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Lanvin: Claridge’s Christmas Tree 2011

In the early part of Autumn 2011, JUSTSO were approached by Lanvin, one of the world’s first Fashion Houses in Paris, to provide creative retail solutions and execute the production and installation of their Christmas Tree at Claridge’s, the most iconic 5 star hotel in Mayfair, London. Alber Elbaz, the creative director at Lanvin, designed the layout for Claridge’s Christmas tree. Lanvin, have a very unique sense of style and were keen to ensure that their creative influence was very evident throughout the installation. Alber utilised a team of designers to hand make the Lanvin decorations whilst also sourcing baubles from Fortnum and Masons, Habitat and Green & Graham. It was crucial that we recognised Claridge’s reputation as a historical art deco hotel and therefore

Alber Elbaz created the design concept and was keen to include human sized puppets dressed in Claridge’s uniform, who sat under the tree.

JUSTSO needed to source an appropriate sized tree (5 meters by 2 meters.) It became immediately obvious that a tree of that size, with the plan to house such a huge selection of decorations and the intention to have the tree up for 6 weeks, we needed to decide between a single artificial tree or two fresh trees with target to pull down at the three week stage and resurrect a new tree and re-dress it. It was clear that an artificial tree was our best option and allowed the tree dressers to densely laden the tree with all of the beautiful decorations and over 20 meters of lighting.

Taking the original Alber drawing and the image below – JUSTSO, who provide creative retail solutions to brands, were instructed to source tree, decorations, installation team, tree dressers and lights. Lanvin were keen to have a rotation of three colours (red, green and blue) constantly changing every 3 minutes which required Just So to source a programmer from Europe that would allow us to achieve this desired effect.

The handmade Lanvin puppets are a signature feature of Lanvin’s brand recognition and therefore we needed to ensure they would be incorporated into the design and layout of the tree – it was decided an antique furniture set was ideal to house the puppets.

During the overnight installation, JUSTSO provided support to resurrect, stylistically dress and install all the relevant features (rocking zebra, presents under tree, antique furniture and puppets) in the foyer of Claridge’s Hotel.

The press coverage was huge both nationally and internationally. The tree was featured editorially in Vogue, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, Grazia, Conde Nast Traveller and The FT to name a few. Recently The BBC aired the documentary “Inside Claridge’s” which featured some of the JUSTSO team assembling the 2011 Christmas Tree.

If you’re looking for a Creative Retail Agency that provides Creative Retail Solutions, contact JUSTSO.