Chances are good that, unless you’ve been a major player at a wedding or prom, you’ve never been inside Palazzo , and it won’t particularly upset you to know that it’s closing its location on Clark Street just south of Belden. But if you travel Clark with any regularity, unless you have been unconscious for the past thirteen years, you cannot have helped but notice its minimal, perfectly composed window displays.
The store’s owners — designing couple Jane and Saeed Hamidi — certainly didn’t intend this, but the store window has become a kind of installation space, presenting an ever-changing [but in a way never-changing] set-piece consisting solely of headless mannequins dressed in the studio’s subtle, uncomplicated designs, against a vanilla satin drape. On the urban streetscape, its simple, direct imagery was an ongoing tribute to the romantic notion that anyone can be a princess in a ballgown.
Saeed says he’s not sure where he’ll open a new salon. Maybe in Los Angeles, where they do their production, Or somewhere else in Chicago with better foot traffic. While this stretch of Clark Street has been unlucky for a lot of retailers [any number of the storefronts on the block have “space available” signs], it’s locals who will lose out most with the disappearance of this small but always worthwhile urban pleasure.