By Ellen Gilbert 

Photography by Ricky Zehavi

"The more I do, the more people want,” says Richard Moore, Tiffany & Co.’s current vice president of creative and visual merchandising. He is more than happy to oblige.

Moore’s job includes year-round responsibility for the look of no less than all the windows and display cases in Tiffany’s more than 200 retail stores around the world.  New York City at holiday time has an especially magical aura, and Moore’s window designs at Tiffany’s flagship store at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street can always be relied on to do their part with extravagance and panache.

1950'S NEW YORK

This year’s windows, Moore hopes, will hit the jackpot once again by evoking what he describes as the “very optimistic energy” of the 1950s. The theme is, as usual, a paean to New York City at holiday time. “Finding jewels in Tiffany’s windows has become something of a New York sport like searching for Ninas in an Al Hirschfeld drawing,” observed writer Judith Goldman in Windows at Tiffany’s, published in 1980, and a bit of cat-and-mousery still holds true. This year, pieces of jewelry are incorporated into depictions of skaters at Rockefeller Center and horse-drawn carriages in Central Park (check out that wagon wheel). In a bit of self-referential whimsy, a young woman gazes wistfully into a Tiffany window unaware that next to her, her boyfriend is holding a Tiffany gift box behind his back. Moore cites old New Yorker covers and the use of a bluish-gray palette with yellow accents for helping to capture the feel of the times. She isn’t really there, but viewers may squint and wonder if that’s jazz pianist Marian McPartland in the back of the tail-finned car, on her way to a gig at Hickory House.

For sheer over-the-topness (almost literally) this year’s extravaganza at the flagship store will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the 1939 New York World’s Fair by decorating the store’s façade with replicas of a giant diamond egret created for the fair by Tiffany. A valence on top of the building will pull the whole thing together.

Many hands, from designers to lighting experts, to set-builders, play a part in creating the finished product before it is unveiled in mid-November. By then, Moore and his colleagues will be well into planning next year’s windows. This means already having some sense of which pieces from Tiffany’s many different collections they want to promote. It also includes being alerted by colleagues abroad to nuances of scenes that will not fly in their respective neighborhoods—e.g., no champagne and no kissing in Mid-East store window scenes.

THE RING

Tiffany’s association with New York City dates to 1837, when 25 year-old Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young opened a “stationery and fancy goods” store with a $1,000 advance from Tiffany’s father. Tiffany’s authorized history describes “fashionable ladies in silks, satins and beribboned bonnets” facing “a gauntlet of narrow streets teeming with horses and carriages” as they made their way to the new emporium at 259 Broadway. “At Tiffany & Co. they discovered a newly emerging ‘American style’ that departed from the European design aesthetic, which was rooted in ceremonial patterns and the Victorian era’s mannered opulence. The young entrepreneurs were inspired by the natural world, which they interpreted in patterns of simplicity, harmony and clarity.”

In 1878, Tiffany acquired one of the world’s largest and finest fancy yellow diamonds from the Kimberly diamond mines in South Africa. Gemologist George Frederick Kunz cut the diamond from 287.42 carats to 128.54 carats with 82 facets, giving the stone remarkable brilliance. Named the Tiffany Diamond, it secured the company’s legacy. The engagement ring as it is known today was introduced in 1886. Unlike earlier diamond rings that were set in bezels, The Tiffany® Setting lifts the stone off the setting, allowing light to flatter the brilliance of the cut. It is, says Tiffany’s “the most sought-after symbol of true love,” and the store’s second floor is largely devoted to selling them. At lunchtime on a recent weekday, couples were seated at various counters where, over flutes of champagne and petits fours, they examined the possible ways to manifest their true love.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, the founder’s son, became Tiffany’s first art director in the late 1800s. His influence went well beyond the company: in 1882, President Chester Arthur invited him to redecorate the White House. The younger Tiffany was a world leader in the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements around the turn of the century, creating a wide range of design that included technically brilliant leaded glass as well as colorful enameled and painterly jewels based on American plants and flowers.

Designer Jean Schlumberger arrived in 1956, and his creations—bejeweled flowers, birds and ocean life—are still in demand. Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso made names for themselves designing Tiffany jewelry in the late 20th century. In recent years, Tiffany’s has had to accommodate political and geological changes, being careful not to deplete stores of certain gemstones, or cutting off trade with inhospitable governments. While technological advances have dramatically changed the way pieces are designed and put together, the hunt for the “right” gem for a particular ring or pin can take up to two years.

THE OLD AND THE NEW

Think about early Tiffany customers and names like Vanderbilt, Astor, Whitney and Havemeyer come to mind. More recently, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and fashionista Diana Vreeland sported Tiffany creations. Tiffany commemorative pieces commissioned by the U.S. Government include ceremonial swords for Civil War generals; the Congressional Medal of Honor (the nation’s highest military award), and the 1885 redesign of the Great Seal of the United States, which appears on the one-dollar bill. Sports fans will be interested to know (if they don’t already) that one of Tiffany’s best known professional designs is the Vince Lombardi Trophy for the National Football League Super Bowl Championship, which Tiffany has created since the first Super Bowl in 1967.

“Our Flagship Store on Fifth Avenue is simply the most famous store there is,” observes Tiffany’s web site. “Every cab driver, every New Yorker, every visitor knows where to find Tiffany & Co. This is the marvelous place where dreams come true.” Women in little black dresses routinely recreate Audrey Hepburn’s croissant and coffee breakfast from the 1960 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Official 50th Anniversary Companion to the movie published by Rizzoli is replete with photos of Hepburn; costars George Peppard and Patricia Neal; writer Truman Capote, and director Blake Edwards, not to mention the words and music for “Moon River.” The location is also the lookout point for the irrepressible “street photographer” Bill Cunningham, who keeps New York Times readers in the know about who wore what at last weekend’s galas.

It’s a little disconcerting then, when Derek Conrad, Tiffany’s current coordinator of Global and Media Relations, observes without any apparent irony, “we like to think of ourselves as your hometown jeweler.” The scene of this conversation, a private showing of Tiffany’s Masterpieces collection for Fall 2014, adds to its unlikelihood; imagine someone calling, “Honey, I’m just running down to Ti’s for a new Swatch battery. Should I bring back a couple of gyros?” Still, Conrad seems sincere, and recent press about the arrival of Tiffany’s first female design director, Francesca Amfitheatrof, has kept PR people busy as they try to appeal to grand and everyday sensibilities, the old and the new. Recent Tiffany press releases have wordily noted that while several of Amfitheatrof’s pieces for the new Masterpieces collection were “inspired by archival jewels of diamonds set in square bezels that are delicately linked,” her “mixture of custom cut princess, baguette and round diamonds in elegant necklaces and bracelets . . . exemplify a new clarity and lean confidence.” Her new “Tiffany T Collection” is being touted as “unapologetically modern,” “very personal,” and reflecting “a new clarity and lean confidence.” The Times Style Magazine got into the spirit of things with a recent article about Amfitheatrof that described her as “lissome and fair, with a profile that calls to mind a John Singer Sargent portrait. . . a vision from a bygone era,” but “very much a modern woman.”

Shifting gears seems to come easily to Moore as well. Next to images of this year’s holiday windows he keeps a bobble-headed, pocketbook-carrying, gloved-hand-waving (it’s solar powered) figure of Queen Elizabeth II. In between worrying about whether or not instructions for mounting windows in Paris, London, and Rome have been followed, he watches his Fitbit activity wristband and worries how his team is doing in Tiffany employees’ Appalachian Trail Challenge competition.

Moore was born and raised in England where he graduated from the University of Leeds with a major in theatrical design. Before coming to Tiffany’s in 2009, he was “head of visual identity” at Liberty’s of London, another venerable old shopping institution that benefitted from his upbeat outlook. In addition to working with Tiffany’s in-house teams, Moore has enjoyed some noteworthy collaborations with other bold-face designers since his arrival at the company. These include a 2012 Oscar season homage to Hollywood glamour with stylist Rachel Zoe, and, the following year, several well-received Gatsby-themed windows created with movie director, producer and co-writer Baz Luhrman and his wife, costume and production designer Catherine Martin.

This is all to the good: Moore’s predecessors, the ever-elegant Robert Rufino, now interiors editor at Elle Décor, and the late Gene Moore (1910-1998) set the bar pretty high. The two Moores were not related, but Richard has been asked often enough about the possibility that he is prepared with a cockamamie story about Gene spending a lost weekend in England thirty-some years ago.

In any case, Gene Moore’s 39-year tenure at Tiffany’s is indisputably noteworthy. He is credited with bringing whimsy and joie de vivre to what was a highly traditional, staid environment. “To fully appreciate the impact of his artistic genius,” said New York Times obituary writer Robert McG. Thomas when Moore died, “you must take a stroll down memory lane, force yourself to stop in front of a typical Tiffany window of the 1940s and yawn as you regard a neat, linear arrangement of silver platters, bowls, candlesticks and the like.”

Gene Moore worked at several area stores before he settled at Tiffany & Co.; the “fanciful wonders he worked with shoes” at the I. Miller shoe chain and his “whimsical way with diamonds” at Tiffany’s had “Fifth Avenue pedestrians doing delighted double takes for more than half a century,” wrote Thomas. In addition to the aforementioned Windows at Tiffany’s (subtitled The Art of Gene Moore) by Judith Goldman (with commentary by Moore), My Time at Tiffany’s, coauthored by Moore and Jay Hyams, offers beautiful images and accounts of Moore’s work.

WHEN I'M 85

Richard Moore lives most of the week in a downtown apartment in New York City’s Soho neighborhood and enjoys an upstate home on weekends and holidays. He regularly hosts or visits friends and family from England. If he happens to be in London at Thanksgiving time, he says that he especially loves foisting Thanksgiving celebrations on unwitting company who don’t quite get this “large lunch on a weekday.”

Moore responds quickly when asked if he will follow in Gene Moore’s footsteps by remaining with Tiffany until he’s 85. “I will stay ‘til I’m 85 and Queen Elizabeth will outdo Queen Victoria,” he says happily. “It’s a great job; I’m very lucky.”