Barneys Celebrates Alber Elbaz's Decade at Lanvin Emily Berl for The New York Times Alber Elbaz in front of his Barneys tribute. THERE is much a shopper could infer from the latest window displays that opened at Barneys New York this week, celebrating Alber Elbaz's 10th anniversary at the house of Lanvin. One window on Madison Avenue shows a brick wall at the moment of an explosion, with chrome-painted bricks flying in all directions, but mostly toward three parachute dresses from the designer's spring 2008 collection. Another shows a wooden floor imploding beneath a black gown on a rotating display. In between is an eight-foot-tall chrome-painted sculpture of Mr. Elbaz, holding a flower. Is it supposed to remind us that Mr. Elbaz revitalized a century-old label by exploding the clichés of the house? Or about mythologizing a designer who is important to Barneys? Or did that 2008 collection go down like a ton of bricks? When Dennis Freedman, the creative director of Barneys, approached Mr. Elbaz with the plans, the sculpture was actually planned to be nine feet tall. The idea was to play on the gold statues that flank the red carpet at the Oscars, since Mr. Elbaz dressed the best-actress winner Meryl Streep in her gold wrap dress this year, and Jean Dujardin, the best actor, also wore Lanvin. Mr. Elbaz's reaction: "Oh, my God, you are going to turn me into Lenin." Mr. Freedman compromised by a foot, but the sculpture remains larger than life. "We wanted to bring this scale of surprise to the windows and make them a bit more Surrealist," he said. Getting the windows right was also important to Mr. Elbaz, who, after he arrived in New York on Friday for a week of Lanvin-related events, observed their installation, as he does at Lanvin's store on the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. This was mainly because Mr. Elbaz did not want the windows to look like a retrospective. "I don't like that word because I am very superstitious," he said. No one would assume that Mr. Elbaz is at the end of his career at Lanvin after only 10 years. Anyway, the windows are surprisingly stark, and certainly anything but reverential toward his decade at Lanvin. "There is no fear," Mr. Elbaz said. When the clothes are just from the oven, they are all fragile, but then six months later, I am used to them. You can break them into pieces.