For this holiday season, Barneys is betting the store on Gaga.
The iconic Madison Avenue department store is converting its entire fifth floor men's section -- a whopping 5500 square feet -- into "Gaga's Workshop," a holiday funhouse curated by the eclectic pop icon. The workshop is set to open at 11:59pm on November 21st, and will stay open all night through November 22nd before returning to normal store hours.
To build hype around the opening of the warehouse, Barneys has kicked off an online countdown called the "12 Days of Gaga," which will unveil a new exclusive product each day until the funhouse, er, holiday workshop opens to the public. There will also, apparently, be clues distributed throughout the city in the form of "alphanumeric codes and QR codes" that can be entered into the website for "special messages and offers."
In a release, Barneys outlines how visitors to the workshop will walk through a giant facade at store's 60th street entrance that will "create the illusion of walking into the mouth of a giant monster-like Lady Gaga."
Once inside, shoppers will have their pick of eight different "stations" -- from a candy shop to a gallery to a library -- including a jewelry shop that was, according to the release, "created out of an oversized Lady Gaga-turned-spider and a boudoir in the shape of a giant wig."
The store's wares are an curated selection of finds from hundreds of different vendors, all edited by Gaga in collaboration with Nicola Formichetti and artists Eli Sudbrack and Christophe Hamaide Pierson. A whopping 25 percent of the sales from the workshop will go to the Born This Way Foundation, which was founded by Gaga and her mother in an effort to build confidence and fight bullying.
Gaga’s mandate, according to Formichetti, was to make the workshop “amazing and fun, for kids and for adults. She was very much involved in coming up with the ideas and overseeing the whole process, but I also got her mom, Cynthia, involved,” he said. “She knew Gaga’s favorite chocolates or her favorite books when she was little. We really wanted this experience to be like going through her memories, in a very surreal way. For that, I needed the help of Mrs. Germanotta.”
WWD also reports some of the spectacular offerings shoppers will be able to buy inside the workshop, which include a Gaga snow globe ($95), a glittering chocolate skull ($68), and a holiday stocking in the shape of a claw ($65).
