BUSINESS LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14587, 25 January 1911, Page 10

BUSINESS LIFE.

THE TOO ATTRACTIVE WINDOW. Tire question of immense importance is the subject of window-dressing. This question, briefly put, is as follows: —When is a shop window too attractive? The answer has been supplied by the Commissioner of Police. It is just as brief. When it causes an obstruction on the public highway, and leads to a police court charge. Be ho a haberdasher, a bootmaker, or an undertaker, his shop window must attract and compel, especially at this season, or otherwise he will bo beaten by his rivals in this or other streets. Competition, deadly and dangerous as it is, spurs him on to new audacities of window decoration. He lies awake at nights wondering how he can go one better than Jones over the way. • The old days have gone by when a few pairs of boots dumped down behind a pane of glass were sufficient as an advertisement, or when a few rolls of silk, a dress length displayed in a negligent way, and a lady's blouse on a wooden bust' would bring in fair customers. The public demands more for its money nowadays. Before it opens its purse it must have its imagination tickled, its emotions thrilled, its heart softened or shocked. Twenty years ago, or so, a window was designed chiefly for letting the light into tho shop. The shop contained more than tho window. Now, in many cases, the window contains more than the shop. Tho few little panes have expanded into vast surfaces of plate-glass. So imperative is it to make tho shop window call to the passers-by that all kinds of ingenious inventions have been produced to put vivacity and movement behind the window-panes. A huge finger moves up and down with an imperative command, a head nods backwards and forwards like a Chinese mandarin in porcelain, the mischievous eyes of a. gnomo sitting on a toadstool leer this way and that. The ingenuity of the shopkeepers to make sensational displays has not been in .vain. These window-panes, with their colour-har-monic in fancy blouses, their strident outbursts of impressionism in silk and satinettes, their sonnets in point lace, their epic poems in evening gowns, their melodrama in winter furs, their musical comedies in autumn hats, stir the emotions of these women and thrill their senses to A rejnarkabhj.degrea.,'V