The French have a great expression for the act of window shopping: lèche-vitrine (literally: lick the window). Leading up to Christmas especially, wrapped in warm coats, we trundle in the cold to huddle outside and take in outlandishly themed decorated shop windows, with their enchanting array of goods. The practice has become such an entertainment that in Manhattan, you can take a two-hour walking tour with WindowsWear, in which guides explain the backstories behind the glass-enclosed displays.
The warm coat and the whimsical window – they're rituals of the season.
In her new novel The Black Velvet Coat, writer Jill Hall's struggling protagonist Anne snags a 1960s Dior coat at a vintage shop and the designer garment has a talismanic, almost mystical effect on her life. She fares much better than the unfortunate man in The Overcoat, Nikolai Gogol's celebrated and grimly humorous 1842 short story about a government clerk in a threadbare cloak whose life is transformed by the titular garment. After a new coat, his life goes all to hell.
There are many such stories set in winter, around the holidays, where an overcoat figures as symbol of material desire or social status; often never more so than when it's absent. This is perfectly illustrated in Gogol's story, an acknowledged masterpiece though not a particularly festive one, by which I mean holiday (more of a Dickensian dead winter, February thing). Yet amid the twinkle and piped-in carols, I'm thinking of it now, and often, because The Overcoat has become the latest in The Familiars series of books of artist responses to classics works of literature. In an inspired twist, publisher Four Corners commissioned Sarah Dobai, a visual artist whose interest in contemporary shop window displays began after the economic downturn. Dobai's art is a companion to the moralistic story, but also diverges from it to offer a parallel and rather cutting commentary, using photographs of goods in the boutique windows of Paris and London along tony avenues like like Bond Street and Boulevard Haussmann.
The juxtaposition is especially effective because the main character Akaky is neither vain nor particularly covetous. He has to be convinced he needs a new coat and is merely a meek, anonymous man who works in an unnamed department. Because he lives a poor and shabby life, he suffers both the ache of the winter in his shoulders and the constant derision of colleagues and finally gives in.
Initially, as we meet the downtrodden Akaky and observe the ridicule his colleagues heap on him because of his tattered garment, the window subjects in Dobai's photographs are banal – the stuff of everyday commodity, supply and salon. Then, as he ascends the staircase to the drunken tailor's room, a large photo of an elaborately propped, glittering diamond jewellery display punctuates the story. When the tailor Petrovich sizes him up, we see crisp trousers and shiny new shoes on a menswear mannequin at a better address.
As the tailor pronounces the cloak beyond repair and names an extraordinary sum, there are photos of hopeful fresh flowers arrayed on Smythson stationery and, tellingly, a leather wallet display. The new cloak is a necessary expense that is, for even Akaky's slender means, an extravagance and to buy it he must endure months of further privation in the already pathetic aspects of his daily life. When Akaky finally gets the garment, warm and lined in hand-quilted thick cotton, trimmed in warm fur, and wears it – his colleagues treat him differently, better – it is his one triumphant day, and Dobai's photo of a live mannequin in a suit is showing off a more modern status symbol: a chunky designer watch.
Spoiler alert: Akaky dies. On the way back from a party in honour of his new coat (read: new respectability), he is brutally mugged of it. Snooty bureaucrats won't help the lowly clerk recover it, and as it's cold out, he succumbs to fever, later returning as a phantom, avenging himself of the whole affair (cue photos of glinting, but utterly vacant window displays).
Before this, I'm struck by how Akaky knew something of anticipation. During his months of penury, he and the tailor meet regularly to discuss the cloak, and visit fabric shops browsing and considering various cloth. Anticipation is not something we can easily relate to any more – even for Christmas, it's somewhat diminished by the fact that several retailers have been promoting the decorations and wares for many weeks already. It seems a fitting cautionary tale that hits home for me. And like many, I'm fortunate – I haven't wanted for anything in quite some time. I know this, and yet I celebrate by visiting the trappings of beautiful windows as entertainment, as though they could be separated from what and how they're selling, which is the idea that having something new and shiny will improve my already charmed life. During the office festivities at which Akaky's new coat is celebrated, Dobai's photograph of a magic shop display more than suggests the insidious trick at work, the manufacturing of magic.
Nathalie Atkinson