Patrick Angus is the creative director at Mario's—an emporium stocked with high-end apparel and luxurious gifts that most of us can't afford. The company owns three stores, and Patrick, a dreamer of dreams, creates the meticulous window displays at the one downtown. He's made a mountain from popcorn ("The store smelled just like a movie theater"). And giant wire spheres covered in hand-knotted strands, designed to "mimic the string balls you hear about residing in some Midwestern barn." He formed a constellation using pieces of saltwater taffy dangling from fishing lines overhead. He's not sure where that idea came from, but he'd wanted to do it for years: "They're sweet lures, in a way. To capture someone's attention." Another display had mannequins in elegant black gowns, and ambling joyfully behind them was a crew of stilt-walking sock monkeys. Patrick built the stilts, but the monkeys came from the collection of a prestigious New York City art gallery director who had presented a selection to choose from. In a warehouse, Patrick encountered the hundreds of sock monkeys sitting quietly on a set of bleachers, staring at him.
Sure, products are showcased, but the point is not just to sell clothes. Each display communicates a message, and for it to be successful, its meaning must be immediately understood. "This is something I share with someone passing by on the street, that they can enjoy, and which costs nothing," says Patrick. His background is in art history, and a museum quality penetrates his work, what with all the careful structuring and still bursts of color. And just like museum visitors, the mannequins always somehow manage to appear erudite and well-mannered. (In real life, those of us without heads only seem menacing, no matter how relaxed the pose.)
The art world has long held ties to window dressing—famous art celebrities like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and Salvador DalĂ have done it. DalĂ's display, in a New York department store, was thrillingly weird, and it's unclear whether he used the store's garments at all. There were taxidermied buffalo parts, and a dead pigeon, and a fur-lined tub with a woman's arms reaching up from the water, and a bed sprinkled with glowing coals. Lounging among them: a couple of gross old mannequins made of wax and human hair, coated in sediment from the attic where he'd found them: "Be sure not to let anyone touch that dust, it's their chief beauty," he said. 
Attention, makers of fashion and workers of garmentry: Let me know what you're working on at mjonjak@thestranger.com.
