FASHION; window shopping

AT DICKINS & JONES in Regent Street, the theme is medieval pageantry - damsels in frothy frocks and knights in armour pose against a tableaux of gargoyles, crumpled damask and Gothic masonry. Liberty, meanwhile, camps it up with a parade of impish but grotesquely muscular harlequins upholstered into spangled body suits, each presenting a preening diva in a designer dress in front of a baroque-framed mirror.

Simpson of Piccadilly's fantasy is inspired by Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird, and stars pale models on gilded feathers against flaming backdrops. At Fortnum & Mason - where the theme is The Pilgrim's Progress - headless angels float on fluffy clouds. And in Harvey Nichols's modernist vision, mannequins are suspended between panels of starry glass.

This Christmas in London's West End, under a polychrome of lights, the windows of Regent Street, Knights-bridge and Piccadilly sparkle and shimmer. A combination of theatre, pantomime, drama and inventive three-dimensional design, these magnificent ensembles represent the art of "visual merchandising" at its most creative.

"Nowadays, the London stores have to work to attract people into the city," explains Sarah Southgate, display manager of Simpson. "There is stiff competition from out-of-town shopping centres, so we have to offer something more than merchandise."

As tourists pour into the West End at Christmas, the volume of pedestrians increases by up to 40 per cent. Regent Street's crowds turn into a seamless mob of shoppers, while the simmering trade war between neighbouring stores becomes a ruthless battle, in which the skills of the window-dresser are as valuable as those of designers and stylists. So far this year, only a handful of London fashion retailers have met the challenge with any real flair. Even Harrods has succumbed to tired cliches; the displays are crowded with tinselled fir trees, fake candles and gold leaf. In other shops, there's ubiquitous use of what's known in the trade as "lifestyle images": blow-up photographs of nobody in particular, providing a grainy black and white backdrop to a cursory arrangement of merchandise. Yet there is inspiration to be found if you look for it, mainly in the big stores like Liberty and Harvey Nichols, as well as in a few smaller shops like Joseph and Gucci, whose minimalist windows have earned the admiration of their larger competititors.

According to Mary Porters, display director at Harvey Nichols, the apparent scarcity of originality is a reflection of the fact that Christmas is the toughest and most competitive season in the calendar. "All the London stores are working to roughly the same brief," she explains. "There has to be an element of glamour and glitz, but at the same time we have to be imaginative and different. Coming up with an original idea year after year is a headache."

Harvey Nichols, as any Knightsbridge shopper knows, has harnessed the art of display to perfection. Last Christmas, the store broke with tradition and stripped the windows of merchandise, informing shoppers that the budget had been donated to charity. An earlier scheme, called "Peas on Earth", consisted of green peas wearing clothes and accessories. This year, the store has gone for a more "sophisticated" look, featuring fashion by Betty Jackson, Westwood, Galliano and Dolce e Gabbana worn by white modernist models with metallic hair and huge silver lashes.

"Display is a way of saying that a store can in turns be whimsical, witty or classic," says Mary Porters. Thus Fortnum's surreal apparitions successfully counter the shop's stuffy image. And Simpson dresses up its curved glass Art Deco windows with fire and feathers, to convey the message that there's more to the store than Daks macs.

More or less all the dummies in the big West End windows come from Adel Roostein in Chelsea, one of the best-known mannequin modellers in the world. Before taking up their positions in the Christmas windows, they will have gone back to their maker for a seasonal "renovation". Summer tans are replaced with alabaster skin tones. Hair and make-up are restyled to order: crimson bobs for Simpson's Firebird mannequins; circles of luminous eye colour for the stars of Harvey Nichols's glassy ensemble.

The core of the creative display work, however, is done by teams of full- time staff, housed in spatially-challenged rooftop studios, lined with redundant papier-mache props and unwigged mannequins. Most work is routine (carting models between floors without being seen), but it is a developing profession, with growing rewards and huge scope for free expression. For the ambitious, I am told, there is no higher goal than working for Harvey Nichols or Liberty.

Howard Tong trained as a fine artist before moving to Harvey Nichols as Visual Merchandising Controller. "It's taken time to get my head round the idea that I was an artist and now I'm a window-dresser," he says. "But the job's image has improved in the last few years. People used to think you'd sold out if you went into display. It had a similarly lightweight image to hairdressing, but these days it attracts very talented people." Most of Harvey Nichols's 20-strong in-house team are fashion or arts graduates, and dozens of freelances are employed on an ad hoc basic. "One Saturday," says Tong, "we had half the London art world in the store slapping paint on the windows."

Ouside the business, nobody earns a name for these ephemeral works of art, but the best pieces do not go unnoticed. Harvey Nichols carries a perpetual waiting list of buyers wanting used props. Some of the glass panels in the current display are already sold. And Liberty has had several cash offers for its burlesque harlequin figures.

The essence of window design, however, is in marketing clothes. "All the display managers go to the big shows in London, Paris and Milan to pick up ideas for the next season," says Tong. The windows, after all, with their 6ft glass-fibre supermodels strutting under bright lights in front of a jostling crowd, are the catwalks of the high street.