Women in Design 2018 - 26
26
Roya Sullivan
National Window Director
Macy's, New York
When Roya Sullivan's family moved from her childhood home
of Iran to Connecticut, they would head into nearby New York
every holiday season to gawk at the department store window
displays. "Gimbels, B. Altman, Saks, we went to all of them,"
she remembers. Little did she know that after all the highschool art classes she loved, those very windows would catapult
her design career.
After graduating from the Corcoran School of the Arts and
Design in Washington, DC, she received a master of fine arts in
painting and photography at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. From
there, she sought out an artistic job in the city that would leave
evenings and weekends free to work on creative projects in her
studio. Enter Macy's, which suggested she enliven the Herald
Square store's windows as a scenic painter-a position that
melded her love of fashion and fine art. "Many people knew
about [window dressing], but it was something you couldn't
study. It was an apprenticeship," she explains.
After a long stint as director of visual merchandising for
Bloomingdale's, where Sullivan reinvented visual concept
shops for private labels like Aqua and directed all shop designs
and fixtures packages, she returned to Macy's in 2014 as
national window director.
Beyond the everyday fashion displays that bring Macy's to
life streetside, Sullivan also spends a great deal of time on the
annual windows that are sheer spectacles, like the intricate
ones fashioned for the Macy's Flower Show at marquee stores
in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The brand's iconic
holiday windows, also installed in the Boston, DC, and Salt
Lake City locations, are a tradition that date back to 1870, when
the department store was the first to celebrate Christmas in
such a visually striking manner. Indeed, creating the windows
is a yearlong process, with four months of ideation, seven
devoted to building, and a month of installation.
Retail has changed since Sullivan began her career, but
special occasion windows flaunting animatronics remain a
magical experience, perhaps a tad more evolved now, with
sculptures, large prints, and LED screens. "A good window
is always going to be based on great composition and styling,
whether it's a mannequin or other forms. It's storytelling,"
says Sullivan. "The best part of my job is that interaction with
people. We create memories for them year after year."
Women in Design 2018
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Women in Design 2018
Contents
Women in Design 2018 - Intro
Women in Design 2018 - Cover1
Women in Design 2018 - Cover2
Women in Design 2018 - Contents
Women in Design 2018 - 2
Women in Design 2018 - 3
Women in Design 2018 - 4
Women in Design 2018 - 5
Women in Design 2018 - 6
Women in Design 2018 - 7
Women in Design 2018 - 8
Women in Design 2018 - 9
Women in Design 2018 - 10
Women in Design 2018 - 11
Women in Design 2018 - 12
Women in Design 2018 - 13
Women in Design 2018 - 14
Women in Design 2018 - 15
Women in Design 2018 - 16
Women in Design 2018 - 17
Women in Design 2018 - 18
Women in Design 2018 - 19
Women in Design 2018 - 20
Women in Design 2018 - 21
Women in Design 2018 - 22
Women in Design 2018 - 23
Women in Design 2018 - 24
Women in Design 2018 - 25
Women in Design 2018 - 26
Women in Design 2018 - 27
Women in Design 2018 - 28
Women in Design 2018 - 29
Women in Design 2018 - 30
Women in Design 2018 - 31
Women in Design 2018 - 32
Women in Design 2018 - Cover3
Women in Design 2018 - Cover4
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