Former Utah Designer animates Paris department store windows for Christmas

According to a post on his blog last week. Couture doll making sensation Andrew Yang, a former Salt Lake boy has been toiling for months on an exciting new project overseas. The oldest department store in the world, Galeries Lafayette in Paris hired him early this year to design their fantastical Christmas window displays. Completely animated by maestro puppeteer Jean-Claude Dehix.

110 individual charachters were created around the theme Rock N' Noel, a Rock and Roll festival starring the K-Stars, an imaginary five girl rock group that has taken the world by storm. The various windows show them "riding tour buses, getting their hair and makeup done, working it on fashion shoots, and of course, rocking it out in concert, in style.", according to Yang who also designed all the clothes from concept to finish. A departure from his stint with Barneys where he dressed his dolls in established runway fashions.

In a recent Vogue India interview he described the process.

You’re going to be designing the store windows for Galleries Lafayette and have done a number of other stores before. How do you conceptualise them and what is it like, designing such large, public spaces?

I start off with references that the display and exhibit teams put together at the stores, and from there I put together my own sort of "mood board" of what I want the actual dolls to look like. The dolls themselves are quite large, so it’s easy to think of countless ways for them to fill the space. In Barneys, for instance, when I did fashion dolls in runway clothes, we paired the looks with the actual outfits and let the dolls climb all over the mannequins, whereas I'm taking a much more cinematic approach with the Galeries Lafayette dolls.