Designing the Shanghai Ship Facade

Faye McLeod has built a body of work that sits at the intersection of retail, image-making and brand building. During her 16-year tenure at Louis Vuitton, she created some of the luxury industry’s most visible physical expressions – from windows and façades to fashion show sets. In that time, she helped define how the house translated its image from the runway and the archive into public-facing experiences around the world.

“I love the fact that the windows are a democratic space. You’re talking to the people on pavements – people can love it or not, and that’s okay,” she says. “You can’t retouch or hide anything. You’ve just got to be authentically you. And I think that’s what I’m really good at – being just me.”

Now in a new phase of her career, McLeod is building her studio, Closer, bringing her special mix of emotion, world-building and collaboration to other  brands and clients.

On this week’s episode of BoF Podcast, McLeod joins BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed to discuss her path into window design, the emotional logic behind her creative process, and why she decided this was the right moment to strike out on her own.

Key Insights: 

• Windows are where luxury meets the street. McLeod describes window design not as a decorative retail function but as one of fashion’s most public-facing forms of communication — a place where a brand has to earn attention in real time. What draws her to the medium is precisely that lack of control. “I love the fact that the windows are a democratic space,” she says. “You’re talking to the people on pavements.” 

• Her instinct for contained spaces comes from somewhere deeper than design training. McLeod links her creative process to a traumatic childhood accident. At the age of five, she fell down a deep hole in the desert in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates and spent hours trapped in what she describes as a concrete box, using imagination and inner resolve to survive. She now sees that experience as formative. “I had to go inside myself to survive. I had to use my imagination,” she says. “I’m good at designing in a contained space.” 

• The audience feedback completes the work. McLeod returns to the idea that creative concepts only fully come alive when people respond in ways you could not have planned. “What I love about what we do is watching the crowd sing back,” she says. “It’s something you cannot control with creative. You just put it out into the universe and see what happens.” In Chengdu, people queued with scissors to cut off pieces of the tail and take them home as souvenirs.

• Her work is built collectively, not individually. Despite the scale and visibility of the projects she discusses, McLeod is emphatic that none of them are authored alone. “It’s not just about one person, it’s about everybody,” she says. “It’s an orchestra and you just find your place.” 

• Her philosophy is simple: pour love into the work. Looking back on her career, she says what she wishes she had known earlier was not a strategic lesson but an emotional one: to trust herself more, let anxiety matter less and commit fully to what she was making. “I wish I knew you just had to pour love into everything you do,” she says. “I just get a big jar of love and I pour it right on top of everything.” 

Additional Resources:

Faye McLeod | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry

Role Call | Faye McLeod, Visual Image Director | BoF 

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