OUTSIDE, THE NOISE of Pine Street is harsh and jagged. Entering Nordstrom at midday is a relief, really. Nordstrom's airy, spacious, evenly lit atrium, the diagonal lines of its rolling escalators caged by glass supports, is comfortably cool. Near the first-floor escalator, a pianist wearing a tux sways behind his instrument, his shoes sleek with wax. The music swathes all the customers, somehow dramatizing their shopping moments, making them seem part of a well-designed movie--deliberate, meaningful, and upscale.

Why is shopping at Nordstrom getting juicier and juicier? Beginning last February, the locally based merchandising giant launched its "Reinvent Yourself" campaign, created by Minneapolis ad agency Fallon McElligott. This new campaign nudges shoppers with the oblique promise that buying stuff at Nordstrom will make them unique, creative people.

According to an industry press release, the "Reinvent Yourself" campaign asks viewers to challenge their preconceptions, including their preconceptions of Nordstrom. This means the merchandiser is now reaching for younger, hipper clientele in addition to its traditional stable of conservative shoppers. Recent "Reinvent Yourself" billboard ads across the country relay that businessmen, for example, should consider wearing something as staggeringly unconventional as khakis and a striped sport shirt to the office. Or that something as quotidian and solidly middle-class as pajamas can be re- envisioned as a single, very expensive string of pearls.

At $40 million, "Reinvent Yourself" is Nordstrom's biggest and most expensive ad campaign ever, and it employs not only print and billboard ads, but also TV spots, a first for the store. With heavy national coverage, the campaign will run for a year, and Nordstrom estimates 93 percent of American women will be exposed at least 15 times to its spring and fall TV ads.

In downtown Seattle, Nordstrom's "Reinvent Yourself" displays have been varied. Last April, each floor sported little clear plastic display capsules, and these contained attractive objects, sealed up and held at bay from the viewer: yummy shoes, or purses of such intense color (deeply saturated lime green, candy-sweet pink) that they made your mouth water. In May, displays in the store's windows featured elongated, all-white dummy figures that lounged around fake poolside patio settings, suave and aloof in a way that echoed the druggy stares of models from Gap ads, implying that it's cool to live in a distant, foggy, sensual miasma of youth, beauty, and hip, well-made clothes.

This summer, in-store displays have included lissome posters with free-associative poetry: "Soaring, teetering slithering, I am fluid/Dancing, whirling, flying, I am rebellious, defiant." The potentially potent word "rebellious" on the poster was surprising--or maybe it was an on-purpose, insider's joke--just because, plastered around such a sumptuous, well-heeled store, that word loses, shall we say, a bit of its punch.

Nowhere is the ad campaign more paradoxical than in the eyes of Nordstrom's own creative workers, where the "Reinvent Yourself" slogan is quite a sore spot with current in-house advertising employees. Stan P., a local poet who--like many local writers--supported his poetry-writing by creating ad copy during the day, has been long aware and disparaging of his former employer's record. During his two-year stint as a copywriter, Stan and his team worked for several months within the company's steamy innards on a creative campaign similar to "Reinvent Yourself" before he met with some stark disappointment. "It's a demoralizing place to work," he says. "You might think that in a creative department, creativity would be valued. Not so. Things like dressing a particular way, being on time to the minute, and other very superficial things are valued instead.

"For the 'Reinvent Yourself' campaign, the Nordstrom advertising department assigned projects to teams of their copywriters and designers, but at the same time, they gave the same project to the highly paid Minnesotan firm that came up with the final campaign. So the local team spent time and energy on what became an unusually creative project, then were informed that the store would use the outside agency's efforts. That kind of undermining goes on constantly at Nordstrom."

Stan left the company, preferring to roam Seattle as an unemployed poet before getting his bearings and finding some other way to support his creative work. With dry humor, he finds it paradoxical that the company purporting to be supportive of its hometown was so antagonistic toward its own creative team members.

"They pick shows like Allie McBeal to run their ads around," he remarks of the TV campaign bemusedly, "because viewers who watch Roseanne or Frasier are too smart to take this lifestyle crap. But it's also scary that they think such a high percentage of American women pay attention to Nordstrom, and watch the shows they've targeted. They have a skewed way of looking at things that nothing seems to alter."

Nordstrom has always been a strong presence in Seattle, and its history of political moves has a definite flair. In 1995, Nordstrom, alongside other downtown merchants, led a drive to ask voters to reopen the then-closed portion of Pine Street in front of Westlake Mall--an action that a group called Friends of Westlake Park vociferously opposed at the time.

Friends of Westlake Park wanted the outdoor plaza as a place for public congregation, along with the pleasant daily chaos and cacophony of a real town square. But according to Rich Jensen, a local who was interested in the conflict at the time, Nordstrom feared that its customers from the suburbs would be driven away by such chaos. Nordstrom exerted its powerful influence such that pro-business voters turned out in droves, and the hope for Westlake Mall to remain traffic-free was killed.

Two years ago, both The Stranger and the Seattle Weekly denounced Nordstrom for refusing to contribute to a housing activists' group, and documented complaints of discrimination toward Nordstrom from African American employees and the store's refusal to build new stores in racially mixed, unpolished neighborhoods. "There is a special kind of Nordstrom snobbery that goes on," Stan says. "They are deathly afraid of attracting poor people as customers. They are lily-white. It's predictable that 'Reinvent Yourself' and all of Nordstrom's striving for glamour has such an odd, twisted underbelly."

He referred to previous decades, when the understated, upper-crust Nordstrom style was something Seattle socialites took very seriously. He thinks his former employer may be struggling to keep up with local cultural mores. "At one time, Nordstrom ruled this town; that was before microcomputing. Now, I think the old Seattle perception that there is the Sonics, Nordstrom, and God is going away. But I don't think Nordstrom knows it."

According to its latest quarterly report, which puts earnings down 5.9% from this time last year, the knowledge may soon come knocking; hopefully, it won't be too late for Nordstrom's poets.