Dennis Freedman The pendulum swings between fashion and art

 The sky behind Dennis Freedman purple twilight, as he stood in the Long Iceland City Studios Barneys New York and saw the movie, the Italian woman with three legs. Beside him on the table, a pile of tchotchkes as booty a police raid on the home of a clown outstretched: wide-eyed, sparklers, donuts, a hair brush with blond hair instead of hair. These are all elements Freedman bought for Italians to inspire. "That's what I love more than anything," he said, only five of them crashed around him. "What do we do now? 'S obsession with doing things? There is a little creepy myself." Freedman, 61, has a very specific flavor that is impossible to predict, much like Alan Alda in Crimes (1989) Woody Allen. (".. If it bends, it's funny, if it breaks, it's not funny") The woman with three legs - actually two, sitting side by side - appear in a surreal video installation for five windows street from Barneys on Madison Avenue. Since the windows are an institution in New York, and the decoration is every four to six weeks, the duty of the highest Freedman as creative director of the business. Freedman is not large or particularly authoritarian, salt and pepper hair was the only thing about him., He told the crew in the studio responsible for For the creative director of one of the trendiest and most expensive shops in the world that he did not dress very well. Old with blonde hair dog sweaters on them are not uncommon. In W, where he worked for 25 years magazine, he was famous for things like uncapping a sharpie and then strumming his arm on it. Asked if Freedman dresses well, said photographer Juergen Teller, "sometimes." Someone slipped a copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries under the buttocks of the two models to solve a problem, and Freedman toe angle considered. An Italian tragicomedy pierced got the tripod and clapped his hands to nail the timing on a triple cross section of the leg. He spoke little, but there was no doubt who was responsible. Under his creative direction, W has to be, so this is not an anti-Vogue and a punky little sister, a place where photographers such as plates, Bruce Weber, Mario Sorrenti, David Sims, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Craig McDean and was more strange and tell a story more. Freedman would not only assign these stories, he traveled the world with photographer shape. He was there for the big picture, developed film on stumps was in Havana to plan the layout, realizing that Eudora Welty lived in Mississippi and - as he with it anyway Weber - to look at it and shoot it. He never paid any of its photographers more than $ 2,000 per day, and put his whole budget in the shooting, which gave the gaps that have made career. In 2011, he joined Barney. "I see the DNA of jobs is not so dissimilar," Freedman said. "With something to sell and you have to also be trendy and creative." The years since he had been with when tough times for magazines. The decline in traffic and without a doubt the relevance of trade led firms to poach talent from venerable glossies. Lucy Yeomans, former editor of British Harper Bazaar, is now the editor of the purchase Net-a-Porter website (the site of his men had already Porter, former British Prime Minister Esquire editor Jeremy Langmead caught). In New York, the central business online Gilt Groupe Ruth Reichl, the former editor of the defunct Gourmet, former tabloid reporter Ben Widdicombe and Tyler Thoreson, set of Style.com. The word that Dennis Freedman is now not advertising. Next to the window, he directs the sender of the company (dressed catalogs, essentially) and the first time a new type of e-mail: The video you can buy. It looks like a clip, but if you stop there, you can get everything young men wear buy it. This is the kind of thing that you can do with unlimited resources. Dennis showed me the last on an iPad in a horse-drawn carriage in the studios of Barneys. He immediately called a boss at Barneys this. "It's great," he said. "It should be on his taxi TV where it should be." The Italians in the studio, surrounded Freedman, the team of Yuri Ancarani, an Italian filmmaker who has observed all of a stool and was recommended by Maurizio Cattelan, whose magazine is toilet paper from work came installed with W. The windows would in two weeks would be deeply surreal TV on conveyor belts, watches, electropop music. They are partly due to the Rube Goldberg-esque Fischli / Weiss based video The Way Things Go (1987). Videos Yuri take a central place in the windows, the theme of "modern neo", which Freedman said, "does not mean -. Well, that's vague" He liked the aesthetics (you seem to have roots in the post-modern furniture.) from him and do not underestimate the name. By naming something, he says, is "to create a world." This was the "buying cycle and sales."