The other week I was standing outside Sunshine Farms, my greengrocer’s, talking to Lucas, the owner. He knows I lived in Florence for decades and we’ve often chatted about Italian food.
That day I’d brought photos I’d taken at the market of Sant’Ambrogio, one of the many open-air food markets in Florence. I wanted to show him what was offered by his counterpart in Italy.
The last thing I expected him to say, when he saw the photos, was “Display! It’s all about display.”
That little word then drew me through a maze of memories, sent me in pursuit of a few words linked by concept and finally had me strolling down the yellow brick road.
When I lived in Florence and went to the food markets, I never had the kind of a reaction that my greengrocer had.
Not because it wasn’t worth noticing the way produce was displayed, rather because it was always displayed beautifully. There simply were no ‘bad’ displays.
My focus when I went to market was on the quality (and price) of the produce. However, I must have been subconsciously aware of how it was displayed, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken the photos I did. Also, I distinctly remember how upset the farmers were when new European Union regulations required them to replace their wooden stands and boxes with huge metal trays.
It had to do with meeting the hygiene standards imposed by the European Community. Esthetically, however, the change was for the worse. There was something clinical, almost unappetizing about those metal trays.
They reminded me of what I’d see in TV crime shows when the scene was in a mortuary where a post-mortem was being carried out on a murder victim. The farmers clearly understood that their wooden boards and boxes were more in character with a traditional food market.
Their old wooden furnishings also sent out a message that proclaimed Italy over the European Union.
The word display can be traced to the Latin plicare, to fold, prefixed by the negative dis, thus displicare signifies to unfold. When you unfold something you open it up to view.
In Italian, the word to fold is piegare; if you attach the prefix dis, which in this case has become shortened to s, you have the word for explain, spiegare, literally to unfold.
The English word explain comes from the Latin explanare, to make clear, to flatten out.
These are all terms about communicating, sending a message, story-telling. When we talk about how a story unfolds we are referring to how it develops (the concept is similar in German, which uses the verb entfalten, to unfold ). When we unfold something we are laying it out, making it clear.
By the late 1600s, display had acquired the connotation of exhibiting something, which is how we most commonly understand the word today. The Italians, with their instinctive flair for design, can create eye-catching displays of even the most unlikely articles.
I’m not thinking of market stands with carrots and potatoes in this case but rather of a Florentine haberdashery and notions store I used to pass daily. In its shop windows I’d see white cotton underwear – in a style as far from alluring as you can get – artfully arranged in the company of hosiery, an assortment of zippers, ribbons, trimmings and balls of wool.
Even if it was only meant to show what they sold, the display was done with something close to panache.
There’s a skill to window dressing, to window displays (occasionally referred to as installations), and the Italians are still masters of it.
Decades ago it was practiced also here. Vancouver’s big department stores – Hudson’s Bay, Woodward’s, Eaton’s – had ground-floor windows facing the street, filled with displays that matched the season. Unfortunately window dressing has become practically a lost art in this part of the world.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could become a "found" art, a reaction to the kind of digital displays that are the uninspired staple of online shopping?
Surely it’s worth reviving an art that once engaged the talents of several famous creative personalities. To name only a few – the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, the stage and film director Vincent Minnelli (second of Judy Garland’s five husbands), and the fashion designer Giorgio Armani. They all did a stint as window dressers.
There’s potentially a further advantage to bringing this lost art back to life. It might help lure customers back to brick-and-mortar stores and assure their survival.
Sabine Eiche is a local writer and art historian with a PhD from Princeton University. She is passionately involved in preserving the environment and protecting nature. Her columns deal with a broad range of topics and often include the etymology of words in order to shed extra light on the subject.
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