Londoners and tourists line New Bond Street. Not to browse or buy––the stores closed for trading hours ago. Instead, the crowd eagerly awaits the facade of Cartier’s flagship boutique to come to life.

A music-filled animation treats the crowd for one minute, every half an hour. Nearly triple the size of the neighboring Boodles facade, but a far cry from the nearly five-minute dramatic extravaganza at New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue. 

“They’re all trying to outdo each other,” claims one passerby, weaving through the crowd. Voices murmur in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic before phones are raised in unison to digitally capture the magic. An aesthetically curated retail season that needs to be seen to be believed welcomes a raft of tourists during less favorable, long winter evenings. 

A returning American tourist is visiting from New Hampshire: “I came here in 2019 and loved it.” She makes the transatlantic journey just to see London’s 2024 displays, “they do it much bigger here than we do over there.” 

“They’re all trying to outdo each other”

More American tourists pose for photos further down the street. “Every year our group gets bigger. We came last year and we have come again.” 

Four Canadian flight attendants claimed they bid to work on the London route, just to be in the heart of it. 

How do tourists know their experience will be worth the trip? What draws crowds of thousands from across the globe confidently to London? A tourist from Mexico admitted she only knew about the lights thanks to Instagram. Another from Manchester agreed––viral posts practically planned the trip for her.

Lights dominate local village squares and our world’s greatest landmarks during the holiday season. These installations have slowly garnered larger budgets, begetting larger audiences. 

Social media has equally sparked an interest beyond our immediate eyeline. Paul Dart has been designing light installations for 36 years, notably at the James Glancy Project. “My job is to decorate a street and create a moment of joy, to recreate the moment you switched on your first Christmas tree and suddenly noticed…that the world could be changed by decoration. In the middle of a very busy street, I’m trying to recreate that moment so the people who come to see the decorations are put into a very good mood. And then they might be in such a good mood that they'll go into the shops and spend some money. It's both a sort of frivolous thing, but it's also a very serious thing. We need cheering up at the darkest time of year, and this is the reason why we do these rather mad things.”

The Instagram Imperative

The lights that frame cities during the most aesthetically engaging time of year similarly dominate social feeds. “The decorations now need to be a very recognizable visual icon because when you look at a small screen, it needs to read immediately,” Dart explains. “What's become more important is…those decorations need to tell you where you were when that picture was taken because it gets sent around the world.”

Dart notes London’s Regent Street is one of the city’s most Instagrammable destinations, particularly around Christmastime, when its iconic angels are suspended above the street.

Social media influences Dart’s technical considerations as a designer, including a change in the actual lights themselves, ensuring these installations are optimized to be photographed on a phone. Becoming social media friendly encourages ‘free publicity,’ something retailers are increasingly dependent on. “Designing these schemes in streets is part of marketing the area,” Dart explains. 

“It's about an immersive experience. So there's music, there's lights, there's pulses. Your senses are reading cues that make you feel something.”

“Obviously, it's a huge resource to have people taking photographs and doing all this free publicity for us because they send them to all their friends around the world. In the past, it would be talking to people over the dinner table. Whereas now, [sharing] is done digitally. So I see the phone from a marketing point of view as a very good thing,” Dart says, then adds–– “But, actually, people are too busy looking through a phone at what I've created instead of actually just enjoying it.”

Sophie Trench, Creative and Strategy lead at Sculptivate, another juggernaut of interactive display design. Trench notes her clients have yet to make social media opportunity their north star: “As people's relationship with social media continues to evolve, we are very much about creating collective experiences that are ‘IRL’.” 

“It's about what happens when you gather people for a shared moment. We don't design primarily for social media and I don't think that's going to change,” Trench explains. “Of course, we definitely consider [social media] in the process. We think about viewpoints, how various aspects will translate on Instagram, and have organised influencer-type events — but even then, it’s about how we amplify what the attendees experience. How they then share it online is a secondary level to the creative process.” 

Sculptivate aims to curate feeling, something that cannot be translated digitally. “It's about an immersive experience. So there's music, there's lights, there's pulses. Your senses are reading cues that make you feel something. The power of an immersive experience can affect your being because it triggers your senses. If you are looking at it through your phone, you're not engaging your senses in the same way.” 

Commodifying Community Spirit

Many assume that London’s extravagant displays are funded by local councils. “It is all commercial money,” Dart explains. “The first lights in Regent Street were paid for by the retailers after the war. It was to attract people and to cheer up London, but it was also to say, ‘we are open,’ come to us rather than going somewhere else.” 

The light display scene is a competitive one. More important than online engagement or physical traffic is store conversion, and retailers are willing to cough up the funding to supplement it. 

Trench reiterates, “As much as it would be lovely to say, ‘we're just going to put this on for the good of everyone who's walking past to say “Happy Holidays”’, that wouldn't be fully commercially viable, and I think we would be a bit disillusioned if we're looking at it just from that angle. That said, brands certainly see this as an opportunity to spread joy and give back.”

Finding new ways to draw people into the streets has become unexpectedly vital. In 2023, Advinas reported that only 32% of survey respondents planned to do Christmas shopping in-store rather than online. 

Despite the scale, nostalgia remains true to tradition. Bond Street’s townhouse-esque displays pay homage to decorated houses in residential neighborhoods. ”Facades are another canvas for the brand to create an experience, it's this experience of retail and the brand that comes out beyond the interior of the building,” Trench says.

Cartier was one of the first to take the risk. “There's this thing of setting a precedent with brands; one brand does something a bit innovative and different, slightly outside the box, in this case, outside of the building. And I think it's then when the other brands follow, and these new ideas become the norm. The Cartier facade we did last year drew a lot of attention, definitely in terms of social media, engagement with the brand was huge.”

Sponsorship is an increasingly visible part of Christmas. Take the Manhattan-based Saks Fifth Avenue flagship, attracting crowds opposite the famous Rockefeller Center Tree. Its 2023 store facade was dominated by an animated Dior-sponsored installation, another Sculptivate activation. Yet, 2024 has seen the dimming down, the first time in years without an interactive light show commissioned. Rumors swirled as to whether the decision was purely budgetary; a spokesperson stated, “for many years, the holidays at Saks Fifth Avenue included a light show at our flagship store, and, for some time, we have contemplated changing our approach.”

Competing London department store Harrods is sponsored by Italian knitwear brand Loro Piana this year, following a successful run of previous sponsorships. With a known downturn of spending in testing times, Trench explains that London hasn’t seen the same shift. “Who knows what will happen next year? We might see more globally what we've seen Saks do this year.” 

When Private Space Masquerades as Public Square

But something is equally different about the atmosphere on Bond Street this year. The once unbranded lights, defying gravity horizontally draped across the street, have now been sponsored by a takeover led by Chanel. A first for the street, but likely not the last. A brand choosing to go bigger and bolder with investment, seizing a new canvas for boosted visibility.

The phenomenon recalls artist and author Jenny Odell's observation that commercial spaces increasingly masquerade as public squares, creating what she terms "simulated commons"—spaces that invite collective gathering while quietly asserting private control. Here, on Bond Street, the traditional festive lights that once symbolized communal celebration have become another luxury product, albeit one consumed through the democratizing lens of Instagram stories.

The irony lies in how these displays, more elaborate and expensive than ever, simultaneously attract broader audiences while reinforcing the very economic stratification they temporarily mask with their sparkle.

Ultimately, these joy-driven displays will no doubt remain an ongoing part of local and global tradition; it’s just a matter of defining the scale the future holds. As streets and stores continue to outdo each other for conflicting commercial and community benefit, will sponsorships make the lights even bigger? Where social media remains unable to replicate the sensory experience created by an installation, it still has influence, and influencers, to encourage people to visit the lights for themselves.