A guide to Warsaw DIY shop windows

As privately owned small businesses – local shops, cobbler, tailors – have been gradually disappearing from the map of Warsaw, their originally designed display windows become imminently extinct, too. Vacant office space strangely morphs into international banks and telecom outlets, or large supermarkets. Old windows are replaced with fancy and glossy large-format stickers depicting happy people using the phone, or sliced bread with ham and cheese. Therefore all the more charming are small-shop windows designed originally by inventive sales assistants – sometimes sentimental, always peculiar, invariably letting the customer travel in time to Warsaw from 1978 or 1992 in the blink of an eye.

Despite massive demise of small businesses, particularly devoted to window dressing, unique venues are still spotted on the streets of Warsaw, some of which take you by complete surprise with their conceptual design. A local TV repair shop on Wileńska 30 Street (North Praga) displays remote controls in the bizarre form of a grey-and-black, slightly dusty fan; a grocery store on Marszałkowska 40 Street (Śródmieście) exhibits a pyramid of vodka, bourbons, and whiskeys on the background of a hand-embroidered tablecloth.

Some shop windows change with the seasons. The window in a hair shop in Koszykowa 55 (Śródmieście district) presents three wigged female heads, with their eyes marked with a pen. They are placed on a beautifully draped velvet, the colour of which is changed by the owner upon the arrival of a new season. Actually, the whole window is dressed differently – in the summer it is adorned with artificial flowers, the autumn introduces pumpkins and ears of grain, while with the wintertime comes the traditional Christmas tree.

The owners of there windows single-handedly devised how to promote their products and services. As a vibrant part of the shop, the windows exemplifies the creativity of the owners striving to impart the city with some personal, local touch. In the municipal no man's land, an original shop window is viewed as a meaningful manifest. Finally not anonymous, it can represent the local folk. The final look of a window is highly determined by the character of the owners or sales assistants – their creativity, personal interests, and aestheticism. Until covered with plastic stickers advertising foreign brands, they remain culturally and artistically stigmatized due to their ostensible banality. Meanwhile, the very core of Warsaw preserved the art of originally creating the extraordinary object of consumption – prostheses hanging on a lace flamboyant typography, daemonic mannequins, the world of knives – all at your fingertips, just behind the glass.

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