils its Christmas windows. The house doesn’t sign them: Jean-Charles de Castelbajac does. Six days ago, Harrods handed its Exhibition Windows to Dior. In Newcastle, Fenwick has put the Gruffalo behind its glass, publishing licence included. And at Liberty, the atrium is a Diptyque forest.

Take a slow look at the Christmas window displays of 2026 in London and Paris and you’ll spot a trend no press release will spell out like this: the department store Christmas window is being rented out. To a big-name designer, to a luxury brand, to a character with rights attached. Window dressing as a craft shows up, when it shows up at all, in the small print.

Is that bad? Not necessarily. Is it dangerous for the rest of retail, which copies what it sees? Very. Because the high-street retailer looks at Haussmann and Knightsbridge and draws the wrong conclusion: that a good Christmas window needs a celebrity, a licence or a six-figure budget. It doesn’t. It needs a signature. Yours.

Christmas window displays 2026: who signs what

Facts before opinions. This is what the department stores have unveiled between late October and today, according to their own announcements and the trade press linked at the end:

Store	City	2026 theme	Who signs it	Model
Galeries Lafayette Haussmann	Paris	«Au cœur de Noël»	Jean-Charles de Castelbajac	Guest author
Printemps Haussmann	Paris	«Un Noël bien tricoté»	In-house team with a seamstress, a puppeteer and Atelier Montex	In-house craft
Harrods	London	«Where the Stars Align»	Harrods (first wholly in-house campaign in several years) + Dior in the Exhibition Windows	House + guest brand
Fortnum & Mason	London	Christmas at home	Visual presentation team + illustrator Olaf Hajek	House with illustrator
Fenwick	Newcastle	«The Gruffalo’s Child»	Licence with Macmillan Children’s Books and Magic Light Pictures	Licence
Liberty	London	«The Christmas Chronicles»	Liberty + Diptyque in the atrium, with wood artist Jean-Simon Roch	House + guest brand

Six stores, four models. And one question hardly anyone asks out loud: when someone else signs the glass, whose story is being told on the pavement? Selfridges, by the way, already played its card in October with «Christmas and the City», and I explained why lighting up Christmas in October with almost no product can make sense. Today’s argument is a different one: the signature.

The guest author: Castelbajac at Galeries Lafayette

Galeries Lafayette has handed its Christmas to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, a designer the house has worked with for almost fifty years. The theme is «Au cœur de Noël»: animated windows guided by a character called Armand, a Father Christmas buried under children’s letters, angels searching for a lost star and a final banquet bursting with colour. Under the dome, the traditional fir, installed there every year since 1976, gives way to a sculptural «protective tree» with giant branches.

The smartest part? Not the tree. It’s that the signature doesn’t stay on the glass: Galeries Lafayette is launching collaborations and exclusive collections featuring Castelbajac’s motifs. The name that fills the pavement turns into product that fills the till. That is real visual merchandising, not decoration with a byline.

What you can learn (and what you can’t)

You learn that a guest author only makes sense if their world can be sold inside the store. What you shouldn’t learn is to depend on them. A house that changes its guest signature every Christmas risks the public remembering the designer and forgetting the store. The celebrity is a rental; identity is a mortgage you pay off year after year.

The brand that rents the glass: Dior at Harrods, Diptyque at Liberty

This year Harrods is proud of its first Christmas campaign created entirely in-house in several years, after seasons with Brunello Cucinelli and Dior. The facade figures are huge: around 600 handmade stars, four kilometres of gold leaf and some 17,000 bulbs, with 60 specialists and 40,000 hours of work. The windows show pieces by Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Valentino, Ralph Lauren and Balmain.

And at the same time, Dior takes over the Exhibition Windows from 6 November to 27 December, plus a pop-up on the ground floor. A contradiction? No: business. Its managing director points out that more than a third of its customers visit during the festive season. With that kind of footfall, the Knightsbridge glass is prime advertising space, and it is sold as such.

Liberty plays the same game more subtly: its «Christmas Chronicles» campaign tells the rituals of the season in chapters, while Diptyque turns the atrium into an «enchanted forest» with a five-metre wooden pine by Jean-Simon Roch. A relationship between the two brands that dates back to the 1960s, to be fair. Not a last-minute rental: an alliance.

The awkward lesson for retail design: when the window performs as media, someone will eventually want to buy it. If you don’t decide what your glass says, whoever pays for it will.

The licence: the Gruffalo at Fenwick

Fenwick in Newcastle keeps alive a tradition that began in 1971. This year the window brings to life «The Gruffalo’s Child», Julia Donaldson’s book illustrated by Axel Scheffler, in collaboration with Macmillan Children’s Books and Magic Light Pictures: animated scenes in a snowy forest, a soundtrack recorded by the Royal Northern Sinfonia and an exclusive bauble whose proceeds go to the National Literacy Trust. Last year it was Dickens.

Zero risk, guaranteed family audience, guaranteed headlines. And well executed: the window ends in a product sold in store and online. But a licence is the most expensive shortcut in creativity: you buy a story that already works instead of building your own. We saw it on a grand scale with the Harry Potter store on Oxford Street, which I analysed in this piece on store design as a destination: the character pulls a crowd, but the crowd comes to see the character, not you.

In-house craft: Printemps and Fortnum & Mason

And then there’s the model I find most interesting, because it’s the only one a small shop can copy. On 10 November Printemps Haussmann opened «Un Noël bien tricoté»: a curious cat and a big red ball of yarn lead a band of cats and mice through the attic, hallway and veranda of a house, all the way to a knitted Christmas tree. Around 160 characters, handmade and embroidered.

What matters is that Printemps names the people who make it: seamstress Valérie Cuter, a long-standing collaborator; a puppeteer who brings the characters to life; and Atelier Montex, an embroidery workshop founded in 1949 and awarded the Living Heritage Company label, which embroidered a dozen characters and their accessories. In a 2024 interview, the store’s scenographer, Julie Ducat, and the puppeteer described the real timeline: about a year of preparation, roughly four months of production and three and a half weeks of installation, at a rate of one night per window.

Fortnum & Mason takes a similar route. Seven windows, seven rooms of a house at Christmas, a fairy created by illustrator Olaf Hajek who lights up each scene with her wand, bespoke wooden furniture and wallpaper inspired by the brand’s own festive packaging. There are even two hidden jigsaws: one with 181 pieces, for its Piccadilly address, and one with 319, for its 319 years of history. Its head of visual presentation, Sallie Smith, sums it up as a celebration of the warmth and nostalgia of Christmas at home.

Notice the nuance: here the outside collaborator works for the brand, not the other way round. Hajek draws the fairy, but the story, the numbers and the wallpaper belong to Fortnum. That is signing.

The objection: «Who cares who signs it, as long as it fills the pavement»

Any marketing director will tell you this, and they’re partly right. The Christmas window is a medium. Figures that have circulated in the industry for years, such as the NPD data quoted by Retail Dive in 2015, say windows influence around 24% of purchases when they are seen, and Macy’s spoke of 15,000 people an hour in front of its Christmas glass. Old, American numbers, but the direction is clear: the glass moves people.

That said, people on the pavement are not a store KPI. The KPI is what happens three metres later. Look at the cases that work: Galeries Lafayette turns Castelbajac into exclusive collections; Fenwick turns the Gruffalo into a bauble that sells; Fortnum turns its packaging into a set; Harrods fills its windows with the brands it sells inside. When the signature doesn’t connect with the store, what you’ve paid for is an Instagram photo booth that expires on 6 January.

And there’s another trap: the guest author and the licence are out of reach for independent retail. Copying the model without the budget produces the copy of a copy: the catalogue reindeer, the «Merry Christmas» vinyl and the garland you see in five shops on the same street.

Self-criticism: we window dressers sign nothing

Now the uncomfortable bit for my own trade. If the Christmas window is being rented out, it’s partly our fault. Window display professionals have accepted anonymity as part of the job. Press releases quote the guest designer, the brand, the character. The team that installs overnight, that solves the lighting and makes the embroidered cat move, is rarely mentioned. Printemps and Fortnum name their people; most don’t.

But we don’t help ourselves either. We don’t document our process, we don’t measure impact, we don’t present figures for stops, entries and sales of the window product. And what isn’t measured is perceived as decoration. Decoration, by definition, can be outsourced, rented or replaced by a celebrity. If we want to sign the glass, we have to prove the glass sells.

How to sign your Christmas window without a celebrity or a licence

This you can copy from the big players, and it doesn’t cost six figures. Seven steps for a small shop:

1. Write the story in one sentence. The theme is your shop, not Santa. If it doesn’t fit in a sentence, it doesn’t fit in the window.
2. Choose one hero product and three supporting ones. The set serves the product. If nobody can tell what you sell within three seconds, you’ve built a nativity scene.
3. Build the set from your own brand. Packaging, tissue paper, colours, craft. Fortnum turns its gift wrap into wallpaper; you can do it with your bags, boxes or labels.
4. Find a local maker and credit them on the glass. A potter, a seamstress, a carpenter. It’s what Printemps does with its workshops, at neighbourhood scale. And it sets you apart from the shop next door.
5. Light it for the night. In December it gets dark early: your window works more hours in the dark than in daylight.
6. Make the story continue inside. A limited edition, a gift set or wrapping that only exists this Christmas, like the Galeries Lafayette collaborations.
7. Measure before and after. Count stops and entries for one hour a day, compare hero-product sales with November. Without data, it’s decoration.

And if you’re going to put a percentage on the glass before Christmas, do the maths first: I explain it in the Black Friday window display guide.

What I take away from Haussmann and Knightsbridge

Department stores can afford to rent out their Christmas, because their brand can carry any guest signature. Your shop can’t. Your Christmas window is probably the most-seen piece of communication of your year, and you can’t let the decoration wholesaler’s catalogue sign it.

If you want your Christmas window to carry your signature and sell, in the Studio we design it with you. If you’d rather learn to do it yourself, the Window Display Killer course (€149) in the Academy is built for exactly that. And if your problem is that the window stops people but doesn’t bring them in, start with a Phygital Retail Audit (€490).

Now it’s my turn to ask: who signs your shop window this Christmas? You, your supplier or this year’s catalogue? Tell me in the comments.

Frequently asked questions

When are the 2026 Christmas windows unveiled in Paris and London?

Printemps Haussmann opened its windows on 10 November and Galeries Lafayette Haussmann on 12 November. In London, Selfridges unveiled on 22 October, Fortnum & Mason on 30 October, Liberty on 5 November, and Dior has occupied Harrods’ Exhibition Windows since 6 November.

Which department stores sign their own Christmas windows this year?

Printemps works with its in-house team and craft workshops it names publicly, and Fortnum & Mason with its visual presentation team and an illustrator. Harrods presents its first wholly in-house campaign in several years, although it hands the Exhibition Windows to Dior.

Is it worth a small shop copying department store windows?

Copying the set, no. Copying the method, yes: your own story, a hero product, a set made from your brand, a named maker and measurement before and after. That works on any budget.

When should I install my Christmas window?

It depends on your trading calendar, but it’s wise to have it ready before early December and planned weeks in advance. Department stores work with around a year of preparation; you don’t need that much, but you do need more than an afternoon.

How do I know whether my Christmas window sells?

Measure three things: how many people stop, how many come in and how much of the window product you sell. Compare with a week before installation. If stops go up but entries don’t, the problem is the link between the glass and the door.

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Sources (consulted in November 2026): Sortiraparis, Galeries Lafayette 2026 · Sortiraparis, Printemps Haussmann 2026 · Sortiraparis, interview with Printemps’ puppeteer and scenographer (2024) · Sortiraparis, Paris Christmas windows guide 2026 · Country & Town House, Harrods 2026 · Retail Gazette, Fortnum & Mason · Retail Gazette, Fenwick · Retail Times, Liberty · ITV News, Selfridges · Retail Dive (2015)