“The history of the department store is inseparable
from the modern metropolis. It emerged in the late 18th century as
the confluence of conspicuous consumption, a refuge, a paradise and a microcosm
of contemporary production. Harding, Howell and Co.’s Grand Fashionable
Magazine opened in Pall Mall in 1796 as a big store separated into departments,
but the idea was developed by stores like Harrods (founded in 1834 and opened
in Knightsbridge in 1849) and Marshall Fields in Chicago and an expanded Le Bon
Marche in Paris (both 1852). For the dirty, constantly under-construction and
industrial 19th-century city, department stores were an urbane, well-lit refuge
from muddy roads, smoke, crime and horse manure. They also offered respectable
employment for women who might even be accommodated in dormitories above the
stores. They represented liberation. Emile Zola refers to their centrality in
the changing status of women in his 1883 novel The Ladies' Paradise, though he also notes the stores were equally
a mechanism for monetising feminine desire.” —English architect, designer and
critic Edwin Heathcote, “Shop and Awe,” The
Financial Times, Aug. 25-26, 2018
Today’s department store is a far cry from its 19th-century
counterpart and it has lost its fair share of cachet, as indicated most
recently by the announcement that Macy’s will be closing 125 locations over the next three years.
The conditions that led to the invention of the
department store are no more, but that doesn’t mean the format can’t be
reinvented. I, for one, will be pulling for this format to endure, even if it’s
in a somewhat different than what we’ve gotten used to over the years.
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