2023 Dior · Saks Fifth Avenue Picture · Machines

Dior holiday windows

Thirteen public windows on Fifth Avenue. Three fully kinetic. Lighting through the rest. Ten weeks from brief to open.

Giant Dior jacket over a miniature red carpet inside a snow globe

Overview

The 2023 Dior holiday installation at Saks was a flagship window set: miniature architecture, garments, motion, and light, all running in public on Fifth Avenue. I was the sole engineer for the electrical and mechanical system — CAD, sourcing, controls, fabrication, and on-site integration.

Creative changed weekly. The hardware could not.

Snow-globe window with a white jacket and winter landscape — Final installation, Saks Fifth Avenue

Close view of the jacket window with fountain and figures — Kinetic and lit jacket window

The problem

Budget and schedule meant using off-the-shelf lighting and motion hardware wherever it would hold. The brief still asked for custom behavior: micro-LED sparkle, dimmable halos, rotary motion, and linear actuators.

Sparkle needed AC-like waveforms. Other LED zones needed PWM dimming. Motors needed PWM. Linear actuators needed reversible polarity. A board per element would have been too slow and too expensive.

CAD model of the circular window enclosure — Window enclosure, CAD

Miniature photographers being wired on the bench — Figure lighting on the bench

The controller

The design highlight was a modular controller that could drive mixed AC and DC loads from one architecture. Arduino plus a dual H-bridge. Under twenty dollars a unit. Twenty-five watts on each of two outputs.

Software-emulated AC for LED patterns, PWM for motors, swappable polarity for actuators. One module instead of a custom driver for every behavior — and enough slack to absorb the next creative revision.

Sneaker window with a snowy city block behind it — Additional window, lighting integration

In-store Dior display with lit trees and miniature towers — In-store display

Outcome

The same module ran the three fully custom windows, elements in the other ten, and in-store displays. Wiring and control stayed simple enough to install on a ten-week clock.

Business Insider ranked it the number-one Fifth Avenue holiday window of 2023.