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Window dressing, an always competitive blood sport, is never more aggressive than during the holiday season, when retailers battle head-to-head for gift-giving dollars. Decadent displays made up of mannequins wearing winter’s must-haves and surrounded by plastic snow (plus an animatronic elf or two) line main-street sidewalks and mall corridors to lure in shoppers.

David Hlynsky's images of store windows shot in Bulgaria in 1989 and Russia in 1990 include a rigid display of military shirts, an abstract eyewear vignette (below) and a relatively stylized selection of jewellery (below).

Such fantasy vignettes are a world – and about 25 years – away from the shop windows Canadian photographer David Hlynsky captured throughout his career. His thousands of stark images shot on a Hasselblad camera during a series of trips to Eastern Europe beginning in 1986 captures the decidedly lo-fi aesthetic that was popular before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of flashy, Western-style advertising. Hlynsky’s upcoming book featuring 180 of the photos, Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain, will be published by Thames & Hudson in February.

In one of Hlynsky’s austere yet surreal shots, a loaf of bread peeks out from beneath embroidered tea towels draped over it like a grandiose cape. In another window, folded military shirts float like tidy ghosts. A display captured in Budapest features a whimsical grouping of no-nonsense panties and patterned sleep shirts that, hung from invisible string, seem to dance. Many of the minimal spaces are decorated with stylized photographs, decals and illustrations – of items such as keys, umbrellas and fur coats – rather than the actual products they’re touting.

“The presence of advertising in the Eastern bloc was very naive by our standard,” American-born Hlynsky says from his home in midtown Toronto. “Even then, Western windows were populated by extremely sophisticated, almost Olympian fantasy images [like] supermodels and movie stars.”

“The Eastern bloc didn’t trade on that seduction,” he continues. “You see in my pictures that what was missing are the bright colours of advertising, the brand fantasies, the sexuality, the images of perfection and of people enjoying prosperity. You see nothing but the product.”

Hlynsky, who is 67, has had a varied career. In the 1970s, he worked for the literary publisher Coach House Press alongside poet bpNichol and author Michael Ondaatje. Later, he helmed the photographic magazine Image Nation. Today, he continues to lecture about art and the media at the University of Toronto. He began travelling to the East to capture pictures that would serve as counterpoints to the gloomy stereotypes Westerners had about life under Communist regimes.

One of the images of everyday life that endures from the Cold War is of stocky, black-clad babushkas lined up for bread in the cold, but Hlynsky encountered something different when he first arrived in Poland.

“I was quite surprised that it wasn’t all cloak-and-dagger, the way that mass media, Hollywood and Washington would have had us believe,” he says. “The kind of suspense and intrigue that was part of our mythology was not there at all – people were carrying on ordinary lives.”

“People there did have books, clothes, hobbies, music, friendships,” he recalls, but consumerism functioned in a different, more practical way than Western society understood and continues to perceive it.

In the West, Hlynsky points out, marketers use superlative imagery and hyperbolic language to build up a product. By contrast, the typical sell line behind the Iron Curtain usually ended in an anticlimax. In one image in the book, a window is propped with a pair of cartoonish-looking Greek-god figures. Written in Cyrillic above the toga-clad characters are the words: “Ambrosia? Nectar? Juice ...” Is what they’re selling divine? No, the window honestly admits, it’s actually just juice.

The artist acknowledges that, over the past quarter century, the project’s meaning has evolved and for him has become about questioning the inverse of what he originally set out to record.

“How did we get to where we are? How is it that consumers have come to take for granted this kind of environment of seduction and flash that we all buy into?” he asks. “We all say we aren’t influenced by advertising, but, of course, we are.”

This story originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Globe Style Advisor. To download the magazine's free iPad app, visit tgam.ca/styleadvisor.