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In March, 1999, a 3rd Avenue window of Bloomingdale's Upper Eastside Manhattan flagship department store in New York City featured a spring iMac display, with all five of the then-current iMac fruit flavor-colors -- Strawberry, Blueberry, Grape, Lime and Tangerine iMacs -- displayed with color-coordinated women's fashions.
In the summer of 1998, when the original Bondi Blue iMac made its debut, Bloomingdale’s creative director Michael Fisher asked an acquaintance at Apple, “When are you guys going to be making iMacs in different colors?”
Informed that Apple had no plans at the time to make different colored iMacs, Fisher chose not to hear that. “Let me know when you make the iMacs in different colors,” he replied. “I need them.” And indeed they did come along six months later.
Bloomingdale’s iMac display reportedly attracted droves of window shoppers, especially at night. The 3rd Avenue window was located across the street from movie theaters, with the whole street is bathed in soft colored light at night.
A Mac user from way back, Michael Fisher also had a Lime iMac in his office, a Power Mac G3 at home, and a PowerBook at his beach house.
A few months later, Bloomies did a similar window dressing display featuring the original clamshell iBook, and that fall the iMac was again featured in Bloomingdale’s Modern Home Office theme and Where will you be in 2000 window displays.
There was also a Bloomingdale's back-to-school window display with the mannequins are carrying iBooks, naturally. “The theme for the back-to-school promotion was ‘Back to Cool,’ and as soon as we decided that, I thought, what better way to tie it in than with Apple’s new consumer portable,� recalls Bloomingdale’s Fisher. “I mean, what a cool accessory you’d have to go back to school with. Right then I knew we had to do it.�
In 2000, Apple changed the iMac fashion motif from bright candy colors to more subdued (and IMHO more attractive and tasteful) earth tones (plus Ruby, which is a gem tone), including my all-time favorites -- Snow and Sage. Salon’s Janelle Brown wrote about “The iMac fashion headache,” having just gotten here living space coordinated with the iMac flavor colors....
“And then Apple made everything worse -- debuting five new iMac colors at Macworld, all in my favorite catalog shades: Indigo! Ruby! Sage! Graphite! And, of course, Snow. Now the puzzling would begin again. Might the Ruby iMac clash with the Garnet walls? Was the Sage iMac the same shade of Sage as my hand towels? I wondered: Would Apple ever consider launching a line of desk furniture in the same stunning shade of Indigo, perhaps with contrasting accents in a lovely Sky or Ocean?”
Apple then turned around committed a bizarre fashion faux pas later that same year by replacing the pretty earth tone iMacs with the hideous Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian wallpaper motif iMacs, which looked like a projection of somebody’s acid flashback from the ‘60s.
These had a mercifully short market tenure that was terminated by the return of a pared down selection of iMac colors, which eventually dwindled to just "Snow," which has been carried on withe the current eMac line.
For more information on Bloomingdale's:
http://www.bloomingdales.com/
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