Designing the Department Store: Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 9781350054370, 9781350054400, 9781350054394

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Geographical and Historical Context
Contributing to the History of the Department Store
1 Retail Architecture
The Visibility of Construction and Renovation
The Changeable Design of the Storefront
Architectural Display as Competition
Technical Scope as a Show Feature
2 Window Display
Professional Development
Making Window Displays
Stocky Style
Draping Techniques and the Female Gaze
Sculptural Style
Machinery of Display
The Unit Principle
3 The Shopfitting Industry
Silent Salesmanship
Science of Shopkeeping
The Shopfitting Industry and Exhibition Culture
From Density to Openness
4 The Department Store Interior
Seasonality
A Great Decoration Event
Virtual Travel via Display
The Model Room: An Interior of Interiors
Professional Development
Conclusion
The Modern Displayman
In Summary
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Designing the Department Store

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Designing the Department Store Display and Retail at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Emily M. Orr

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS, and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 © Emily M. Orr, 2020 Emily M. Orr has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Historic England Archive All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of images and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in copyright acknowledgment and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. Disclaimer: The corporate brands/logos contained in this book are reproduced under the fair dealing and/or fair use defenses/exceptions under English, US, and international copyright laws. In relation to US law, the author and publishers also exercise their rights to publish these logos under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The author and publishers also rely on the various defenses/exceptions under English, US, and international trademark laws. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5437-0      ePDF: 978-1-3500-5439-4      ePub: 978-1-3500-5438-7 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of Figures  vii Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  1 1 Retail Architecture  23 The Visibility of Construction and Renovation  23 The Changeable Design of the Storefront  30 Architectural Display as Competition  43 Technical Scope as a Show Feature  49

2 Window Display  57 Professional Development  58 Making Window Displays  67 Stocky Style  75 Draping Techniques and the Female Gaze  77 Sculptural Style  81 Machinery of Display  88 The Unit Principle  93

3 The Shopfitting Industry  97 Silent Salesmanship  99 Science of Shopkeeping  108 The Shopfitting Industry and Exhibition Culture  119 From Density to Openness  124

4 The Department Store Interior  131 Seasonality  133 A Great Decoration Event  138 Virtual Travel via Display  141

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Contents

The Model Room: An Interior of Interiors  151 Professional Development  157

Conclusion  163 Bibliography  173 Index  189

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FIGURES



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Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (exterior), ca. 1894 (color image in Plate 1)  2 0.2 Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (interior, flattened), ca. 1894 (color image in Plate 2)  4 0.3 Postcard, “Greetings from Chicago,” postmarked June 8, 1907 (color image in Plate 3)  17 1.1 Schlesinger & Mayer, Advertisement, October 10, 1903  25 1.2 Mandel’s Department Store, Corner of State and Madison Streets, Chicago, May 12, 1911  28 1.3 Postcard, “Marshall Field & Co.’s Store,” postmarked May 1, 1906 (color image in Plate 4)  29 1.4 Lincoln Decorations, Exterior View of Marshall Field & Company, 1909  31 1.5 A. T. Stewart’s Cast Iron Palace, New York, 1900  34 1.6 Carson Pirie Scott and Company Store, Chicago, IL, n.d.  36 1.7 D. H. Evans Department Store Viewed Across Oxford Street, June 1917  45 1.8 William Whiteley, Limited, Westbourne Grove Premises, view ca. 1873 (color image in Plate 5)  47 1.9 Whiteley’s New Premises, Façade to Queen’s Road, Looking South, 1912  48 1.10 Selfridge’s, Postcard, ca. 1918  49 1.11 Postcard, “Substructure of Marshall Field & Co.’s Retail Store, Chicago,” ca. 1910 (color image in Plate 6)  53 2.1 Property Room or Workroom in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4, 1903  69 2.2 Hamilton Hunter, “Show Window Construction,” US Patent 709, 985, issued September 30, 1902  71 2.3 “The Window Trimmer’s Department,” in The WideAwake Window Dresser, 1894  73 2.4 Norwich Nickel and Brass Works “Perfection” Fixtures for All Departments in The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, 1894  73 2.5 Pedestrians Viewing a Marshall Field & Company Window Display, 1910  74 2.6 Bon Marché Christmas Window, Liverpool, 1900  75

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Figures



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Back and Front Overdrapes in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 2, 1903  78 Wire Working Shops in Harris & Sheldon, Red White & Blue Catalogue, 1899  80 Handkerchief Folding Instructions for a “Cups Fold” in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 3, 1903  82 “Window Decorated with Napkins, Doylies, or Handkerchiefs. By Mr. E. Katz,” The Show Window, December 1899 (color image in Plate 7)  83 Liberty Bell Constructed from Southern California Citrus, Inside the California Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition 1894  87 Chair Arch for Visit of Prince and Princess of Wales, High Wycombe, 1884  87 Swan and Edgar, Piccadilly Circus, 1912  90 Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, State St. Looking South, Chicago,” 1915 (color image in Plate 8)  92 The Economist Training School, Advertisement, April 12, 1913  95 Detroit Show Case Co., Advertisement, February 1913  100 Welch-Wilmarth, Advertisement, “When She Sees She Buys,” December 1920  102 Interior of the Showroom at Ponting’s, January 1913  104 K1868—New All-Brass Stand in Harris & Sheldon’s Red, White and Blue Catalogue, 1899  105 Harrods Ladies’ Boot Department, London, 1919  107 Carson Pirie Scott and Company Store, Cleaning and Handkerchief Departments, Chicago, IL, ca. 1900  109 Selfridge’s, Postcard, “Umbrella Section,” ca. 1909  112 J. H. Wilson Marriott, Advertisement, 1889 (color image in Plate 9)  116 “The Old Way” and “The New Way” of Displaying Rugs in Making Your Store Work for You, 1917  118 Centennial Premium Case in Claes & Lehnbeuter Manufacturing Co.’s, New Illustrated Catalogue 1887 (color image in Plate 10)  121 Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, Retail Store, State Street Aisle, One Block Long,” ca. 1908 (color image in Plate 11)  127 Cheap Counter and Counter Case List in Harris & Sheldon’s Illustrated Price List, 1890 (color image in Plate 12)  129 Selfridge’s, Postcard, “Linen Section,” ca. 1910  132 Fall-Opening Display in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4, 1903  134

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Marshall Field & Company, An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, 1907 (color image in Plate 13)  140 The Interior of Siegel Cooper, New York, January 1, 1900  142 Siegel Cooper & Co., Coin Purse, 1896–1917 (color image in Plate 14)  144 Postcard, “A Portion of the Rug Department, Marshall Field & Co., Retail, Chicago,” ca. 1910 (color image in Plate 15)  146 French Lingerie and Domestic Lingerie Departments, Marshall Field & Company, 1913  148 Louis XV Drawing Room, House Palatial, New Wanamaker Building, New York, 1911 (color image in Plate 16)  154 The Building Department Showroom of John Barker & Co., December 27, 1912  158

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the course of my graduate study and this subsequent book project, which is based on my PhD thesis, I have pursued research and writing with the financial support of a number of institutions and with the intellectual and moral support of a number of individuals. It is my pleasure to be able to thank them here. First, thanks are due to my PhD advisors at the Royal College of Art/ Victoria & Albert Museum, Dr.  Sarah Cheang and Dr.  Glenn Adamson, for their exchange of ideas and guidance, genuine engagement with my topic, generosity with their time, and enthusiastic dedication to helping me shape, improve, and complete this project. I am appreciative of the insightful feedback of Professor Penny Sparke and Dr. Victoria Kelley, who served as external examiners for my PhD thesis. I gratefully acknowledge research and travel funding that both facilitated my access to archives and resources and allowed me the opportunities to share my research in conference programs. The research for this publication has been supported by fellowships from the British Association of Victorian Studies, Hagley Museum and Library, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Pasold Research Fund, Royal College of Art Research Student Conference Fund, and Royal Historical Society. Further support for image costs for the book publication has been provided by the Design History Society and the Pasold Research Fund. I would also like to acknowledge the principal institutions where I received assistance with my research:  Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Brooklyn Historical Society; Macy’s Archive; Hagley Museum and Library; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; New  York Historical Society; Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Museum of American History Archives Center; Chicago History Museum Archives and Manuscripts Department; Philadelphia Historical Society; Smithsonian Libraries; Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum; British Library; City of Westminster Archives; Harrods Archive; Lambeth Library; Linley Sambourne House; National Art Library; English Heritage Archive (now Historic England); Harris & Sheldon Group Limited; John Lewis Heritage Center; and University of Glasgow Archive Services.

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Acknowledgments

This research has benefitted greatly from conversations with Larry Bird, Mario Carpo, Judith Clark, Christine Guth, and Anca Lasc, who all took an interest in my topic and shared their knowledge. Finally, for unfailing financial and personal support, I am truly grateful to my parents, John and Sally Orr. Heartfelt thanks are also due to my friends and colleagues, and in particular, my sister, Sara, for her continual encouragement.

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Introduction

At Christmas time in about 1894, the department store Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn, New  York, sent out a promotional mailing of “The Model Department Store,” a collapsible three-dimensional paper model that reproduced exterior and interior views of the store’s location at 422 Fulton Street (Figure  0.1, see also Plate 1 in the plate section).1 Brooklyn’s most sophisticated department store, Abraham & Straus, upheld this reputation by prioritizing the design of its retail environment since its founding in 1867. This illustrated mailing promoted the investment that the store had made in its original program of display as well as showcased the high quality of its advertisements. The frontal view reveals how the store’s façade aimed to impress with its rows of windows, offering enticing merchandise on the ground floor while communicating order and spreading light evenly to the interior on the upper tiers. The gridded frontality of the building conveyed the segmentation that drove the store’s architectural design as well as the fragmentation of the store’s interior experience. Each window signified the great variety and quantity of wares that the store sold. The title “The Model Department Store” held dual meaning; the mailing itself was indeed a model, a facsimile of the existing store, and at the same time, Abraham & Straus was designating itself as the model, or the paragon, of the modern department store. At the time of this mailing’s production in 1894, the features of the “model department store” were being developed and promoted by retail executives, designers, economists, educators, and journalists. All constituents agreed that display, from the grand scale of the architectural façade to the details of the interior arrangements, was central An envelope for The Model Department Store survives in the collection of the Hagley Library and Museum. It is addressed to a “Mrs. Vernon Baker” who was likely Nettie Baker, a house servant and wife of Vernon Baker, who served as liveryman and chauffeur for the McCrossen family of 226 Milton Avenue in Ballston Spa, Saratoga, New  York. US Census Bureau, New York, State Census, 1905. Accessed November 1, 2014. http://search.ancestry.com/search/ db.aspx?dbid=8940. 1

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FIGURE 0.1  Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (exterior), ca. 1894. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.

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to an outstanding in-store visitor experience and critical to the financial and creative success of the department store itself. This model, valid and celebrated for over one hundred years, is now losing traction. As always, the decline of a long-standing paradigm invites a critical look at the history of its rise. “The Model Department Store” metaphorically transported its recipients, potential patrons, into the space of the store and transformed them into consumers (Figure  0.2, see also Plate 2 in the plate section). The threedimensional model unfolded to reveal a perspective cutaway view that simulated the immersive power of display as the mediator between the consumer and the merchandise.2 The interior imagery conveys the influence of visual merchandising, designed to steer consumer vision and to entice the public to explore the store. The representation of striking sightlines indicated that the store considered the visual impression of its façade and the clearly organized and layered layout of its interior to be strong selling points. The model offered optical engagement with the architectural details and commodities on display, encouraging the consumers to employ their powers of imagination to mentally transport themselves into an interior that they could later visit firsthand. This remarkable model embodies some of the central issues of this study: the introduction of new ways of interacting with and viewing merchandise, the creativity and efficiency of display, the design and construction of a new space for shopping, and the promotion of this visual information to the public. Bringing together achievements in architecture, shopfitting, and interior design, which made up the store’s culture of display, this Model Department Store exemplifies the new ambitious retail format that redefined shopping—and shaped the experience of urban modernity—in Chicago, London, and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. The department store’s rise to prominence in these major cities of the late nineteenth century has come to be understood as fostering a great range of financial, social, and cultural achievements including economic and industrial growth, the increasing independence of female shoppers, technological advancement, material abundance, and the establishment of shopping as a leisure activity.3 Display was central to all these developments. There is a tradition of these cutaway models that dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth century. For example, see Bailey Rawlins, Bailey Rawlins’ Expanding View of the Great Exhibition, color lithography with watercolor, 1851, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 3 Elaine S.  Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving:  Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1989); Joseph H. Appel, The Business Biography of John Wanamaker:  Founder and Builder, America’s Merchant Pioneer from 1861 to 1922, with Glimpses of Rodman Wanamaker and Thomas B.  Wanamaker (New York: Macmillan, 1930); Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America 1880–1920 (New  York:  Norton, 1989); David Chaney, “The Department Store as a Cultural Form,” Theory, Culture and Society 1 (1983):  22–31; Rudi Laermans, “Learning to Consume: Early Department Stores and the Shaping of the Modern Consumer Culture (1860–1914),” Theory, Culture and Society 10 (1993):  79–102; Erica D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Alan Trachtenberg and Eric Foner, The Incorporation of 2

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FIGURE 0.2  Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (interior, flattened), ca. 1894. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.

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Geographical and Historical Context From the late nineteenth century, displaymen, professionals active in the art and commerce of display, made the department store a significant site for design innovation. The creativity and skills of the displaymen produced many inventive results. Displaymen conceived of selling spaces where textiles towered around interior figurines and fountains, umbrellas appeared as sculptural sprays, rugs spilled over balconies, commodity sculptures filled show windows, and block-long sales-floor vistas were decorated according to the season. The Brooklyn Bridge built in spools of thread, a Liberty Bell constructed of folded textiles, a great central dome modeled on the Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, and an interior reproduction of the Burlington Arcade are a few of the many attractions that dazzled visitors to turn-of-thetwentieth-century department stores. The following narrative will explore how these individuals—architects, window dressers, shopfitters, and interiors designers—drove a particular stylistic transformation in the retail environment that occurred from about 1880 to 1920. Through active on-site display work, designers turned static stockpiles of goods, stressing accumulation and function, into dynamic, often ephemeral assemblages, meant to represent and convey the variability of fashion. These designers constantly reconstructed the presentation of merchandise in the windows and on the sales floors so that the perception of display as “wide-awake” to trends communicated the store’s upstanding reputation, instilled confidence in consumers, and encouraged repeat visitors.4 The similar motivations of speed, change, and fashion in visual merchandising and interior design also drove vitality in architecture with constant construction of new sites of shopping, remodeling, and upgrading. One significant impetus behind this continual architectural change was the drive to build a better environment for the display of merchandise, leading

America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams:  Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1987). 4 “Wide-awake” terminology comes from the title of a popular American window dressing treatise: Frank L. Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser: A Treatise on the Art and Science of Show Window and Store Interior Construction, Economy and Decoration:  Containing a Complete Exposition of the Laws of Color Harmony, Full Instruction in Fabric Draperies and Many Practical Ideas Concerning Proper Display Forms, Fixtures and Accessories (New  York:  Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Further to this point, as George Cowan, vice president of the Koester School of Window Trimming, advised, “The store can advertise itself very effectively through its show windows, not only to secure an immediate sale of merchandise, but also to derive permanent publicity . . . Convey through your show windows the impression that your store is thoroughly up-to-date.” George J. Cowan, Window Backgrounds:  A Collection of Drawings and Description of Store Window Backgrounds (Chicago, IL: The Dry Goods Reporter, 1912), 71.

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to advancements that were artistic and technological and effects that were financial as well as commercial. Around 1920, an illustrated pamphlet distributed by Marshall Field’s of Chicago described this retail transformation, pointing out how in recent years the store’s emphasis on display turned the bland “merchandising house” into an enticing “world of romance—a permanent yet ever-changing exposition, a show-place for visitors.”5 The perception of the department store shifted from a storage place for wares in 1880 to a “show-place” of goods by 1920:  architects and displaymen guided this shift, ensuring that the department store promoted a novel, dual message of flexibility in style and reliability in business while constituting a distinct moment in the economic and cultural lives of commodities. New means and approaches to display drove a momentum across product categories by maximizing visibility and creative presentation while also streamlining the introduction of new stock to the sales floor. This cycle of change, propelled by the renewal process of display design and also carried out at a larger scale via frequent architectural renovation, indicated the department store’s alignment with modernity. Not only was the store different from one visit to the next, there was also a multiplicity contained within the store itself, as departments were often presented as a series of distinct interiors. As such, the department store was a permanent site for the public to view ever-altering spaces of display—“a permanent yet ever-changing exposition.” This impermanence was at once an attractor for consumers and a provocative challenge for the displaymen. Displaymen excelled at a sophisticated and interdisciplinary range of activities across architecture and design and therefore made an impact on many aspects of the retail environment. From the large scale of monumental architecture to the small scale of a hat stand, technologically adept and artistically effective display was a primary objective of the architects, window dressers, shopfitters, and interior designers at work in principal department stores in this era. Architects and shopfitters prioritized display in their buildings and floorplan layouts with large show windows and customized casework. Window dressers and interior designers flattered wares with artistic arrangements, complete with fixtures and visual effects. Plate glass windows, cast iron storefronts, arc lighting, mannequins, rotating stands, and many other components came together in this making, and remaking, of the department store interior. This narrative of display features ephemera—photographs, postcards, pamphlets, and a wealth of other promotional and trade-specific material—in order to provide particular visual and critical access as to how display was created and promoted. These sources also point to the

Marshall Field & Co., The Store of Service: Marshall Field & Co. (Chicago, IL: Marshall Field & Company, ca. 1920), 4. 5

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international network of people, objects, and ideas involved in display’s development. In Chicago, London, and New  York, large-scale retail thrived due to a number of particular economic and cultural factors. These three cities were chosen as case studies because of their distinct significance in the history of retail display and within those cities, most examples will be drawn from the well-known stores because their histories survive in detail and there are few well-documented firms in retailing in this era. Repeated reference to these stores is not meant to suggest that they were the only active department stores. Effort has been made to balance examples between these cities, and any seeming preference is not meant to indicate increased importance. By 1906, Chicago was the distribution center of the United States and the world’s greatest railroad center. The city had an unprecedented amount of goods passing through its transport channels while also supplying the country with a record number of inland exports, mostly furniture. In addition, the Chicago area contained 50,000,000 people with “high buying power” within twelve hours’ ride, the prime target audience for the sophisticated retail setting.6 Modernization of the city’s public transportation greatly increased access to stores and in 1890, at the time of the completion of the main cable car routes to the downtown, it was estimated that 100,000 people passed the display windows along the shopping corridor each day. Leading Chicago department stores central to this study include Schlesinger and Mayer (founded 1872), Carson Pirie Scott (founded 1854), and Mandel Brothers (founded 1855). As Britain’s capital and economic center, London flourished as a shopping hub by the late nineteenth century. From 1888, women were hired to lead shopping trips through the Lady Guide Association.7 Females also authored trusted shopping guides.8 In 1900, the Central Line opened on the London Underground, linking east to west London, followed by Piccadilly Circus station in 1906, bringing patrons to the front door of Swan and Edgar (founded 1812). The store’s competitors included Harrods (founded 1849), Selfridge’s (founded 1909), Whiteley’s (founded 1863), D. H. Evans (founded 1879), and Barker’s (founded 1870). New York’s retail history has its roots in A. T. Stewart who opened as a small drapers in 1823, servicing the prominent dry goods trade that was By 1906, Chicago was first in the wholesale distribution of dry goods and general merchandise in America with an annual dry goods distribution of $600,000,000. Six hundred freight cars yearly hauled away $102,000,000 worth of furniture. Annual inland exports totaled $32,755,419 and exports totaled $70,932,864. Hubert F. Miller, “A Nation of Shopkeepers,” Chicago, The Great Central Market: A Magazine of Business 3 (2) (1906): 31. 7 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 132–41. 8 Florence Waxman, A Shopping Guide to Paris and London (New  York:  McBride, Nast, 1912); Olivia, Olivia’s Shopping and How She Does It:  A Prejudiced Guide, 1906, Reprint (Stroud: Gunpowder, 2009). 6

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one of the city’s great nineteenth-century businesses. The legacy of Stewart’s business impacted the grander stores that followed decades later, including Macy’s (founded 1858), Siegel Cooper (founded 1887), Wanamaker’s (founded 1862), and Lord & Taylor (founded 1826). In 1878, the elevated railway opened on Sixth avenue, bringing shoppers directly to stores along Ladies’ Mile and the Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic in 1883, facilitating access to Abraham & Straus (founded 1867). Alongside other major American cities, New  York expanded rapidly from approximately half a million to around 3.5  million people between 1850 and 1900, many of whom were members of the middle class and the primary consumer base for the growing retail sector. These cities therefore offered the particular financial and creative capital, material resources, professional talent, and attentive audience to further display as both a commercial and artistic pursuit of the department store. While Chicago and New  York were at the forefront of window display, London’s shopfitting industry was unparalleled in its centralization and strength as it benefitted from existing industries that had relevant skills in manufacturing. These three cities were also home to seminal events in the history of the display profession:  The Retail Dry Goods Association formed in New  York in 1895, The National Association of Window Trimmers held its first annual meeting at Chicago in August 1898, and the British Association of Display Men was founded in London in 1919. Focusing on architecture, window displays, shopfittings, and interior decoration expands our understanding of the role of department stores in shaping the modern city. Department stores rose to prominence as urban monuments around which shopping neighborhoods and avenues developed:  State Street in Chicago, Broadway in New  York, and Westbourne Grove and Oxford Street in London, among others. Department stores affected the dynamics of these cities at large by attracting crowds, driving patterns of circulation, and offering daytime as well as nighttime entertainment. Displays drew groups of window shoppers along major retail thoroughfares. As one British female journalist observed upon visiting New York in 1906, “The city of New York, built on a long and very narrow island, suggests the tube of a thermometer, and the population can well be likened to mercury: they fluctuate in a mass, now up, now down, moved by the impelling atmosphere of the shopping centres.”9 The window display was one element in a network of advertisements that enticed city crowds on a regular basis. As historian Lynda Nead has described, amidst the motion of the sandwich boards and delivery cart signage, the show window created “an alternative mapping of the city, tracing

Mrs. John Van Vorst, “The Nation that Shops,” The Pall Mall Magazine, June 1906, 744.

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the contours of commodity capitalism.”10 The speed of the introduction of new commodities was in synch with the motion of the surrounding city, which offered various forms of mobile and highly visible advertisements. The public moved in response to these advertisements; as American author George Cole recounted in 1892, a well-dressed window “indicates progressive ideas, which win the masses—the crowd ever following where life, activity and push are prominent.”11 The show window caught consumers’ attention from the sidewalk and coaxed them to step inside and shop. Thomas A.  Bird, editor of MRSW, distinguished the show window from other promotional methods due to its visual directness: “The newspaper advertisement, the circular, the letter, the catalogue, the bill-board or street-car ad, all say ‘Come to the store and see the goods.’ The show window says, ‘Here they are.’ The show window is absolutely direct—it catches the possible customer at the psychological moment. He is on the spot and it is but a step inside the store and the sale is made.”12 The impact of the show window encouraged an alignment between urban space and time and the circulation of commodities as consumers coordinated their leisure schedules with the unveiling of new merchandise displays. George Rooney, display manager at Brooklyn’s Abraham & Straus in the 1920s, timed the revealing of new show windows with the concentration of evening sidewalk traffic when the public was out enjoying other city amusements. As author William Nelson Taft described in The Handbook of Window Display, Mr. Rooney and his staff begin to change their windows about 4:30 in the afternoon, an hour before the store closes. The work continued until possibly 6 or 6:30 PM. In this way, Mr. Rooney believes that, while the changes are being made, he strikes the masses as they are hurrying home with little thought of a window display on their mind and, later in the evening when the change has been completed, the crowds leaving their homes to go to the theatres, moving pictures or other amusements are attracted to the beautiful and fresh window settings.13 10 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 58. 11 George S. Cole, A Complete Dictionary, of Dry Goods and History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool and Other Fibrous Substances, Including a Full Explanation of the Modern Processes of Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving, with an Appendix Containing a Treatise on Window Trimming, German Words and Phrases, with Their English Pronunciation and Signification, Together with Various Useful Tables (Chicago, IL: W. B. Conkey, 1892), 470. 12 Thomas A. Bird,“Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” in Library of Advertising: Show Window Display and Specialty Advertising, vol. 4, ed. A. P. Johnson (Chicago, IL: Cree Pub. Co., 1911), 11. 13 William Nelson Taft, The Handbook of Window Display (New  York:  McGraw-Hill, 1926), 39.

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Rooney aligned his disclosure of new window display designs with other already established patterns of urban activity in order to maximize their impact. Displays not only decorated but also demarcated one business from the next; they aided in shoppers’ navigation of the city and identification of their desired destination. One New York guidebook, Selling Service with the Goods, pointed to the use of window displays as landmarks: Never change the window display on Monday or Tuesday. Experience has shown that many people who see show windows Saturday evening and Sundays very often go out on Monday or Tuesday to buy something that attracted them when seen. If the windows are changed, they may be unable to locate the store, and hence a sale is lost. Thursday or Friday is a better day to change the windows.14 This advice detects consumers’ close attention to window arrangements, particularly when strolling the city on weekend evenings. The author also notes pedestrians’ use of display style as a memory aid to structure their shopping itinerary. When in 1891 the Chicago City Council sought to force Marshall Field’s to scale down its new show windows, which encroached on the sidewalk beyond the building line, the outraged editor of the Dry Goods Economist responded that far from being an impediment, “the windows are an ornament to the street.”15 Thus, the show window emerged as a site of focused merchandise presentation and artistic and cultural expression. Linking these three cities together through the specific lens of display will diversify and enrich the cross-Atlantic story of the department store beyond the well-established narrative of the American Harry Selfridge bringing his American store to Oxford Street in London in 1909. A few distinct examples will here reveal how display, as a new priority in the department store model at the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged the international exchange of merchandising ideas and methods. Displaymen traveled abroad to gain new ideas and receive training just as literature on visual merchandising was distributed and read globally.16 For instance, in February of 1898, the American periodical The Show Warren Olmstead Woodward and George A. Fredericks, Selling Service with the Goods (New York: James A. McCann, 1921), 128. 15 Dry Goods Economist, January 10, 1891, 28, quoted in Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving, 70. 16 One particularly amazing example reaches all the way to Australia: In 1901, The Brisbane Courier reported that The “American decorator” Frank L. Carr “comes from America and the land of new ideas and he is at present engaged on a tour of the world . . . He has earned some glowing tributes in all parts of the United States and Europe, besides the principal cities of Australia.” The author of several publications, Carr’s most influential work The Wide Awake 14

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11

Window sent a correspondent “to photograph the window decorations of all the European capitals.”17 A monthly column featured his findings along with his photographs. One American paper reported in 1902 that Germany and other European nations had recently been sending executives to America to study “western trade methods” and “to make an especial study of the art of window dressing as it has been developed in Chicago, as a means not only of adding beauty to a city but of attracting trade.”18 In 1914, the merchandise manager of Selfridge’s visited Lord & Taylor in New York.19 And in 1926, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that executives of thirty-three leading department stores of various German cities began “a study of business methods as practiced in Philadelphia, for the purpose of learning new systems of efficiency.”20 The executives visited Wanamaker’s, Strawbridge and Clothier, Lit Brothers, the Sesquicentennial Exposition Grounds, and Gimbel Brothers. These entrepreneurs were in fact following the paths of their wealthiest patrons, who shopped between department stores and attended fairs all over the globe and keenly compared them. The development of retail architecture was also global in scope as leading architects built departments stores around the world. For instance, Daniel Burnham, famous for his masterminding of the design and construction of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, also worked in Chicago on the Marshall Field and Company building (1902), in New  York on John Wanamaker’s (1906) and Gimbel’s (1909), and in London he oversaw Selfridge’s (1908–9).21 Department store executives visited their competition on surveillance missions to marvel at merchandise, observe inner workings, and note successful methods, bringing back ideas to implement in their home cities. In 1909, Mr. John Lawrie, the managing director of Whiteley’s

Window Dresser sold 6,000 copies in the United States and 1,200 in England. “Frank L. Carr, An American Decorator,” The Brisbane Courier, May 15, 1901, 7. 17 “Our European Correspondent,” The Show Window, February 1898, 85. In that same year, The Show Window eagerly reported how the British Drapers’ Record had begun to reproduce designs published in the American periodical, to which the British journalists paid the following compliment: “the success which has so far attended this publication affords in itself indisputable evidence of the enterprise of Americans, who have been quick to recognize its utility . . . it faithfully reflects the progress made in the art of window-dressing.” “A Great Trade Paper,” The Show Window, October 1898, 183. 18 “Art of Window Dressing—Artistic Trimmers Are Born, Not Made—Experts Well Paid,” Saint Paul Globe, May 12, 1902, 14. 19 “Where Ideas Come From,” MRSW, July 1914, 28. 20 “33 Germans Here Studying Stores,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 23, 1926; Large Black Scrapbook Series, vol. 20–50, John Wanamaker Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society. 21 The architect Daniel Burnham was in part responsible for the widespread execution of classical revival styling. In its loose appropriation of a range of classical styles and symbols, the department store carried on the visual language of the world’s fair and embodied this new architecture of display.

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Designing the Department Store

in London, embarked on a five weeks’ trip to America “with the express purpose of studying the buildings of the great stores of the States” in preparation for his store’s upcoming remodeling.22 Upon his return Mr. Lawrie surmised, “For a big store, I  hardly think it would be possible to improve upon the Marshall Field building in Chicago.”23 The light-filled dome at the new Whiteley’s was no doubt inspired by the remarkable mosaic dome designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany for Marshall Field’s in Chicago, which upon completion in 1902 became the largest glass mosaic in the world, composed of 1,600,000 pieces of iridescent glass.24 Congratulatory correspondence between major department store directors at the time of new buildings and openings survives in archives as evidence of the international conversation and awareness around the growth and modernization of retail architecture.25 Examining the shopfitting trade within the context of exhibition culture reveals and reinforces the international nature of the industry. The Detroit Showcase Company, for instance, made a specialty of “knocked down” showcases for export. In 1915, the Dun’s Review reported on this technological breakthrough:  “The fact that they can be shipped flat, thus saving freight and eliminating the risk of breakage, should appeal especially to foreign buyers.”26 In order to actively promote shopfitting as an American industry and assert its potential as an exportable skill and craft, the National Commercial Fixtures Manufacturers Association formed in 1912. At its second annual meeting in Chicago, sixty fixture manufacturers from all parts of the country attended.27

“Mr. John Lawrie’s Visit to the States: The Style of Building Most Suitable for a Large Store,” The Drapers’ Record, September 11, 1909, 637–8. The article reported, “In all probability Messrs. Whiteley will shortly be making considerable extensions to their Queen’s-road premises, and the directorate are desirous of erecting a new building which will be second to none in London.” 23 Ibid., 637. 24 The dome was compared by a local art critic to the nave of St. Peter’s in Rome. See Marjorie Rosenberg, “A Sad Heart at the Department Store,” American Scholar 54 (Spring 1985):  183. Such metaphors reveal how visitors drew visual connections between grand spaces across international borders and perceived the power of architecture to impact the retail environment. 25 See notes of congratulation sent to Abraham Straus on the occasion of his store’s opening on November 8, 1902: Letter from the New York Times; Letter from B. Altman; Telegram from B. Altman; Telegram from Saks & Co.; and Telegram from Jules S. Ehrich that survive in the Macy’s Archive, 8B Box 10. The New  York Times offers particular congratulations on “the magnitude of your establishment, its perfect organization and marvelous system and wonder in this age of colossal industrial undertakings.” 26 The article also invoked the shopfitting trade’s popular “half sold” and “silent salesman” language of the period: “Goods are half sold when attractively displayed. A good showcase is a silent salesman that is always on duty.” “Show Cases ‘Knocked Down’ for Export,” Dun’s Review, January 1915, 98. 27 “Fixture Manufacturers Meet,” MRSW, March 1913, 43. 22

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Contributing to the History of the Department Store In calling attention to the stylistic development and impact of department store display, my research builds on the pioneering scholarship of William Leach and Leonard Marcus, as well as the more recent publications of William Bird and Louisa Iarocci.28 Bringing together an international group of case studies, Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, edited by Anca Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, combines the examination of architecture, interior design, display design, and more to create, for one of the first times, a more complete picture of the advancement of the design of the department store and its crossovers with other areas of cultural production.29 This edited volume’s introduction also gives a thorough overview of recent histories of visual merchandising, written from multiple perspectives, including architecture and design.30 Tracing the behind-the-scenes construction process of display will draw attention to a set of overlooked design practices in the department store since most of the existing research has evaluated and pictured display as complete. Therefore, an emphasis on the architects and designers and their complicated processes of making offers an alternative to the mainstream focus on consumption within retail history. Considering the department store as a locus of design production, innovation, and professionalization connects it to a larger narrative within the history of design. This message of design production was in fact promoted by the stores themselves; a Marshall Field & Company pamphlet offers this evocative imagery of its store as “a blending of forge, shop and factory; armies at work; muscle, steam, electricity, sawing, sewing, hammering, fashioning; millinery and furs, sweetmeats and jewelry, shoes and shirts; draperies and dresses; the world condensed—its sciences, arts and crafts interwoven into a wonderful tapestry called ‘Merchandise.’ ”31 Herein department store merchandise was advertised as the complex product of different types of simultaneous activity and fabrication that many readers might have more easily associated with the “forge” or “factory” rather than the “shop” itself.

William Leach, Land of Desire:  Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New  York:  Pantheon, 1993); Leonard Marcus, The American Store Window (New  York:  Whitney Library of Design, 1979); William L. Bird, Holidays on Display (Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, 2007); Louisa Iarocci, Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 29 Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty, eds. Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail (New York: Routledge, 2017). 30 Ibid., 4–5. 31 Marshall Field & Company, The Store of Service, 2. 28

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Designing the Department Store

Displaymen are the protagonists of this narrative.32 These designers absorbed various influences, ranging from art and travel to the theater and current events, in order to create merchandise presentations that drew attention to their skilled practice and the visionary ambition of the store at large. Display designs communicated a range of messages; an abundance of goods celebrated industrial proficiency, gendered themes directly addressed the independent female consumer, and styling exhibited an alignment with modern art. By identifying crossovers in training, lexicon, and guiding principles, links emerge between display and the burgeoning fields of industrial design, interior design, and commercial art in the early twentieth century that have so far been insufficiently explored. The multidimensional nature of the work was in part a result of the display profession’s creation as a combination of existing skill sets and design vocations, which led to future developments in related fields. As Penny Sparke has explained, industrial designers of the late 1920s and 1930s “demonstrated the way in which the commercial design profession was dependent on earlier visualizing work undertaken in the contexts of commerce and spectacle” including that of window and retail display.33 Hybrid terms such as “commercial artist” and “industrial designer” that developed in the early twentieth century reflected an attempt to reconcile compatibilities between art and commerce and design and industry, all of which displaymen initiated. The primary research material that underpins this investigation of the design of the department store includes firsthand designer accounts, newspaper articles, architectural renderings, shopfitting catalogs, window dressing guidebooks, publicity photographs, postcards, store opening and anniversary pamphlets, display periodicals, advertisements, and more. Clippings from retail periodicals and newspaper articles on display are frequently present in department store archives, often stored in scrapbooks assembled by the businesses themselves. The frequent use of many examples and quotations from these sources is deliberate and is meant to convey the energy, speed, and internationally shared rhetoric around the department stores’ display practices. An examination of manufacturer catalogs and display guidebooks will underscore the precise and technical nature of making displays. Guidebooks

The gendered nature of the term points to the profession’s male majority. While many women worked in other paid positions within the department store ranks, most notably in sales, and increasingly took up remunerative work within other art industries, display was, for the most part, not an available pursuit for a female at the turn of the twentieth century. For analysis of the range of literary and artistic professions pursued by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013). 33 Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2004), 59. 32

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Introduction

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demonstrate how designers as authors represented their skills and laid claim to techniques. While advice literature can often be idealistic (and therefore misleading), the majority of the advice literature for the display field was practical and implemented in well-known department stores. Following from Louisa Iarocci’s work on visual merchandising, I shall seek “to challenge that scholarly ambivalence that often celebrates the spectacle but denies the agenda of consumerism.”34 By charting the impact of advice literature onto realized displays, direct links will be identified between prescription and practice. In addition, a thorough review of press coverage will uncover how consumers’ fascination with the display’s assembly and technology was crucial to its success as a modern marketing strategy. These sources also provide an understanding as to how and when strategies and styles of merchandising traveled between Chicago, London, and New York. Department stores were great publishers and promoters of their own histories, producing a vast amount of text and imagery, and in some cases, assembling their own archives, which have preserved, among the many aspects of department store culture, the work of their display staff. Pictures of department store exteriors and interiors decorated fans, served as the subjects for postcards, improved advertisements, and validated successful growth in manufacturers’ catalogs. Ephemera was produced to meet an immediate need often tied to a one-time event. These characteristics made it a fitting format for the transitory medium of display. Illustrated pamphlets offered a tour through the store in order to provide a preview of the interiors, encouraging the recipients to engage their powers of imagination while motivating them to visit in person.35 The imagery indicated the store’s display agenda and pictured the customers’ potential experience. These artifacts are in fact cases of doubled mediation; this printed and photographic material promotes the store’s promotional techniques. No matter the style of the window display, changeability and ephemerality were absolutely central to the design’s success. Thomas A.  Bird, editor of MRSW, observed, “Some of the opening displays that have been designed by decorators for the big department stores are works of art as perfect as any to be found in art galleries; yet they are built to last but two or three weeks, and are then torn out to make room for something else. That is one of the unsatisfactory features of the window dresser’s work—his achievements leave behind no lasting record.”36 In fact, the lasting record is indeed the

Iarocci, Visual Merchandising, 1. Penny Sparke similarly critiques, “While the modern urban experience has been described in terms of the high level of spectacle visible to city dwellers, most accounts have privileged its reception rather than its production or its designed components.” Sparke, Introduction to Design and Culture, 14. 35 For more on illustrated guides, see Paul Dobraszczyk, “City Reading: The Design and Use of Nineteenth-Century London Guidebooks,” Journal of Design History 25 (2012): 123–44. 36 Bird, “Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” 22. 34

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Designing the Department Store

ephemera that survives as a valuable documentation of the skill and artistry of the displaymen. The picture postcard, a favorite medium for department store promotion, often featured architectural and interior design imagery and the new narratives of consumption that they offered.37 Augmented with text, picture postcards preserve narrative firsthand accounts of how department store visitors navigated new shopping experiences, which they chose to record and share. In a postcard, mailed in June of 1907, the imagery captured the department store’s alternative messages of permanence and impermanence (Figure 0.3, see also Plate 3 in the plate section). An image of the exterior of Marshall Field’s monumental building that occupied an entire city block expressed enduring grandiosity. The postcard also chronicled a fleeting moment, emphasized by the card’s phrase “Time flies fast, not long a day; Briefly I write to save delay.” In haste, the sender filled in the blanks to communicate descriptions of their mood in a “trance,” the “divine” scenery, and “bright” prospects, all of these feelings and observations that were brought on by the design of the department store, including the architecture, and even the surroundings where the sender was likely seated in the store’s writing room. This brief moment of “loafing,” as the card shares, was meant for the writing and sending of postcards as quick impressions of the new shopping experience. Photographs, illustrations, descriptions, and text captured these short-lived moments of display’s impact. This examination of the design of display yields a few key findings on the people, spaces, materials, tools, and techniques that contributed to the historical impact of the department store. First, foregrounding the perspective of the displayman will bring to light how these designers created and shared design concepts within the field internationally while pursuing a determined program of professional development. The settings in which the display profession developed—basement and attic workshops, behind plate glass and in the salesroom, the factory floor of manufacturers, and the annual conventions of organizations—will form the primary sites of this investigation, taking readers into new spaces to tell the history of the department store. The display designers occupied the middle space between production and consumption, making up one of the first generations of individuals whom historian Regina Blaszcyck has called “fashion intermediaries” or networks of business professionals who “studied the marketplace, collected data about consumer taste, created products to meet public expectations and promoted them.”38 In this case, the product was the design for the merchandise display itself. The picture postcard was born during the World’s Columbian Exposition and its true growth came after July 1, 1898, when Congress granted privately printed postcards the same one-cent mailing privileges given to government cards. Neil Harris, “Urban Tourism and the Commercial City,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William Robert Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 72. 38 Regina Blaszcyck, Producing Fashion:  Commerce, Culture, and Consumers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6. 37

17

FIGURE 0.3  Suhling & Koehn Co., Postcard, “Greetings from Chicago,” postmarked June 8, 1907. Courtesy Cardcow.com.

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Designing the Department Store

Second, the display moment in the life of the commodity emerges as a distinct and professionally styled phase of mediation that takes place between production and consumption within the retail context. The display moment actively managed the meeting points between the consumer and the product on the sales floor. The department store is a complex space and its display practices and culture need theoretical framing. Grace Lees-Maffei has recently drawn attention to mediation, the third element in a paradigm with production and consumption, as its own stream within design history, arguing that “mediating channels are themselves designed and therefore open to design historical analysis.” The designing, making, and presentation elements of the display process were fundamental to the entrance of goods into the market; for this reason, the display moment can be thought of as constituting commodities as such. Display had its own context and communicated its own message, anchored often neither in the production nor the use of the product itself. The significance of a display was not based in the value of its individual items but instead the overall visual impact and physical presence of the arrangement. Since mass production supplied stores with many of the same items, display played an important role in convincing consumers to purchase them at one store over another. This concept of the display moment in the life of the commodity will serve as a key analytical tool. Within the framework of the department store, display was such an essential condition of objects being on view, and therefore active in the marketplace, that display can be interpreted as defining the transition from object to commodity. Staff transformed everyday objects into attractive commodities, worthy of their price once on the salesfloor. As American industrial designer George Nelson wrote in his book Display in 1956, “The word ‘display’ comes from a Latin root which means to unfold or to spread out. As used by us, in a variety of situations, it always conveys the idea of calling someone’s attention to something by showing it in a conspicuous way.”39 Displaymen enticed consumers through acts as simple as elevating hats on a well-lit stand or acts as complex as incorporating hundreds of handkerchiefs into a sculptural arrangement. This new treatment on the sales floor assigned new meaning to goods depending on how they were grouped together and presented. In extreme cases of imaginative transformation, the signification of the object could change entirely once it entered the marketplace, for instance when toothbrushes became the hands of a clock in a commodity picture in a show window. Displaymen facilitated this shift from thing to commodity. Marx famously recognized “a form of magic in the material transformations that capitalism performed,” such as wood worked to make a table, which “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other

George Nelson, Display (New York: Whitney Publications, 1953), 6.

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Introduction

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commodities, it stands on its head.”40 Marx highlights the transformative moment when an object moves from a “common every-day thing” to “something transcendent” as it enters the marketplace and assumes a new relevance “in relation to all other commodities.” The displayman designed and executed this transformation of the everyday object into a commodity and his tools and techniques made the “magic” possible. While Marx does not account for the labor involved with this commodification process, he does call attention to the particular stage in the life of an object when it is placed “in relation to all other commodities.”41 Displaymen created and managed this stage. Third, the department store was an active space of design production in which this display moment in the life of the commodity evolved through complex architectural plans, arrangement schemes, themes, and interior layouts that were conceived in concert in order to achieve unique and preconceived results. An evaluation of the labor of display will reveal how displaymen encouraged consumers to pay attention to the strategy and timing behind the design of the retail space. Whether in conspicuous view of the consumers or more often hidden from them, the planning and execution of the exhibition of commodities was of increasing consumer intrigue. Some stores practiced “open dressing” that made the process of the window display into a show of its own, while others executed the displays during offhours or behind a curtain to dramatize the anticipation for the new show. Addressing display design as a process sheds new light on materials and technologies and reveals how elements of infrastructure, shopfittings, decorations, and the merchandise itself came together under the direction of display professionals. The work of turning objects into commodities prompted new curiosity, expectations, and attention toward the construction and style of display. New facets of the design of the department store will be identified in the tools of the window dressers and interior designers— the shopfittings, or the objects that filled the salesfloor that were not for sale and instead accelerated the sale. Fixtures climbed walls and hung from ceilings to bring merchandise to new heights, and glass-walled and mirrored casework showed off goods in three dimensions; meanwhile, pulley systems swiftly raised new display schemes, fully assembled, from the basement into the show window. Such retail technologies and display strategies advanced with turnover and restyling as primary goals. The clever use of shopfittings, ranging from small stands to extensive rows of casework, guided consumers’ movement and vision, modernized the interior, and organized and optimized the experience of shopping on a grand scale.

Karl Marx, Capital:  A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163f. 41 Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 27–30. 40

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Designing the Department Store

Primary research, especially in design guidebooks and textbooks, points to a canon of window display types that were presented to the public from the late nineteenth century onward. From the mid-nineteenth century, when the show window was even used as a storage space and as a means of keeping stock that was seldom wanted inside the store, to very abstract designs of the 1920s, the medium underwent a dramatic development.42 Window display design registered the style of the period in which it was produced; one can observe how the density of the Victorian era, as exemplified in the “stocky window” mode, was refined in the early twentieth century with the introduction of the “unit principle” and then further abstracted under the influences of modern art by 1920. As window display grew increasingly sophisticated, consumer attention expanded beyond just the commodities, which were the only subject of the stocky window, to the manual expertise, props, and new technologies at work that made possible a range of new window display arrangements. Although retail displays’ stylistic relatives can be found in other exhibition contexts such as world’s fairs, trade expositions, and the theatre, many of the window dresser’s techniques for the manipulation of textiles and the building and combining of goods were for merchandising purposes only. This distinction makes it possible to isolate the display moment in the life of the commodity and study it as a discrete phase of design production. Fourth, the agency of display shaped the visual character and physical conditions of the marketplace while conditioning new and particular consumer behaviors. From the late nineteenth century, consumers paid increasing attention to context. The public, when entering a store, increasingly judged objects along with their surroundings, whether that be at the scale of the shelf on which they were sitting or the building in which they were housed. In 1893 retail expert Nathaniel Fowler advised, “In buying nowadays, appearance is not necessarily everything, but it has a great deal to do with the consummation of trade. A customer looking for a chair, or anything else, and finding that chair in an uninviting position, surrounded by nothing of eye-pleasing character, may buy the chair, but he is more likely to purchase it somewhere else, where the chair has a proper setting.”43 Sophisticated display techniques introduced new ways of viewing and evaluating objects within staged interiors, around an associated theme, or supported by an elaborate framework of technologies.

G. L. Timmins, Window Dressing:  The Principles of Display (London:  Sir Issac Pitman, 1922), xiii. In 1913, the British author W. B. Dingley lamented, “There still appear to be many tradesmen who cannot be made to see the value and importance of the shop window: who just go on using it as a store cupboard, a place in which to deposit a load of goods when not wanted at the moment.” See W. B. Dingley, “The Value of the Shop Window,” The Imprint, April 1913, 257. 43 Nathaniel C. Fowler, Building Business: An Illustrated Manual for Aggressive Business Men (Boston: The Trade Co., 1893), 43. 42

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This concept of arrangement that prioritized the presentation of commodities in an artistic format was analyzed by important theorists including Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel. Upon a visit to the Berlin Trade Exhibition in 1896, Simmel observed “the aesthetic output of the exhibition principle” in “what could be termed the shop-window quality of things, a characteristic which the exhibition accentuates.”44 Here Simmel identifies the display practice as celebrating “enticing external appearance,” which he describes as tied to its relevance in the retail context with the terminology “shop-window.” Simmel pinpoints display’s role in accomplishing the exhibitionary demand to garner attention “by means of the external attraction of the object, even indeed by the means of the form of its arrangement.”45 When combined, these arrangements made up the overall “enticing external appearance” of the department store itself. Due to increased use of shopfittings, consumers became progressively attuned to not only what the stores were selling but also how they were selling it. Shopfittings also prescribed the actions of shoppers by guiding particular patterns of vision and movement. Historian Erica Rappaport defines the late nineteenth-century female shopper as an “ambulatory figure” who “excited those who could profit from, control, or at least direct her movements.”46 The shopfitters were precisely “those who could profit from, control, or at least direct her movements.” The American shopfitting firm Hugh Lyons & Company chose the slogan “make buyers out of passersby,” implying that, as its advertising copy stated, “Hugh Lyons fixtures will help to make your windows more profitable.”47 Fixtures helped to concentrate consumers’ attention on specific ranges of merchandise, which was the first step in making a sale. This phrase, “make buyers out of passersby,” was a popular one used globally, often by fixtures companies or journalists, to emphasize the agency of display design.48 Shopfittings, and display at large, thus significantly altered the browsing and selection process. The major exchange was no longer a personal one between the customer and the salesperson but instead an elaborately mediated one, via the shopfittings, between the customer and the commodity arrangement. Casework and stands allowed visual access to wares, whereby, similar to the show window, consumers could shop by just looking and without touching. These fixtures exhibited agency as “silent salesmen” and Georg Simmel, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition,” in ed. Georg Simmel, David Frisby, and Mike Featherstone, Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: Sage, 1997), 257. 45 Ibid. 46 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 23. 47 Advertisement, “Hugh Lyons & Company,” MRSW, July 1920, 2. 48 The cover for the French shopfitting firm Siégel & Hommey pictures a huge hand reaching out to grab a man passing by a show window and bears the phrase “Une belle vitrine, un bel étalage arretent le passant et l’engagent a acheter.” Siégel & Hommey, Étalages Vitrines et Accessoires pour Tous Commerces, Paris, bound book with printed paper, 1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 44

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Designing the Department Store

animated the shopping experience. They also lessened the need for assistants behind the counter, while setting up opportunities for self-service. As the department store’s philosophy of ephemerality threatens its very existence today, this book will frame a retrospective look at how this retail revolution, driven and determined by the power of display, was set into motion. Chapters are organized around the four design professionals and display spaces that conditioned how consumers interacted visually and physically with merchandise. The first chapter reveals how retail architecture emerged as a specific design practice as merchandising challenges and possibilities became new and particular responsibilities of the architecture profession. The second chapter explores how window displays showcased the creative skills and tools of the developing window dressing profession. Window dressing earned new recognition as a skilled activity, valued internally by the department stores, recognized publicly by passersby, and praised in the international press. The third chapter highlights the role of the shopfitter in facilitating provocative interactions between people, both employees and the public, and the merchandise. The final chapter shows how the interior decorators devised a new format for the retail environment that thrived on speed and fragmentation that had never before been experienced to such an extreme in the mercantile sphere. Across these sectors, professional designers, operating under a set of principles in line with business thinking and retail philosophy, used customized tools and techniques to continually create, and re-create, artistically and financially successful display in the department store.

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1 Retail Architecture

The Visibility of Construction and Renovation While contrasting regulations in building codes determined a number of notable divergences in the development of department store architecture in America and Britain, architects in both countries aimed to achieve a similarly symbolic yet highly functional and enticing type of building. Retail architecture emerged as a specific design practice, driven by goals of light, circulation, organization, visibility, and modernization. Architects developed the ideal plans for a building explicitly designed to accelerate the viewing and purchasing of merchandise. Windows grew, aisles widened, vistas expanded, lighting intensified, and the movement of goods and people quickened. The buildings’ impressions from the street were of utmost importance since the department store thrived on foot traffic. Even though many shared characteristics can be identified in the architecture of leading department stores in Chicago, London, and New York, stores also individually advocated for how their architecture’s particularly evocative style and efficiency set their shopping experience apart. Marshall Field’s had its Tiffany glass dome; Selfridge’s offered its visitors a ride in an elevator with bronze and cast-iron scenes of the Zodiac; Macy’s had its wooden escalator. While architecture developed at the service of display needs, architectural milestones also provided the impetus to advertise, celebrate with new displays, and invite the public for appraisal of the new shopping space. In 1898, the London department store D. H. Evans grew with the purchase of 308 Oxford Street. An account book of that year lists that a blanket show took place to celebrate when the new shopfronts were completed on the week of October 15. A store-wide inauguration sale quickly followed on the week of October 29.1 Alignment between architectural upgrading and visual merchandising signaled the currency of the business’s identity. Private Book of Weekly Figures, FRAS 374/1, Records of D. H. Evans & Co., Ltd., House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow. 1

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Architecture was a leading component in the department store’s promotional agenda not only as a stylistic statement and a source of civic pride but also as a technological marvel. Advertisements emphasized progress and speed with stores’ building programs by comparing characteristics of the most recent iteration of a store against previous inferior facilities. For instance, an advertisement published on October 10, 1903, for the fast approaching opening of the new Schlesinger and Mayer store in the Chicago Tribune summoned the public to take the role of architectural spectators (Figure  1.1). The advertisement positioned the building, a “perfect product of architecture and building construction,” as central to the earning of “public confidence” and the enabling of the optimal shopping experience.2 The advertisement featured the rounded façade, characterized by Louis Sullivan’s cast-iron ornament at its entrance, second-floor show windows, and towering twelve stories. A  group of customers at ground level appear overshadowed by the building’s magnitude, designed to impress. The advertisement invited the reader “to inspect our multiplied facilities” and included a list of “distinctive features” promoting foremost “the corner circular entrance, mahogany and marble fixtures, new combination arc and incandescent lights” and the “largest and finest display windows in the world.” This list of technological elements and luxurious stylistic attributes enumerated Schlesinger and Mayer’s commitment to a modern retail environment. The advertisement’s tag line, “In Two Days Another Great New Store,” was embedded with a message of reinvention and anticipation, promising a new retail experience soon. The architecture of the department store facilitated a modern shopping experience via industrial and technical ingenuity, up-to-date styling, and most conspicuously, a nearly constant cycle of renovation propelled by design production and innovation. As Lewis Mumford has written, “If the vitality of an institution may be gauged by its architecture, the department store was one of the most vital institutions of the era.”3 Upon the opening of Lord & Taylor’s new building at 20th and Broadway in 1871, a New York newspaper reported, “It has been said that no one could have the best house in New  York for more than a day; for, by the time it was done, somebody would be putting up a better one.”4 The world’s fair also helped Schlesinger & Mayer, Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1903, 5. The advertising copy read, “A commercial institution, to endure, must be rooted in the rock of public confidence . . . We shall open to the public on Monday October 12, a great new store. The building is the newest and, we believe, the most beautiful in Chicago. Equipment and contents are in perfect harmony with the structure. The policy pervading the whole is as broad as the institution is beautiful and complete. Thus equipped, we believe we can, as never before, give to the shopping public that absolute satisfaction which begets confidence.” 3 Lewis Mumford quoted in Hrant Pasdermadjian, The Department Store:  Its Origins, Evolution, and Economics (London: Newman), 24. 4 “The New Building of Lord and Taylor,” Christian Union, October 1, 1870, 2. 2

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FIGURE 1.1  Schlesinger & Mayer, Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1903, 5. Courtesy Chicago Tribune Archive.

to shape a new understanding of architecture as a symbolic yet temporary display feature.5 On the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the In 1904, an article in the American Arts & Crafts entrepreneur and furniture maker Gustav Stickley’s The Craftsman magazine praised the World’s Columbian Exposition for its “indication of architectural possibilities.” The author identified that “the buildings, erected for temporary 5

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endurance of the Beaux Arts style was at odds with the exhibition’s limited existence, a dialectic with which the department store also contended. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the construction sites of commerce were the grounds for real estate battles. Stores were in constant competition to expand as rapidly, efficiently, and impressively as possible. The department store’s ongoing construction process was an act of design production that featured in the department store’s advertising scheme as well as contributed to the vital qualities of the department store experience. Retail architecture therefore should not be read in isolation but instead as one element in the department store’s changeable program of display along with the show window and interior and exterior decorations. The swelling scale of these buildings came at a price and the cost of centrally located Manhattan property rose sharply at the turn of the twentieth century; for instance, a typical 100-by-25-foot lot along Fifth Avenue cost $125,000 in 1901, $300,000 in 1906, and $350,000 to 400,000 in 1907.6 Therefore, architectural development became an increasingly strong measure of financial success over time. The expansion rate of Abraham & Straus is particularly telling of the ambitious pace at which this expansion took place. When the store first opened as a small dry goods shop in Brooklyn in 1865, its dimensions were 25 by 90 feet, the same size as the food shop alone within the larger department store of 1965.7 Abraham & Straus underwent twenty-eight expansions in its first one hundred years.8 In both America and Britain, stores illustrated their architectural expansion in advertisements to prove financial prowess and promise stylistic evolution.9 For instance, in its in-house periodical, the Harrodian Gazette, Harrods ran an illustration in 1913 with the headline “The Progress of Harrods,” showing the genealogy of the department store’s architectural history through its six buildings, up to its current home location in Knightsbridge. Retail architecture’s construction affected urban life in a number of significant ways. As retail districts emerged, the construction of stores dramatically altered the nature of neighborhoods. Fifth Avenue experienced an incredible overhaul in the early twentieth century, transitioning from a residential district of brownstones to large lots upon which department stores B.  Altman (1905–10), Bonwit Teller (1911), and Lord and Taylor (1914) stood.10 The visibility of stores’ construction processes conspicuously purposes, were necessarily shams; but they were frank, and, in spite of their structure, educative to the majority of the visitors.” E. M. Bangs, “The Revival of Handicraft,” The Craftsman, May 1904, 190. 6 Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 25. 7 Press Release:  The Pioneering in Abraham & Straus’ First Century, Feb 14, 1865–Feb 14, 1965, 1, ARC.223, Box 1, Folder 2, Abraham & Straus Collection. 8 Press Release:  The First Century of Abraham & Straus, 1, Abraham & Straus Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society. 9 “The Progress of Harrods,” Harrodian Gazette, April 4, 1913, 21, Harrods Archive. 10 Page, Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940, 25–6.

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indicated cities’ growth in the retail sector, while also signaling to passersby the promises of new display possibilities and amenities. As the Dry Goods Economist reported in 1902, “Probably the majority of ECONOMIST readers are familiar with the exterior plans of the new Macy store, having seen it in its unfinished condition on their visits to New  York.”11 At times of expansion while construction on other areas of the store was underway, stores aimed to keep as much of their selling spaces as accessible and functional as possible. These circumstances put new demands on the architectural and engineering professions, further complicating the existing technological challenges of erecting a tall, fireproof, steel-framed structure. During the building of Mandel’s department store’s major construction project in Chicago in 1912, the south section was in continuous use until the new north section could be used12 (Figure  1.2). Therefore, shopping and construction occurred side by side, making the building’s renovation a highly visible and audible element of the shopping experience. From the perspective of the city dweller, the grandiosity of the department store represented a merging of existing cultural institutions. The New York World reported on December 19, 1886, that the Macy’s building was so large and sprawling that “one is at a loss to tell where it begins or where it ends. It is a bazaar, a museum, a hotel, and a great fancy store all combined.”13 In the stores’ immense proportions, the totality of their contents, and symbolic representation of urban modernity, the store embodied the city itself. One critic equated A. T. Stewart with the city of New York so closely that he wrote, “Mr. Stewart, indeed, cannot be ‘advertised’ in the ordinary meaning of that word; you might as well advertise the city of New York.”14 American author “Macy & Co.’s New Store,” Dry Goods Economist, November 15, 1902, 19, 8B Box 10, Macy’s Archive. Yet another example can be found in an article on the opening of the new Siegel Cooper “shopping resort” in 1896. A journalist remarked, “Some of the features of the vast establishment have been for weeks familiar to the public. Architecturally, the building is a distinct gain to the shopping district.” See “Big Store Thrown Open: A Dress Rehearsal at the New Shopping Resort,” New York Times, September 13, 1896, 16. 12 Hope Edwin Reum, “Methods Used in Erecting a Modern Department Store in Chicago” (BS thesis, University of Illinois, 1913), 1. In 1913, this building project served as the focus for a thesis in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. The student explained that Mandel’s building, a “modern, fireproof eighteen-story department store,” was built in Chicago under these “rather unusual conditions,” in which the building remained as an operational place of business while it was also a building site. The use of a temporary retaining wall and cribbing supports during excavation were two technological advancements that made the Mandel’s expansion possible. 13 New  York World, December 19, 1886, cited in Ralph M. Hower, History of Macy’s of New  York, 1858–1919:  Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 164. 14 “A Monument of Trade,” The Galaxy, January 1870, 101 quoted in Jay E. Cantor, “A Monument of Trade: A. T. Stewart and the Rise of the Millionaire’s Mansion in New York,” Winterthur Portfolio 10 (1975): 195. For similar discussion regarding Wertheim in Berlin, see Helen Shiner, “Embodying the Spirit of the Metropolis: The Warenhaus Wertheim, Berlin, 1896– 1904,” in Modernism and the Spirit of the City, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte (New York: Routledge, 2003), 100. 11

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FIGURE 1.2  Mandel’s Department Store, Corner of State and Madison Streets, Chicago, May 12, 1911, in Hope Edwin Reum, “Methods Used in Erecting a Modern Department Store in Chicago” (BS thesis, University of Illinois, 1913). Courtesy Archive.org; Digitized by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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FIGURE 1.3  Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Marshall Field & Co.’s Store,” postmarked May 1, 1906. Author’s collection.

Frances Waxman referred to examples of this new large-scale purpose-built retail architecture as “store cities” in A Shopping Guide to Paris and London in 1912.15 Marshall Field’s offered a view “one block long”; meanwhile, Siegel Cooper referred to its main aisle as a “broad central avenue.” The department store utilized the postcard to reinforce its dominance in the cityscape and interconnectedness with the urban layout. Historian Neil Harris explains, “Most significant is that the postcard ordered the urban landscape unlike anything that had preceded it—a landscape filled with commercial structures and human transactions.”16 In 1906, Marshall Field’s printed a postcard that publicized the store’s command of an entire city block (Figure 1.3, see also Plate 4 in the plate section). The postcard showed the business’s hold on valuable urban real estate, and the size of the building sent a message of stable and impressive commercial power. A three-quarter exterior view of the building flattered and exaggerated its imposing façade. This perspective afforded a visual scan of the storefront and a sightline of the store’s depth, while conveying the structure’s stature. The sender’s notation at the right-hand side communicates the building’s monumental impression: “How would you like to do your Spring shopping Francis Sheafer Waxman, A Shopping Guide to Paris and London (New York: McBride, Nast, 1912), 57. 16 Neil Harris, “Urban Tourism and the Commercial City,” in Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William Robert Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 72. 15

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in this store—all you see in this picture is Marshall Fields store except the dark strip at left.” Here the store’s dignified stone-clad façade visually sets it apart from the ordinary brick buildings surrounding it, and the building’s mass is so large that it takes up the vast majority of the image frame.

The Changeable Design of the Storefront The storefront has been the most adaptable and changeable aspect of retail architecture for centuries, in large part due to its service to the store’s display needs. Its style altered due to the redesign of the surrounding architectural framework as well as the continual refresh of the show windows’ contents. Made up of plate glass, merchandise, and architectural elements, the storefront was a stylistic statement that could be interpreted at first glance by passersby for evidence of the quality and personality of the business that it advertised.17 Passersby read the architectural details of the façade and the window displays in tandem for indications of the quality of the business. In January 1916, MRSW reported, “Someone has truthfully said that he could tell how progressive a merchant was by the appearance of his store front and how well his windows were trimmed.”18 From the eighteenth century, classical styles of architecture were ideally suited to the shop front due to practical advantages, and neoclassical retail architecture persisted well into the twentieth century also due to its stylistic favor. Doorposts took the form of pilasters and fanlights were frequent over doors. The entablature provided a place for the shop name and the cornice provided weather protection for the windows below.19 Columns opened up the façade for the placement of larger show windows. Here style and display needs were aligned for the best design result. The columns and pediment also served as the ideal armature for a host of decorations, as seen in the oversize swags and eagles in the Marshall Field’s decorations of 1909 that celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (Figure 1.4). Retail architecture was a mode and style of display itself, especially when enhanced with ephemeral decorations devised by professional designers. While the department store’s particularly robust strain of classicism aimed to encourage a reverent attitude toward commodities, the style was also

In January of 1916 MRSW reported, “Someone has truthfully said that he could tell how progressive a merchant was by the appearance of his store front and how well his windows were trimmed.” “Model Fronts,” MRSW, February 1916, 62. 18 “Model Fronts,” MRSW, February 1916, 62. 19 For a classical storefront, see Outlines of Designs for Shop-Fronts and Door-Cases with the Mouldings at Large, and Enrichments to Each Design (London: I & J Taylor’s Architectural Library, 1792), plate 8. For a description of the classically styled Harvey and Sons in Ludgate Hill, one of the first London area stores to have double height show windows, see “Shops of London,” The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, October 16, 1841, 249. 17

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FIGURE 1.4  Lincoln Decorations, Exterior View of Marshall Field & Company, 1909. DN-0054039, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum. © Chicago History Museum.

pointedly theatrical.20 The oversize flags appeared as curtains pulled back to reveal a stage set. The classical architecture aligned with the holiday’s nationalistic sentiment. The civic and permanent language of the classical style, seen through the rows of columns and windows that lined shopping avenues in both America and Britain, contrasted with the temporary nature inherent in the exterior and interior decorations.21 As a crucial element of the overall display scheme of the department store, architecture helped to meet

Some architectural elements even served as props, deceiving in their design with the aim of visual impact. For instance, at Harrods, the dome was purely symbolic and reflected no interior rotunda but instead stood on steel girders spanning a flat roof. See A. S. Gray, J. Breach and N. Breach, Edwardian Architecture: A Biographical Dictionary (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1986), 68. 21 The application of classicism to the buildings of department stores was looked down upon by some critics for the style’s aggrandizement of the shopping experience and misalignment with the style of some of its more delicate merchandise. In the London Evening News on April 10, 1907, a journalist expressed that “dainty feminine finery would look hopelessly silly and frivolous in a severe, not to say forbidding, classical frame.” Evening News, April 10, 1907, 2. 20

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the contradictory challenge of the store’s experience as “a permanent yet ever-changing exposition,” as Chicago’s Marshall Field’s called its interior.22 Before artistic window dressing in the late nineteenth century, the wooden storefront was a single stand-alone segment that could be removed and replaced to provide variety. As early as the mid-1820s, one-story storefronts were being advertised as for sale in New York City. Pattern books offered manufacturers many pattern and composition possibilities.23 Windows, doors, trim, stucco moldings, cast-iron elements, terra-cotta details, and patent bricks could be ordered from manufacturers’ catalogs, making it possible to construct elaborate buildings relatively cheaply.24 The construction of the façade involved many individual and significant design decisions that directly impacted how pedestrians viewed and judged the department store from their perspective. Debates on storefront design dominated Meetings of the Board of Directors of the London department store D.  H. Evans during the planning for a major expansion and renovation in 1907. Records in the store’s archives document how various applications for all aspects of the design of the frontage, from the slope of the roof and the use of fire-resistant materials to sidewalk lights and ornamental ironwork, were prepared for the approval of the London County Council. Estimates for shop fronts, plate glass, shutters, blinds, and brass brackets were also obtained.25 Materials were important visual cues in the facade’s composition, so much so that pioneer American department store owner A.  T. Stewart used building materials as an advertising device; his stores earned popular names: the Marble Palace, built in 1846, and the Cast Iron Palace, completed in 1862. This naming scheme called attention to the stores’ construction and encouraged consumers to consider retail architecture as changeable. A. T. Stewart produced an effect of “palatial magnificence” when on September 10, 1846, his Marble Palace opened on Broadway between Chambers and Reade Streets.26 Amidst the dull brick buildings on Broadway, Stewart’s

Marshall Field & Company, The Store of Service, 4. Julia Scalzo, “All a Matter of Taste: The Problem of Victorian and Edwardian Shopfronts,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68 (March 2009): 54. 24 Julian Barnard, The Decorative Tradition (London: Architectural Press, 1973), 23–5. For a catalogue of building materials, see for instance Spanjer Brothers, Manufacturers of Advertising & Decorative Woodwork . . . (Chicago, IL: Spanjer Brothers, 1916). 25 Frederick Sage & Co. and Haskin Bros. submitted bids. Haskin Bros. won the contract with its less expensive estimate. Minutes of Meetings of Board of Directors, 1894–1968, FRAS 362/1, Records of D. H. Evans & Co. Ltd., House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow. 26 In 1853, Putnam’s Monthly wrote in reference to Stewart’s Marble Palace, “There is no warehouse in London, nor in any other European city approaching some of the large and splendid establishments in Broadway, nor is there any shop in the world to rival the palatial magnificence of that on the corner of Broadway and Chambers-street.” See “New  York Daguerreotyped,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art, February 1853, 129, quoted in Winston Weisman, “Commercial Palaces of New York: 1845– 1875,” The Art Bulletin 36 (December 1954): 286. 22 23

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establishment, in the Anglo-Italian palazzo style, rose four stories high, to start, with walls in Tuckahoe marble.27 Classicism determined the Marble Palace’s structure as a modular unit so that it could easily expand down the block, which occurred later in 1850, evidence of enlargement and transformation as being intrinsic to retail architecture from the time of the first American purpose-built department store. City Hall, located south of the Marble Palace, served as the store’s model with its marble construction and defining features of a dome and rotunda, common to civic buildings but never used before for a retail outlet.28 In adopting architectural features and a style previously reserved for significant public structures, the department store was signaling its status as an urban monument as well as its interconnectedness to its surrounding city. The department store gained prominence at a time when civic values and commercial accomplishments began to merge, and the sharing of an architectural style visually communicated this relationship. An 1853 article in Putnam’s Monthly even noted how this alignment was evident on the interior where “every department of the business is managed with a beautiful thoroughness, which is becoming more and more a part of our national character.”29 In 1859, architect John Kellum commenced construction on the Cast Iron Palace, A. T. Stewart’s new downtown New York location (Figure 1.5), a building that The Independent called “the first and only one of its kind in the world constructed wholly of iron, standing alone, unsupported by any surrounding walls. It is an enduring monument to the mind that conceived it, and to the architect who executed it.”30 The building’s material composition prompted this laudatory review. When it was completed in 1863, the Cast Iron Palace was the largest building in New York.31 Cast iron fell to its lowest price in 1880 and in New York and along the eastern coast of the United States, the cast-iron façade visually defined office buildings and department stores.32 Cast iron made possible bold new advances in architectural designs and building technology, while providing richness in ornamentation and fire resistance. Cast-iron columns reinforced the sidewalk

John Butler Snook, architect of the Marble Palace, built a reputation for work in the classical mode; the double-sided trade sign that hung in front of his New  York City office depicted the façade of a Greek temple in high relief. See Architect’s Sign, ca. 1837, wood, New York Historical Society, New York. Snook’s notable buildings following the Marble Palace included the Grand Central Depot (1869–71) and the Metropolitan Hotel (1849–52). 28 As historian Mona Domosh has observed, “An appeal to civic notions would provide his store with cultural legitimacy.” Mona Domosh, “Shaping the Commercial City: Retail Districts in Nineteenth-Century New  York and Boston,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (June 1990): 264. 29 “New York Daguerreotyped,” 129. 30 “A. T. Stewart & Co.’s Marble Stores,” The Independent, January 6, 1870, 22, 110. 31 Herbert Adams Gibbons, John Wanamaker (New York: Harper), 1926, 9. 32 C. G. Powell, An Economic History of the British Building Industry, 1815–1979 (London: Architectural Press, 1980), 83. 27

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FIGURE 1.5  A. T. Stewart’s Cast Iron Palace, New York, 1900. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, LC-D4-33238.

from the underground, allowing for expansion beneath the footpath and even under the street.33 By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, cast iron was the material of choice for the façade and the building framework in Chicago and New York.34 Selfridge would bring this material technology to London in 1909.35 The cast-iron frame construction, with each floor taking See “Elevation and Section of Sidewalk Showing Vault Under Street,” Plate LXXXIII, no. 45, from Daniel D. Badger, Illustrations of Iron Architecture Made by the Architectural Iron Works of the City of New York City (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1865) pictured in Margot Gayle, David W. Look, and John G. Waite, Metals in America’s Historic Buildings: Uses and Preservation Treatments (Washington, DC:  U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Cultural Resources, Preservation Assistance, 1992), 51. 34 Among the earliest examples of a complete cast-iron façade in New York was the Haughwout Store, purveyor of elegant goods for the home, built by John Gaynor in 1857 at the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome Street. Modeled on the Sansovino Library in Venice, the building has Corinthian columns and a façade of Palladian-style large arched windows. 35 In the years of Selfridge’s construction, there were important changes in building legislation: the LCC (General Powers) Act of 1908 allowed greater cubical extent and dealt with the uniting of buildings by openings in internal and external walls. In 1909, the LCC (General Powers) Act (known as the Steel Frame Act) officially recognized steel frame construction. John Stow, The Survey of London (London: J. M. Dent, 1912), 22. 33

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the weight of its own outer wall, became the standard for the multistoried department store and was later used in the modern skyscraper.36 In 1896, John Wanamaker inherited Stewart’s Cast Iron Palace and at that time, he reflected on the quality of the building’s construction, “A. T. Stewart built it thirty years ago, but he built it so wisely and so well that it is to-day in every respect a model store. A generation of architects has been able to suggest no material improvements.”37 At the turn of the twentieth century, the material of cast iron had a direct impact on retail architecture’s ability to achieve ambitious display possibilities. Stewart recognized that cast iron “had in its favor unequalled advantages of lightness, durability, economy, incombustability [sic]” and most importantly that it made for “ready renovation.”38 Cast-iron columns supported large show windows and expanded the ground floor’s sweeping vista views of merchandise, free from any visual interruptions of dividing walls. Natural light flooded the interiors.39 These advantages in layout and light had also been beneficial and attractive for multistoried textile mills in England, the first locations of structural cast-iron columns; the columns could be placed further apart due to their strength, providing more floor space for looms and other machinery. The factory roots of an expansive sales floor layout, accented with cast-iron columns, point to the department store’s alignment with the spaces of design production. Since textiles were at the core of any department store’s stock list, this architectural lineage with the textile mill has a particular resonance for retail. On the storefront, cast iron allowed for series of replicable elements that leant order and decoration to the façade. Cast iron could even be painted to give the appearance of another material; Stewart painted his cast iron so that it appeared like marble and gave an impression of solidity.40 This

Ferry points out the enduring effects of these architectural advances, “Indeed this type of construction was so reliable and successful that it was one of the first examples of the type of construction used in building the modern skyscraper, with each floor taking the weight of its own outer wall.” John William Ferry, A History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 42. 37 John Wanamaker, A Story and Some Pictures (New York: Chasmar-Winchell Press, 1898), n.p. 38 John B. Cornell, “Men Who Have Assisted in the Development of Architectural Resources,” Architectural Record 1 (December 1891), 245 quoted in Deborah S. Gardener, “A Paradise of Fashion: A. T. Stewart’s Department Store, 1862–1875,” in A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America, ed. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984), 63. 39 Gayle, Look, and Waite, Metals in America’s Historic Buildings, 50. 40 The employment of trompe l’oeil styling allowed for low-cost effect and frequent alteration. Nathaniel Whittock, author of the early guidebook On the Construction and Decoration of the Shop Fronts of London (1840), observed that as of the 1790s, “the painter’s aid was called in” and “the columns, pilasters, frieze, and cornice, produced by the carpenter, were painted to imitate various sorts of marble, and the doors and shutters to imitate various sorts of wood.” See Nathaniel Whittock, On the Construction and Decoration of the Shop Fronts of London (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1840), 2. 36

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FIGURE 1.6  Carson Pirie Scott and Company Store, Chicago, IL. Louis H. Sullivan, architect, n.d. Courtesy Sullivaniana Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago, Digital File # 193101.081110–03.

deception and manipulation of public perception suggests a reading of retail architecture as an impressive stage set for the display of merchandise whose elements were often exaggerated for dramatic effect. While in this turn of the century period, architects most often used cast iron in a classical format, Louis Sullivan employed the material to embody the organic curves of Art Nouveau. Shunning the predictable historicist forms of classicism, Sullivan’s cast-iron façade of a dense patterning of vines and leaves for Schlesinger and Mayer (later Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company) in Chicago (1899–1903) introduced what critic Lewis Mumford described as “a conscious orientation of architecture towards new forms of expression” (Figure 1.6).41 Sullivan harnessed the “automatic developments of the mechanical age” through his use of the material cast iron but developed a wholly novel decoration scheme, one that would grow over the surface of the building.42 In Sullivan’s own words, he aimed to “vitalize building materials, to animate them collectively with a thought, a state of feeling.”43 Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades:  A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Dover, 1955), 167. 42 Ibid., 166. 43 Louis H. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover, 1979), 140–1, quoted in Mumford, The Brown Decades, 123. 41

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The scrolling ironwork became a recognizable symbol for the department store itself and its design contributed to the store’s graphic identity. In Schlesinger and Mayer’s 1903 advertisement, scrolling vines grow out of the building and encircle the department store’s name, suggesting the vital characteristics of its architecture (Figure 1.1). Sullivan also devised a fresh color palette of a vibrant polychrome to enhance the ornamental pattern of the Schlesinger and Mayer façade. Over a coat of bright vermilion, lay a translucent green, with flecks and spots of red. Architectural historian John Siry has suggested that the color scheme may have been intended to “recall the seasonal colors of nature in passage from summer to fall,” a shift that seasonal commodities also embraced.44 Along the façade, the repetition of the goods in the window was echoed in the repetition of the orderly circular patterning of cast iron above. This rhythmic sequencing of commodities and ornament suggests the profusion and replication made possible by mechanical industrialization across media. In addition to iron, glass was the other dominant material in the modern department store façade. Due to shared functions and a joint use of iron and glass, Sigfried Giedion places the department store in a continuum with other large, public, functional structures: “The department store has no equally large forerunner in the past. In this respect it is like the market halls, railway stations, and exhibition buildings of the nineteenth century, and the object it serves is the same: the rapid handling of business activities involving huge crowds of pedestrians.”45 Stores remodeled in order to attain that desirable glass and steel combination whose monumentality signaled commercial success and an investment in the latest materials. Immense iron columns added visual and physical weight to the structure while countering the transparency of the plate glass.46 The addition of more plate glass show windows was one of the leading motivations for the renovation and generation of new commercial buildings at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1898, the Inland Architect and News Record reported how Chicago’s architecture was responding to display needs, “The demand of the window dresser—an artist of recent development—was constantly for a more showy place in which to exhibit his goods; and the buyers demanded more light.”47 The display profession’s 44 John Siry, Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 178. 45 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 234. 46 Similarly, with respect to its steel and glass construction, the Crystal Palace was described in a period guide as “uniting perfect strength with aerial lightness.” Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), 46, quoted in Jonathan C. Welchman and Kate Nichols, Sculpture and the Vitrine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 23. 47 “Modernizing Commercial Buildings,” Inland Architect and News Record, September 1898, 18. The article elaborates on the transformation of Chicago’s business district:  “Chicago streets are undergoing a change. The tall drums of the house-mover are constantly seen in the business district. In place of crude stone carvings of ‘after the fire’ architecture appears a style

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requirement of show windows and natural light on the interiors dictated architectural form and style. At least a ground level dominated by a wall of windows became a distinct characteristic of modern retail architecture. A refreshing display of wares behind the glass provided constant redesign of the building’s first impressions for the consumer. In order to establish how the significance of display, particularly the show window, drove the development of the design of the façade, it is useful to take a historical perspective. The roots of retail architecture can be traced to the “simple movable trading booth” that populated the fair and the bazaar where, as German art collector and patron Karl Ernst Osthaus described in the 1913 Werkbund Yearbook, “the entire shop is, as it were, the shop window.”48 At the fair or the bazaar, there was no glass partition or designation of display space. Instead, the tradesman’s whole stall served to entice shoppers and the making of the wares was included in their exposition. Even when merchants began to occupy interior spaces on the first floors of domestic dwellings, many still had open fronts until the eighteenth century when the first glazed shop fronts were introduced. The addition of the glass front, designating a barrier between shopping space and city space, therefore marked a pivotal moment in the history of retail architecture. The window offered containment and safety for the wares, while also encouraging a new method of shopping by looking only. As the visual identity of shops developed in the late eighteenth century, most retail outlets existed on the ground floor below a residential apartment on the second floor. Therefore, the shop was limited in width by the typical dimensions of the domestic building. In London, a 14- to 24-foot frontage was the maximum physical condition of a running shop front design from about 1750 to 1840. Although these British shops were not “purpose built in their entirety,” historian Claire Walsh explains, “they were very purposefully designed and constructed.”49 Whereas in New York, more stores took over entire buildings and most early to mid-nineteenth-century storefronts assumed a distinctive post-and-lintel construction with one-piece granite

of architecture entirely American and of commercial origin . . . three entire buildings on State Street were made over” and the largest, most successful of these alterations was for Mandel Brothers who “owing to their increasing trade, required a larger and better-lighted place of business.” 48 Karl Ernst Osthaus, “The Display Window” (Das Schaufenster), trans. Lauren Kogod, in Lauren Kogod, “The Display Window as Educator: The German Werkbund and Cultural Economy,” in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, ed. Peggy Deamer (New York: Routledge, 2014), 63. 49 Claire Walsh, “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in the Eighteenth Century” (MA thesis, Victoria & Albert Museum/Royal College of Art), 16. Even in 1853, a journalist notes that “one peculiarity of New-York stores which distinguishes them from their London and Paris rivals, is the fact that they generally occupy the whole of the building for purposes connected with their business, and are not confined to the first stories.” See “New York Daguerreotyped,” 129.

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posts supporting a granite lintel. This construction foretold the more robust classical format that would soon follow.50 In London, the transformation of the show window was the most dramatic. From about 1730 until the 1790s, windows of luxury shops drew out onto the pavement in curves in the form of the bow front.51 The curved glass front let in light and allowed the goods to be seen on three sides. But this glass was expensive and available only to the best stores, such as the silk purveyors along Artillery Lane in the London neighborhood of Spitalfields, where some of the city’s oldest shopfronts survive today. Most eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century storefronts were divided into a grid of panes and windows could be fitted with shelves that extended horizontally off the back of the mullions.52 This structure then dictated a window display that allowed for, on average, one item per windowpane, an orderly method used for most types of goods except textiles well into nineteenth century.53 Herein architecture dictated a rigid display format.54 This layout communicated order and variety, which were qualities that reflected well on the character of the store’s owner. Even at the time of the department store’s rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century, the gridded design still populated the windows of many small shops in Chicago, London, and New York, therefore making the large plate glass windows of the department store that much more impressive by comparison. The show window’s growth and associated material technologies substantially altered the appearance and consumer experience of retail architecture. Improvements in the glass manufacturing process led to the development of increasingly larger and more durable sheets of plate glass, allowing windows to be divided into fewer components. The introduction of plate glass with its uninhibited sleek surface prompted a distinct shift in approaches to window display. In contrast to the windows with gridded Morrison H. Heckscher, “Building the Empire City: Architects and Architecture,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New Haven, CT; London:  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New  York/Yale University Press, 2000), 183. 51 The London Building Act of 1774 limited the projection of the bow front to no more than 10 inches. 52 See, for instance, the shelving that survives in the windows of the eighteenth-century shop at 34 Haymarket, London SW1Y. 53 Walsh, “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” 83. However, due to the difficulty and expense of lighting the interior, some retailers packed the window with wares to increase their visibility. In these cases, the pane-by-pane organization was not followed. For descriptions of such window arrangements, see William O’Daniel, Ins and Outs of London (Philadelphia, PA: S. C. Lamb, 1859), 47–8. 54 A strict pane-by-pane approach was popularized by print shops whose prints were near equal in dimensions to the panes of glass. This display scheme was celebrated in the work of Georgian caricaturists who often included their employer’s print shop in the background. See, for example, John Raphael Smith, Spectators at a Print-Shop in St. Paul’s Church Yard, handcolored mezzotint, 1744, British Museum, London. 50

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panes, large plate glass windows facilitated a more liberal display format. Goods became acrobatic, climbing at angles and curves. Designs that spanned the windows’ full height and width were a boon to the fixtures industry as flexible forms were necessary to suspend goods in mid-air across the great expanses of glass. The quality of the fixtures had a strong bearing on the impact of window display designs. As the standard form of the store window advanced from a contained grid layout to an expanse of glass across a city block, windows held the potential to carry a compositional theme that could be played out in a series of variations. By the late nineteenth century, plate glass was produced through a rolled plate process whereby glass was poured onto an inclined metal plane and then passed between rollers, ground, and polished. The result was a flat surface that was free of distortions.55 In London, with the repeal of the glass tax in 1845 and the window tax in 1851, store windows grew in width and height.56 The American plate glass industry escalated quickly; by 1892, the annual production of eight American plate glass factories reached 18, 250,000 square feet from only 120,000 square feet in 1870.57 The transparency of the plate glass show windows impacted the interior as well as the exterior appearance of the department store; if left open at the back, windows let natural light into the store’s showrooms and facilitated accurate viewing of the merchandise. Articles in retail periodicals and the press continually debated the best technologies and techniques to achieve accurate and effective lighting in the show window and on the sales floor.58 Even by the mid-nineteenth century, merchants desired a sleek transparent surface for their windows. As of 1849, merchants such as Edward P. Dickie, at 144 Chambers Street in New York, were selling imported window glass. Dickie’s broadside advertised “Single Thick,” “Thick,” and “Double Thick” thicknesses (at up to 32 × 50 and 30 × 60 inch sheets) at prices “that will defy competition!” Dickie claimed to be the “sole receiver” of a number of notable types that exhibited the most desirable “uniform quality.” See Brower Brothers, Map of the City of New York: Advertisement for Edward P. Dickie, Importer of French Window Glass, handcolored lithograph, 1861, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 56 In London, patent plate was introduced in 1839 and the maximum size achieved was 8 by 4 feet. Larger sizes of cast plate glass were available from 1826 but rarely used until 1845. See Walsh, “Shop Design and the Display of Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” appendix. 57 “Plate Glass, American and English—How Built Up—Tariffs and Prices,” American Economist, October 28, 1892, 230. The first manufacture of plate glass in America was attempted in New Albany, Indiana, in 1868 by John Ford, who opened the first commercially successful polished plate glass factory two years later. In 1882, Ford moved to Creighton, Pennsylvania, seeking a larger factory to increase volume and decrease production costs, and founded the well-known manufacturer Pittsburgh Plate Glass. 58 Luxfer prismatic glass, developed by the Luxfer Prism Company of Chicago in the early 1890s, offered a new solution. A  thickened glass of many plates, Luxfer’s serrated surface performed like prisms to bend rays of sunlight from the sky and refract them to diffuse light horizontally through the depth of the standard commercial space. Originally an American manufacturer, The Luxfer Prism Company established its first international subsidiary, the London-based British Luxfer Prism Syndicate, in 1898. The prisms appeared in major department stores worldwide and offered the practical benefits of distributing daylight in the interior and cutting costs on electrical lighting. Stern Bros. and B. Altman were two New York 55

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Beginning in the eighteenth century, retailing by natural light was a mark of honest dealing.59 Accurate lighting was necessary for the careful selection of merchandise. While artificial lighting systems signaled modernization, they were also considered by some to be deceitful due to their ability to alter consumers’ perceptions of the merchandise.60 Stores actively advertised statistics on their use of plate glass and journalists and prospective shoppers calculated a store’s worth, against its competition, by the quantity and quality of a particular store’s show windows.61 Therefore, large glass windows became not only a feature but also a determining factor in the design of the department store. Windows were often featured and numbered in press coverage on the new stores.62 A booklet for Barkers department store in London bragged that “the Barker windows are a mile long! If we stay to think, shop windows are an index of the wonders of modern merchandising . . . A mile of shop windows! This is evidence, eloquent enough, of the amazing growth of that business which we know as Barkers.”63 These statistics on materials provided the reader with figures by which to obtain an understanding of scale as well as compare stores against their competition. By the late nineteenth century, many department stores gave over as much of their façades as possible to windows. The glazed façade was a technical need of display long before it was a stylistic requirement of modernism as the curtain wall.64 The Chicago Dry Goods Reporter reported on the Marshall stores that embraced the Luxfer technology. “Daylight vs. Artificial Light,” The World’s Work Advertiser 6 (1903): 4085–92. 59 One American guidebook pointed out natural light’s financial advantages:  “Natural light costs nothing beyond the construction of the premises to admit it as freely as circumstances will allow.” Samson Clark, Short Talks with Drapers (London: Trade Press Association, 1916), 181. 60 Siry, Carson Pirie Scott, 198. Arc lights could cast a blue violet glow; meanwhile, incandescent light could cast a red yellow glow, making the inspection and color matching of textiles particularly challenging. 61 The use of these figures reveals public attention to architectural detail as well as a greater cultural fascination with the “language of technical explanation and scientific description” that historian Neil Harris has identified as present in recreational literature by the 1840s. See Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1973), 75. 62 For instance, Lord & Taylor’s new “business palace” of iron and glass, built on the corner of Broadway and 20th Streets in 1871, attracted attention with “plate glass windows on Broadway, eight in number, each one 7 feet wide and 16 feet in height.” See “The New Building of Lord and Taylor,” 2. 63 A Brief Narrative of the House of Barker, 1870–1930, 11, FRAS 955/1, Records of the House of Barker, House of Fraser Archive. The guide to the Great Exhibition also listed quantities of glass used in the building’s construction to impress readers. See Samuel Philips and F. K. J. Shenton, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Its Park and Gardens (Sydenham:  Crystal Palace Library, 1860), 15. 64 German architect Bruno Taut made such a connection when in his publication Modern Architecture (1929) he reproduced Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s designs for a shop (1820) in which the façades consisted of large areas of glass divided by masonry piers. See Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London: The Studio, 1929), 35. Taut’s point of view is discussed in Alexandra Artley, The Golden Age of Shop Design: European Shop Interiors, 1880–1939 (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976), 6. In 1898, Hermann Tietz built a department

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Field’s building in 1902 and described the classical façade as functioning as the “background for the enormous plate glass windows, so numerous that the building seems a veritable palace of glass.”65 As prominent yet transparent architectural elements at street level, banks of show windows reshaped the built environment and the pedestrian experience. The show windows’ persistent frontality confronted and enticed city goers while expanding the physical and creative parameters of the retail advertisement. A  bulletin produced by the Chicago Association of Commerce in 1907 called attention to the visual variety in the window displays of the stores along State Street, while also stressing their combined impression: “The world has no panorama of show windows on a single street approximating in interest the displays this month along the extended fronts of Siegel Cooper & Co., Rothschild’s, the Hub, the Fair, Mandel Bros., Carson, Pirie Scott & Co., the Boston Store, Hillman’s, Charles A. Stevens & Bros., Marshall Field & Company, and others whose individuality also contributes to the spectacular ensemble.”66 The impact of this major urban thoroughfare was indeed defined by its lineup of show windows. Since its introduction in the eighteenth century, the glass front has been a transparent but pronounced design element of the store façade, giving visual access while denying the consumer physical contact with the merchandise. Similar to the glass-walled casework found on the interior sales floor, the show window managed shopping behaviors, contained merchandise, and became the mediator between the public and the wares for sale. Historian Isobel Armstrong has called the nineteenth century the “era of public glass” in which “the transparency of glass becomes a third term—something between you and the world. It makes itself known as a constitutive element of experience that organizes work on the world as medium and barrier.”67 This transparent surface was also reflective and, due to the material properties of the plate glass, captured the images of passersby and the surrounding city and street. Passersby looked to the show window for the store’s vision of what was in fashion; at the same time, they saw their own image in return. John Wanamaker anthropomorphized this condition of the department store in a late-nineteenth-century advertisement, writing, “Windows are eyes to meet eyes.”68 Wanamaker’s metaphor also underscored that the store was an active and responsive component of the cityscape. store in the Leipziger Strasse in Berlin so dominated by glass that Pevsner recollected, “So here was the fully mature curtain wall.” See Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 271. 65 Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 16, 03052 (24), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company, Chicago History Museum. 66 Chicago Association of Commerce, “The Bulletin:  State Street in Festal Garb,” 1907, 10, 03052 (27), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 67 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds:  Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90. 68 The complete advertisement read as follows:  “The Store is a living Personage! The Gray Clothes it wears express the everyday usefulness of our business system. The Show Windows

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Increasing numbers of show windows, both above and even below ground, further integrated display design into the visual experience of the city. By 1916 in London, second-floor show windows were arranged for the eyes of passengers on double-decker busses, forging a link between store architecture and city circulation.69 In Chicago, underground windows were built in 1905 for Field’s, Mandel’s, and Carson, Pirie, Scott. In London, architect Charles Holden incorporated three showcases for the merchandise of local retailers, such as Swan and Edgar, in his design for the Piccadilly Circus underground station in 1928. In New York at Astor Place, Wanamaker installed six elevators at two subway exits/store entrances that conveyed passengers immediately to the floor that they desired to visit in the department store, offering the new convenience of being able to step immediately from the train into the store. “Underground shopping” became all the rage in New York, as one journalist reported in 1914.70 The department stores’ placement of underground windows aligned the displays with the speed and modernity associated with the subway itself.

Architectural Display as Competition Show windows were one of many elements of the façade scrutinized by consumers who pitted one department store against another. The public gained an increasingly sophisticated ability to read architecture for signals of the quality and reputation of a business, particularly as large-scale purpose-built structures began to tower over their competition at the turn of the twentieth century. These immense structures were built in America prior to Britain. When Selfridge, who at that time was working at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, visited London to assess the retail scene, he was still able to describe the premises of some of his future competitors as “an agglomeration of small shops.”71 In his memoir Romance of Commerce, Selfridge observed that “in America stores tower up to fifteen storeys, or are eyes to meet eyes. The Front Doors are arms swinging a welcome.” See Advertisement, late nineteenth century, vol. 20–48:  Large Black Scrapbook Series, John Wanamaker Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society. 69 Samson Clark, Retail Drapery Advertising: A Handbook on Drapery Publicity and Kindred Matters (London: Trade Press Association, 1916), 102. Similarly, in New York by 1898, Siegel Cooper installed oversized windows on its second floor that allowed passengers on the Sixth Avenue elevated train to window shop. A ramp enabled those same passengers to enter directly into the store on the second floor. 70 H. C. Brown, The New Subway in Manhattan (New York: Brown, Henry Collins, 1904), 29. In New York, the Astor Place and 59th street subway stations still contain their underground show windows for the stores at street level. In March of 1914 Technical World Magazine reported, “Subway shopping is all the rage. Vast throngs of shoppers come and go from morning until evening. So great is the lure of the underground life to them.” See Bailey Millard, “Millions of the Cellar,” Technical World Magazine, March 1914, 69. 71 Selfridge quoted in Gray et al., Edwardian Architecture, 67.

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more with rapid smooth running lifts. These buildings measure their floor area by the acre and twenty thirty or even forty acres of floor space.”72 Whereas the takeover of existing storefronts to form a larger establishment was common for longer in London where purpose-built department stores did not exist as such until 1909 with the construction of Selfridge’s. Major department stores in London increasingly used architecture and display to try to keep apace with Selfridge’s and maintain the attention and loyalty of consumers. News of this retail competition reached abroad. The New York Times reported, “This ocular demonstration [‘window dressing’] of trade opportunities has been one cause of dismay on the part of those who are of enough importance to pretend to rivalry the new establishment [Selfridge’s].”73 Completed just two months following Selfridge’s opening, the “west block” of the London department store D. H. Evans (Nos. 308–320 Oxford Street) was overseen by architect John Murray (Figure  1.7). Selfridge’s and D.  H. Evans were only a few blocks apart, increasing the potential for comparison and competition. The building, with its highly ornamental Edwardian Baroque façade, was constructed in four sections, the first opening in May 1907. The Draper’s Record reported, “As a building, in both design and material it will be unique. As a work of art, it stands out as preeminently beautiful, a noble addition to the commercial architecture of London.”74 The Builder described how the building’s sophisticated design was based on “careful study of numerous large trade buildings in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin.”75 The façade was completed in a striking color scheme of white Pentelikon marble with green Cipollino marble columns and pilasters, and lavish carvings.76 The whole building cost over £131,000.77

Harry Gordon Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce (London:  John Lane, 1918), 365. Selfridge’s observation on the smaller scale of London department stores was in part due to municipal regulations that restricted the height of new buildings, unlike in America where stores rose to greater elevations. 73 “American Store Pleases London,” New York Times, April 18, 1909, C4. 74 “D. H. Evans and Co., Ltd.: The New Premises in Oxford-street, W.,” The Drapers’ Record, May 18, 1907, 411. 75 The Builder, December 18, 1909, 670–1, quoted in Kathryn Morrison, Shops Project Report:  D. H.  Evans Oxford Street London, BF 101754/1, The Architecture of Shopping Project, English Heritage. 76 Carvings were produced by Charles Henry Mabey Jr. For more, see “Charles Henry Mabey Junior,” Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, accessed October 26, 2014, http://sculpture. gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=ann_1277210485; for more on the construction process of this building including decisions on materials and contractors hired, see Minutes of Meetings of Board of Directors, Records of D. H. Evans & Co. Ltd., House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow. 77 The Builder, December 18, 1909, 670–1, quoted in Morrison, Shops Project Report:  D. H. Evans, Architecture of Shopping Project. 72

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FIGURE 1.7  D. H. Evans Department Store Viewed Across Oxford Street, June 1917. Photograph by Adolphe Augustus Boucher, Bedford Lemere and Company. By permission of Historic England Archive.

The many elements and specialist industries involved in the creation of this façade exhibit retail architecture’s capacity as a compelling statement of luxury, financial strength, and modernization. D. H. Evans presented a host of symbols and designs ready for the visual assessment and interpretation of passersby.78 While the D. H. Evans façade contained no allusion to the building’s ties with the retail industry, its skillful combination of materials and forms showed off the trade of architecture itself. On the first floor, cartouches were positioned above and between the windows, flanked with Ionic columns. The simpler second floor windows had heavily molded lintels and wrought iron balconettes, while the third floor was lit by large oculi with elaborate frames and prominent keystones.79 “Gold-coloured metal fronts” Rich symbolism continued on the interior in a “rather luxurious” restaurant located on the second floor that was “paneled in oak with low relief panels by Mr. Brook Hitch, finished in old ivory representing Harvest, Commerce, Industry, Science, and Trade.” “D. H. Evans and Co., Ltd.: The New Premises,” The Drapers’ Record, May 18, 1907, 411. 79 Morrison, Shops Project Report:  D. H.  Evans Oxford Street London, BF 101754/1, Architecture of Shopping Project. Morrison notes that the D.  H. Evans Collection contains photographs of Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. 78

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along the ground floor were designed to hold large plate glass windows.80 The metalwork complemented the building’s color scheme and provided a continuous sleek framework through which to view commodities.81 In these eclectic façades, historian Alan Trachtenberg has identified “a confidence of appropriation” of styles; this was a message that was mirrored in the stock of the department store as a world of goods.82 The complexity and multistyled nature of the façade differed from the order and rationality that more often dictated the architectural program of stores in America.83 William Whiteley, owner of one of London’s earliest and largest department stores, also began to build the latest, most impressive iteration of his retail structure in the year following Selfridge’s completion in 1910. An examination of the growth of William Whiteley’s reveals the magnitude of scale and complex stylistic progression involved in a major department store’s renovation over decades. Between 1863 and 1873, Whiteley’s took over ten consecutive storefronts in Bayswater, London, and, after twenty years of business, had expanded to eighteen shops, all together forming one of the largest retail expanses that the London public had ever seen (Figure 1.8, see also Plate 5 in the plate section). Selling took place on two out of the four stories. The repetitive appearance of an orderly row of identical shop fronts suggested that the department store was expandable and even reproducible, similar to the stock that it contained. With such a static and redundant façade, the window display was important in providing variety and visual interest. Despite the impressiveness of this store’s span, the segmentation of the façade was stylistically and functionally unsatisfactory. On October 28, 1910, the foundation was laid for “the ideal store— destined to become the greatest shopping center in the world.”84 A  great improvement on the earlier series of shop fronts, the new Whiteley’s (Figure 1.9) was a purpose-built steel frame structure of the latest technology and design that was the peak of Whiteley’s long architectural development. The Grecian Corinthian style of this building and its monumental front of plate glass windows dramatically set it apart from Whiteley’s previous premises. The Architectural Review reported on how the building’s “imposing

Minutes of Meetings of Board of Directors, FRAS 362/1, Records of D. H. Evans, House of Fraser Archive. 81 “D. H. Evans and Co., Ltd.,” 411. 82 Alan Trachtenberg and Eric Foner, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 117. 83 Lord & Taylor’s store of 1870 is a notable exception. About the Lord & Taylor store, one journalist remarked, “The building is of the composite order of architecture, approaching, perhaps, more nearly to the style of the Renaissance than any other distinct school. The marked peculiarity of the structure is its varied and profuse ornamentation, which forms a strong contrast with the rigid simplicity of many of the great iron buildings of New York.” See “The New Building of Lord and Taylor,” 2, 13. 84 Souvenir Programme for the Laying of the Foundation Stone of Whiteley’s New Store, October 28, 1910, 3, 726/248, Records of William Whiteley Department Store , Westminster City Archives. 80

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FIGURE 1.8  William Whiteley, Limited, Westbourne Grove Premises, view ca. 1873 in William Whiteley Limited Illustrated Furnishing Catalogue, 1900, endpaper. Records of William Whiteley Department Store, 726/57. Courtesy City of Westminster Archives Centre.

architectural effect” was determined by both structural requirements and “commercial requirements of large window display.”85 The solution for this “dual object” was “a big Order”:  a main entrance, with three doorways, flanked by coupled columns, with a pyramidal tower and the corner dome.86 The journalist warned that if “in certain points it does not satisfy the architectural sense, we must not forget that it is a case of making architectural design fit in as best may with the exorbitant demands of window space.”87 The structure awed visitors in its presentation of “an uninterrupted mass of glass from the ceiling to the ground.”88 85 “Current Architecture—Whiteley’s New Premises,” Architectural Review, March 1912, 165, 726/251, Records of William Whiteley Department Store. 86 Ibid. Whiteley’s marketed its central dome, rising to a height of 150 feet, as a reproduction of the famous Santa Maria della Salute of Venice, which the Architectural Review called one of the most beautiful examples of classic architecture in Europe. Ibid., 164. 87 Ibid. 88 Richard S. Lambert, The Universal Provider: A Study of William Whiteley and the Rise of the London Department Store (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1938), 42–3.

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FIGURE 1.9  Whiteley’s New Premises, Façade to Queen’s Road, Looking South, 1912, in John Belcher and J. J. Joass, “Current Architecture, Whiteley’s New Premises,” Architectural Review, March 1912, 165. Records of William Whiteley Department Store, 726/251. Courtesy City of Westminster Archives Centre.

Via articles, postcards, and mailings to consumers, stores actively marketed their retail architecture achievements and positioned their buildings as desirable destinations in their home cities. A  Selfridge’s postcard of 1918 shows the store towering over West London and rising above the skyline as if it were the single dominant public attraction worthy of attention and the sole defining structure for that region of the city (Figure 1.10). Selfridge’s glistening white stone construction demarcates it from its surroundings. This postcard features the department store’s classical styling and, implicitly, its steel frame structure and reinforced concrete methods of construction that allowed it to reach such a height and achieve such a footprint. Even about ten years following its opening, Selfridge’s still projected itself as the most impressive structure on Oxford Street.89 This depiction of the store, emphasizing its great height and width, alludes to the nine passenger The imagery also projects a familiar allegory of architectural history; like the Acropolis on the hillside, Selfridge’s stands overlooking all of London as a monument to its supposed cultural ideals. 89

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FIGURE 1.10  Selfridge’s, Postcard, ca. 1918. Courtesy Mary Evans/Pharcide.

elevators, two service elevators, and six staircases required to navigate the store’s eight floors (five above ground and three below). In 1919, near in date to the release of this postcard, Harry Gordon Selfridge envisioned a 300-foot tower on top of his emporium as a part of an extension that would soon be underway. The foundation was laid but regulations of an 80-foot building height maximum halted the tower’s construction. Government regulations repeatedly diminished Selfridge’s grander architectural visions, and yet his store still towered over all of London.90

Technical Scope as a Show Feature At the turn of the twentieth century, stores’ technical complexity was heavily touted in the press and stores’ promotional materials. Due to widespread fascination, stores opened these behind-the-scenes mechanical spaces to public view for the first time. Wanamaker expressed that the true innovation

In 1907 when American architect Frank Swales drafted a design for Selfridge’s in London and issues arose with the city’s building height restrictions capped at 80 feet, the plans were taken over by British architects Frank Atkinson and Sir John Burnet who were more familiar with London building regulations. London’s Building Acts of 1894 and 1905 impeded the construction of the Selfridge’s building through their regulations for fire prevention (restrictions placed on cubic footage between party walls) and structural stability since the 1894 Building Act prescribed the required thickness of external walls. See J. C. Lawrence, “Steel Frame Architecture versus the London Building Regulations:  Selfridges, the Ritz, and American Technology,” Construction History 6 (1990): 25. 90

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in the department store was taking place in the store’s back rooms: “There is an outer life of the store with which the public is made familiar by daily contact, and there is an inner life of which the public has scarcely any conception, yet which deserves to be noted as indicating the higher plane to which modern merchandising is advancing.”91 The inner life of the store included the store’s technical scope, from lighting to ventilation, in addition to the window dressers’ workshops and other activities related to the design production of display, as well as the finishing of goods, mailing, shipping, accounting, the preparation of food at the restaurant, and more. All of these technological qualities amplified the comfort and pleasure of the shopping experience as well the display of the merchandise itself. Purpose-built retail architecture responded to technological advancements in display. For instance, when Louis Sullivan conceived of the show windows for Schlesinger and Mayer department store in Chicago in the early twentieth century, he considered the popularity of the use of electric motors. Sullivan planned for wiring within the raised base of the window and allotted a depth of 6 to 8 feet to leave room for the mechanical elements so that the wares could be shown in motion.92 The metaphor of the building as machine, first established with regards to factories in the early twentieth century, further encourages interpretation of the department store as a busy site of production as well as emphasizes the application of science and rationalization to the design of the stores’ inner workings.93 The department store was one of the first spaces in which the public experienced the glow of industrial electrical lighting, the speed of an elevator, and the comfort of ventilation systems. The quick and efficient movement of goods and people, extending above and below ground, was a primary contributor to the metaphor of the store as a machine. In 1865, Strawbridge and Clothier became the first American department store to install an elevator and Harrods was the first British department store to introduce a moving staircase in 1898.94 Siegel Cooper operated ten main passenger elevators that made an average of 2,500 round trips a day or a total of 95 car miles.95 Barkers in London operated eighty elevators in its complex of buildings and each made the journey from the top to bottom of the building in two and a half minutes.96 The elevator was a prominently designed element of the department store in which artistic design and John Wanamaker, Annals of the Wanamaker System: Its Origin, Its Principles, Its Methods, and Its Development in This & Other Cities (Philadelphia, PA: The Company, 1899), n.p. 92 Siry, Carson Pirie Scott, 141. 93 Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture:  Vindications of Early Victorian Industry (Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 18–50. 94 Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 34. 95 Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York, 133. 96 “Mechanical Equipment in Stores,” 1, FRAS 965, Records of John Barker & Co., House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow. 91

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machinery came together to create a new mobile interior and a distinct experience for the modern consumer. Stores educated their staff on the building’s technical details so that they could accurately pass the information along to curious customers.97 Often in the same sentences counting quantities of show windows and acreage of salesfloors, articles enumerated aspects of the department store’s infrastructure. Macy’s boasted “42 miles of electric wiring, 15,000 incandescent lamps, together with 1400 arc lamps, 80 electric motors and 30 parcel conveyers.”98 Such press coverage attempted to put almost incomprehensible technological achievement into concrete and calculable terms. Stores offered tours to give their visitors a behind-the-scenes view in order to raise their appreciation of mechanical prowess. Marshall Field reported, “Visitors to the store who so desire can be taken by a guide on a comprehensive tour of the store (106,000 took it last summer), starting from the Visitors’ Bureau on the third floor, and including particularly those parts of the store which are usually not seen by the public.”99 Schlesinger and Mayer in Chicago offered tours of its mechanical system from subbasement to rooftop on its opening days.100 In New  York, the engine room at the basement level of Siegel Cooper was designed to be on permanent display. Adjacent to the department for House Furnishing Goods, the engine room was visible through “immense sheets of plate glass,” much in the same way that the store presented its merchandise through glass windows and casework. As the New York Times promoted, “The electrical plant . . . will be one the most interesting sights in the city. The firm intends to make it a show feature . . . where passers may look upon the largest installation in the world of electric motors for commercial use.”101 Siegel Cooper aestheticized its mechanical features with the use of luxury materials, such as marble and plate glass, and the construction of a purpose-built display area. In plain view at Siegel Cooper was a “revolving screw turned by electric power for sending packages from the upper floors to the delivery department.”102 This piece of machinery showed off how swiftly and In its internal newspaper, the Harrodian Gazette, Harrods included an article on “Our Power Supply” offering, “It may be of interest to our staff to learn that in the basement of our building there is installed a plant for providing power, light, heat, air, and water, for most of which services the House is independent of outside supplies.” The Engineer, “Our Power Supply,” Harrodian Gazette, August 1, 1913, 8, Harrods Archive, Harrods Corporate Affairs. 98 “Macy & Co.’s New Store,” 19, Macy’s Archive. 99 Marshall Field & Company, 1913, 16023 (2), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 100 Siry, Carson Pirie Scott, 205. 101 “Largest Light Ever Made,” New York Times, September 6, 1896, 10. The store also made a monument out of its switchboard, “nearly 50 feet long, constructed of white Italian marble and raised six feet above the floor level on an iron framework, which also supports a platform for the operators, with massive brass rails, the whole thing being very handsome.” 102 “Will Be a Great Store,” New York Times, March 23, 1895, 8. 97

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efficiently the store managed the movement of goods. This revolving screw’s visibility made machinery an aesthetic element of the department store experience. To similar effect, many stores had pneumatic tubing snaking across their ceilings that served as discernable evidence of the store’s ability to quickly circulate money.103 The department store actively infiltrated city life, both above and below ground. One postcard printed by Marshall Field’s (Figure  1.11, see also Plate 6 in the plate section) visually demonstrates, with a rare cross section view, how the substructure of the department store was built into the city’s underground composition. Materials in Chicago’s stratigraphy are labeled on the postcard’s right-hand side as are the different retail departments labeled on the left. Here the metaphorical interconnectedness between the city and the store, often amplified in promotional language, appears as a physical reality. The postcard conveys how the department store was physically embedded, 110 feet underground, into the makeup of the urban fabric; the store’s system of concrete caissons penetrate the earth to support the whole superstructure and carry the steel columns that hold up the store’s impressive frontage above ground. Just as the show windows absorbed the energy of the city streets, the activity in the machinery, shipping room, and basement salesroom paralleled the motion of the motorcars and carriages on the street above. Goods, people, and industrial elements are shown here in layers as components of the overall system of the department store. The mechanical nature of the store’s underground activity appears linked with the city’s larger industrial systems. Behind-the-scenes equipment and technology were often featured in promotional material, therefore reinforcing the public message of the department store’s operations as a vast machine. An article on John Barker’s in London pointed out that “a little known, but very important side of Store life, is that concerning mechanical equipment.”104 Due to their great scale, many department stores had their own utility systems, which was an industrial feat worth advertising. Siegel Cooper housed all of its equipment within its boundary walls, except its water supply, and a plant for power, light, heating, and ventilation was established under 18th street sidewalk.105 The New York Times reported that it was the largest plant in In 1901 Macy’s promoted that, at its new store, “over eighteen miles of pipes and tubes, covering the entire building are used to make the system absolutely perfect.” Two tube offices were located in the basement and on the fourth floor. Although hidden from the view, these communication hubs featured proudly in department store pamphlets. “1901:  Macy’s New Store—Biggest Department House in Country Planned,” 8B Box 10, Macy’s Archive. 104 “Mechanical Equipment in Stores,” 4, FRAS 965, Records of John Barker & Co., House of Fraser Archive. 105 Selfridge’s had a similar setup. In its internal newspaper, the Harrodian Gazette, Harrods included an article on “Our Power Supply” offering, “It may be of interest to our staff to learn that in the basement of our building there is installed a plant for providing power, light, heat, air, and water, for most of which services the House is independent of outside supplies.” See 103

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FIGURE 1.11  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Substructure of Marshall Field & Co.’s Retail Store, Chicago,” ca. 1910. Courtesy of Newberry Library, Chicago, VO1468.

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any establishment in America, except for a few factories.106 The scale of the store’s mechanical underpinnings not only invites comparison to a large machine but also reinforces the store’s nearly autonomous capacity at the scale of a factory.107 Machine power facilitated a high level of productivity, involved numerous and diverse technological components, and replaced manpower in store operation. The combination of pneumatic tube systems and cash registers displaced the work of the cash boys.108 Stores emphasized the interrelated nature of their mechanical systems. Siegel Cooper proudly described in a guidebook how the same source of power was shared by a vast variety of uses in the “Engine-Room and Machinery” from “lighting and elevating power” to coffee grinding, butter churning, running sewing machines and dental apparatus, and powering the carpenter’s shop and hair-dyeing and manicuring departments.109 This range of activities, from coffee grinding to wood cutting, pointed to the department store as a site of production. Typically located in the basement or on the upper floors, window dressing workshops, one of the prime sites of display creation, shared space with many of the stores’ other support systems such as the shipping of packages, the bookkeeping department, and mail-order managing. Alongside the creation of display, the upper floors of some stores were devoted to rooms for sewing and finishing.110 The mechanical elements of the show window often drew from the same energy supply that powered the inner workings

The Engineer, “Our Power Supply,” Harrodian Gazette, August 1, 1913, 8, Harrods Archive, Harrods Corporate Affairs. 106 “Big Store Thrown Open,” 16. 107 The popular three-quarter exterior view of the department store building that appeared on postcards (Figure 1.3) and other ephemera was the very same view used to depict factories in manufacturer catalogues. Historian Kenneth Ames’s description of this standard factory imagery could just as well apply to the department store: “an artifact, as a machine of sorts, notable for its scale, multiplicity or complexity of parts, and orderliness.” Although the interior was not usually visible, the exterior generated the sense that what took place inside was efficient, wellorganized, business-like, and prosperous, representing the freshest approaches and techniques in that line of business. See Kenneth L. Ames, “Trade Catalogues and the Study of History,” in Accumulation & Display: Mass Marketing Household Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simmon J. Bronner (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1986), 12. 108 The Bon Marché Brixton in London described pneumatic tubing’s advantages:  “One of the many noteworthy methods observable in the organization . . . is the ‘cash railway’ which quite dispenses with the mistakes, delay, and almost unavoidable confusion attendant upon the employment of cash boys. Noise and bustle, too, are reduced to a minimum, and a customer never has to wait longer than half-a-minute for change.” Modern London:  The World’s Metropolis, An Epitome of Results, Business Men and Commercial Interests, Wealth and Growth, Etc. (London: Historical Publishing Co., 1887), 141. 109 It is curious to note that “each dynamo in the engine-room is named after an illustrious man in electrical science,” further emphasizing the substitute of machine for man. Stuart C. Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York and Its Most Magnificent Store Being a Concise and Comprehensive Visitors’ Guide to Greater New York (New York: Siegel-Cooper, 1898), 133. 110 See illustration of A. T. Stewart’s Sewing Room, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 24, 1875, 109.

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of the entire building, making the department store an integrated machine. As one New  York newspaper reported, in the basement workroom the “machinist rigs all sorts of pulleys, cogs, belts, wheels and the like [for the window display] to connect with the engines that raise the elevators, run the cash railway system and propel the dynamos.”111 The journalist describes the work room as a highly technical space of tools and activity, synching the design production of the window display to the other behind-the-scenes operations of the department store that kept the business running smoothly. Journalists likened the department store to a machine in order to highlight efficiency. On the opening night of the new Siegel Cooper in 1896, the New York Times reported, “Everything was in gear here, and there was neither jar nor friction anywhere last night.”112 Meanwhile, a 1914 brochure for the opening of B. Altman & Co.’s enlarged store described that “there is everywhere apparent a certain poise, which conveys to the keen observer the mental impression of a great organization kept under perfect control—a gigantic piece of well-constructed, well-cared-for machinery of which every infinitesimal part is accurately placed and keyed.”113 Such direct mechanistic analogies amplified the public’s awe for the proficiency as well as complexity of the department store’s operation.

“Art in Window-Dressing: How the Famous Displays in Show Windows Are Designed: Talks with Men at the Head of the Profession,” The Evening World, December 13, 1889, 5. 112 “Big Store Thrown Open,” 16. 113 B. Altman & Co.’s Enlarged Store: Fifth Avenue-Madison Avenue, Thirty-Fourth and ThirtyFifth Streets, New York (New York: B. Altman & Co., 1914), 22. 111

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The show window’s predominance on the façade and its transparency as a sidewalk sales device linked display directly with architecture. George S.  Cole was the author of one of the earliest American texts on window dressing, which he contained within his tome A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods (1892). Cole advised, “The show window was architecturally created for the sole purpose that it might be appropriately trimmed, and if it be not properly arranged it is simply useless—a waste of space which cannot be filled or used for any other purpose.”1 As architects responded to demands for increasing the presence and size of show windows, the burden then fell to window dressers to carry out the windows’ promotional mission. The show window succeeded by making its contents conspicuous; it was built for the sole purpose of promotion and the designs created for the show window were exclusive to it. By defining the window display design as an artistic entity in its own right, the window dresser created a new space and identity for the commodity on display that was held in suspension between production and consumption. Claiming this specific display domain, the window dresser secured an authoritative role in retail. The window dresser emerged as a distinct figure within the late nineteenth-century marketplace. Professional window dressers relentlessly experimented to fashion their windows into the best design statements and selling devices possible. The artistic potential and selling capacity of the window space peaked together at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1920, MRSW reported, “Frequently do merchants estimate window sales, or sales influenced by displays in show windows, at better than 60 percent, as many merchants have no hesitancy in crediting 75 or 80 percent of total business to the influence of goods displays.”2 The window dresser devised displays that articulated particular messages of modernity via materials, technique, style, George S. Cole, A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods (Chicago, IL:  W. B.  Conkey Co., 1892), 470. 2 “The Greatest Selling Factor,” MRSW, July 1920, 19. 1

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subject matter, and the use of technology. For instance, consumers perceived the achievement of an ambitious layout, the movement of mechanization, and the artistic effects of colored lighting as evidence of a store being up-todate and worthy of their patronage. Frequent and tactfully timed reconfiguration of the window display’s contents built a continually responsive consumer market that was alert to the window dressers’ method of presentation often enhanced by lighting and other theatrical effects.3 Consumer attention to display and accompanying interest in its design process encouraged the display field’s innovation and professional advancement. The public eagerly engaged as pedestrian consumers and department stores even invested money in the skilled performance of consumerism, placing paid “window gazers” in the streets to model behavior. Well-dressed men and women in Chicago and New York worked as “window gazers” paid two dollars a day to window shop from ten in the morning until nine at night in order to attract crowds.4 An article in L. Frank Baum’s periodical The Show Window described the effectiveness of the window gazer who “comes down the street at a swinging pace, glances casually at the window, and then abruptly stops to gaze eagerly at the goods displayed. Usually a number of people stumble over him at first but some are sure to pause and see what he is looking at, and soon a crowd accumulates.”5 The diverse work of the window dresser conditioned the public’s curiosity and established the window display as a destination deserving of repeated visits and particular attention.

Professional Development Window displays had been drawing pedestrian crowds since the eighteenth century, when the show window first appeared as a grid of panes.6 The view from the street resembled the flat two-dimensional effect of a trading card or advertisement that the customer may have been familiar with before arriving at the shop. In these smaller shops of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the reputation of a store largely rested on the taste Taft suggested, “The majority of people who pass a store window do so every day and, if they are brought to realize that there is something new to be seen, it would not be long before they formed the habit of stopping to look at the window regularly, instead of waiting until they had a special item in mind.” William Nelson Taft, The Handbook of Window Display (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1926), 36. 4 “Window Gazers Earn Money,” The Show Window, August 1899, 107. 5 Mark Graham, “The Window Gazer,” The Show Window, November 1897, 1–3. 6 Visitors such as C. P. Moritz, a German visitor to London in 1782, drew connections to other familiar gridded visual formats as he noted, “In London care is taken to show . . . all works of art and industry to the public . . . Such a street often resembles a well-organized show cabinet.” C. P. Moritz quoted in Sean Rothery, The Shops of Ireland (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009), 24. 3

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of the shop owner.7 The merchant chose the best-quality wares and then consumers required guidance in their navigation of a selection. Later in the nineteenth century, with the department store’s expansion of stock and vast physical layout, a dedicated display staff became necessary to create the displays that helped to guide the consumers’ selections. At the same time, the window display crucially trained consumers that it was possible to shop via observation and without engaging with a merchant. The increasing agency of the show window reshaped retail strategy. A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods described this shift as follows, “An old retailer has said that all he asked was to get consumers inside his door. Give him a chance to show his goods and he could sell them. If he makes good use of his window, all the modern storekeeper needs to ask is, that the people shall pass his door. The window will bring them in.”8 Rather than relying on the persuasive personality of their sales staff to sell wares, beginning in the late nineteenth century, merchants, first in America, then later in Britain, believed that the show window could alone entice the public, thus its design was of utmost importance.9 On March 16, 1909, in response to the opening week window displays at Selfridge’s, a journalist for the London Daily Chronicle wrote, “The Modern Shop is run on the principle that the public buys not what it wants but what it sees.”10 Window dressers managed these important visual impressions. In America in 1880 and in England in 1881, the term “window dresser” first appeared in the profession box in national censuses.11 By 1902, one American journalist estimated 150 active window dressers in the country.12 The biographies of named displaymen at the leading department stores of Chicago, London, and New  York are relatively unknown. However, the occasional profile of a displayman in the press does shed light on a For descriptions of these one-man shops see Charles Manby Smith, “London Shops, Old and New,” in The Little World of London (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1857), 325. 8 Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 469. 9 In 1892, the American author George S.  Cole assured his readership that “the storekeeper, when he has handsomely dressed his window, has half made a sale.” Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 469. In July of 1920, the MRSW called the show window “the greatest selling factor.” “The Greatest Selling Factor,” MRSW, July 1920, 19. 10 Daily Chronicle, March 16, 1909, quoted in Erica D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 159. 11 Bernhardt Harviss (born in Mecklenburg), John Jones (born in Wales), Joseph Nassauer (born in England), H. John Powell (born in New York), Charles Willis (born in England), and James Woods (born in England). United States Census Bureau, “1880 United States Federal Census,” accessed February 1, 2015. http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=6742. In the 1881 Chelsea District of London Census, one man is listed as a “window dresser mantle”: William J. Allen (born in England). Census Returns of England and Wales, “1881 British Isles Census,” accessed February 1, 2015. http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=7572. 12 “Art of Window Dressing: Artistic Trimmers Are Born, Not Made—Experts Well Paid,” Saint Paul Globe, May 12, 1902, 14. The journalist also offered information on the nationalities of the men: “Of the 150 expert window dressers who exercise their calling in the United States today over three-fourths are foreign born, being mostly natives of England and Scotland.” 7

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professional pathway in the display field. For instance, in 1922, the Dry Goods Economist identified W. F. Larkin, then chief of the decoration department at Wanamaker’s, New  York, as an “interesting figure in department store life.”13 The rarity of this documentation merits its replication here in detail. Larkin’s biography contains overlaps between sectors of display from the circus and retail to the theatre and the trade exposition. When he was a little boy, Larkin had planned to go into the circus. As a teenager he “painted portraits and did landscapes in oil and became a scenic artist for musical comedy stock.”14 He dabbled in “illustration and designing” before taking a job at the National Cash Register Company as a designer and builder of window attractions of “mechanical, electrical figures, tricks etc.,” which were fitted with shipping cases and sent around the world.15 He also did similar “show work” at the Jamestown Exposition, the Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and in Canada and Mexico before settling at Wanamaker’s. Larkin’s background calls attention to the multidimensional nature of the display medium and profession and its application to these many industries. Some of the earliest descriptions of window dressing evoke an impression of the window dresser as an artist, employing his painterly skill, such as this 1848 poetic description of a window dresser at work in a London drapery shop: The artist, warm from his bed, unshaven, with yesterday’s cravat on, disposing his piles of silk and velvet in the ample window; arranging his mantillas, his cloaks, and all his finery, upon long poles, standing upright for the better display of these inviting articles; festooning his cashmere shawls, to give unity to his composition; then, having effectually baited his lady-trap, rushing out of the shop, and, with his hand over his eyes, criticizing the general effect of the picture, has often struck us as irresistibly amusing.16 The author observes physical labor in the construction of the grouping; the window dresser’s artistic abilities to judge color, light, and shade; and his specialized knowledge of the material properties of textiles. This passage calls attention to the physicality of the building of the window display, the artistic technique and manual skills involved, as well as the gendering of the presentation as a “lady trap.” This window dresser has baited his female customers with clever designs. In this description dated to 1848, dressing the shop window is portrayed as an “art—one of the fine arts” and the window “Love of Work, the Real Secret of Larkin’s Climb,” Dry Goods Economist, February 4, 1922, 39. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 John Fisher Murray, “The Physiology of London Life,” in Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 16, ed. Richard Bentley (London: Richard Bentley, 1844), 286. 13

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dresser is openly praised for his craftsmanship and individuality. Later in the nineteenth century while the window dresser continued to aspire to the status of an artist, his work was also tempered by commercial needs. One American window display guidebook advised that the window dresser carefully balance his “artistic feeling” with his “business sense.”17 The pairing of art and commerce in the show window parallels the personal and professional backgrounds of displaymen themselves. In September of 1899, The Show Window administered a poll based on 380 reports of “existing professional trimmers in the field” and determined that 24 percent had come from a strictly commercial background and had been “clerks and floor walkers” and 17 percent had been “unsuccessful merchants.” Another 28  percent of the group had come from artistic professions or those that mixed art and commerce:  7  percent were carpenters and cabinet makers, 6  percent had worked in the theatre, 6  percent were previously involved with newspapers, 5 percent were artists, and 4 percent were sign and scenic painters.18 The profession of window dressing had its roots in the dry goods houses that were often the precursors to the department store.19 Many of the first prescriptive texts on window dressing centered on textiles and were written for dealers in the dry goods.20 The manipulability of yard goods and smaller individual wares, most notably handkerchiefs, made possible the execution of ambitious arrangements. The function of textiles, after all, relied on an ability to drape on the body or in the home. Therefore, the weight and fold of fabrics, as well as their texture and color, were essential features to communicate effectively in a window display. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the public’s expectation for dramatic presentation grew and the window dressers’ role expanded accordingly to encompass the interior. Window dressers on both sides of the Atlantic considered revising the name of their profession so that it reflected their new responsibilities. At the convention of the National Association of Window Trimmers, held in New  York in 1915, and attended by between Thomas A. Bird,“Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” in Library of Advertising: Show Window Display and Specialty Advertising, vol. 4, ed. A. P. Johnson (Chicago, IL: Cree Pub. Co., 1911), 16. 18 Other professions included the following:  traveling salesmen, 9  percent; bookkeepers, 4  percent; upholsterers, 4  percent; ad. writers, 3  percent; paper hangers, 3  percent; lawyers and clergymen, 2  percent; miscellaneous, 6  percent. Other notable findings included the following:  American trimmers are descendants of the following nations:  Scandinavians, 26 percent; English (including Yankees), 35 percent; Germans, 22 percent; Scotch, 9 percent; Irish, 7 percent; French, 5 percent; all others, 6 percent. See L. Frank Baum, “Some Statistics,” The Show Window, September 1899, 195–7. 19 In 1857, Abraham Abraham of Abraham & Straus worked as a teenager at the dry goods store Hart & Dettlebach in Newark, along with Simon Bloomingdale and Benjamin Altman. See “Press Release: The First Century of Abraham & Straus,” Abraham & Straus Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society. 20 See, for instance, Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 1892. 17

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1,500 and 2,000 members, it was decided that the term “window trimmer” was no longer appropriate and that Display Man should instead become the operative term for the vocation.21 The organization’s name change to the International Association of Display Men reflected the group’s increasingly global reach. In 1922, in London, it was similarly reported, “The name, ‘Window Dresser’ is gradually being less used, and the more dignified and fitting name of ‘Display Man’ is being more generally adopted.”22 While the term “dresser” had connotations of femininity, the term “Display Man” was definitively male. It is important to note that while females were able to hold very successful careers as top saleswomen in department stores, few advanced in this period in Britain or America as window dressers.23 While women’s goods were primarily featured in the space of the show window, the task of the display’s arrangement in the large department store largely fell to males. In the professional literature and even fictional accounts, the female most often played the role of consumer.24 Although the final visual effect may have been feminine, the rigorous work involved to produce that result was judged to be more fitting for males. Therefore, the show window generally operated around a gendered dichotomy of male producer and female consumer. Due to the physical demands of the profession and the unconventional hours, men were said to be more practically suited for the task. The work of creating the window display was potentially dangerous and fires in the windows were not uncommon.25 Men were working in cramped conditions and in high heat due to the gas lighting that could easily catch the goods on fire. There was therefore some truth in the New York Times report in 1902 that “women have not yet broken into this field of activity. One reason is that her skirts would be in the way.”26 With the leadership of a few essential men, window dressers actively organized and promoted themselves as a professional group. The process of professionalization, which involved a number of discrete steps, aimed “No More ‘Window Trimmers,’ ” New  York Times, August 1, 1915, 27. The journalist reported, “Among display men it is termed a ‘wake’ over the death and burial of the term ‘window trimmer’ which has been discarded.” 22 G. L. Timmins, Window Dressing:  The Principles of Display (London:  Sir Isaac Pitman, 1922), xiii. 23 L. Frank Baum, “Some Statistics,” The Show Window, September 1899, 197. The survey identified that there were about eighty women in America working as window dressers, mostly in small towns. 24 In 1921, one guidebook reported, “It is generally agreed that women buy ninety per cent of the necessities and luxuries used in the American home.” See Woodward and Fredericks, Selling Service with the Goods (New York: James A. McCann, 1921), 14. 25 For the story of a fire in a Siegel Cooper window, see “Miscellaneous City News: A Heavy Fire in Sixth-Avenue,” New York Times, April 13, 1880, 2. 26 “Window Dressing in Big Stores: An Art Which Enlists Services of Men of Taste,” New York Times, October 19, 1902, 27. For a similar mention of skirts as a deterrent for females’ window work, see “Art of Window Dressing,” 14. 21

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to establish display practice as a skilled and authoritative vocation.27 Through trade literature, education systems, and advertising, displaymen also followed a pathway of professional advancement within the store structure and more broadly in the design sector. Displaymen deliberately navigated this process in keeping with the drive of scientific management to rationalize even the creative industries. This formalization occurred in the late nineteenth century in America and not until the second decade of the twentieth century in Britain. In 1898, L.  Frank Baum founded the National Association of Window Trimmers. The organization’s first annual meeting was held in Chicago in August 1898 and by 1900 the organization had members in almost every state.28 In 1919, the British Association of Display Men came together under the leadership of window dresser E. N. Goldsman, who for twelve years was the display manager at Selfridge’s. The organization launched its own journal called Display in the same year. These groups held conventions that included lectures, workshops, display demonstrations, and booths where manufacturers showed off the latest tools of the trade. The specialized trade press played an important role in the professionalization of the display field, providing a platform for the sharing of knowledge among displaymen, creating a readership of attentive consumers, and serving as the means to encourage a global dialogue on advancements in display work.29 Articles on window display first appeared in literature for the dry goods trade. The London periodical The Draper’s Record and the American equivalent, the Dry Goods Economist, began to regularly report on window novelties in the late 1880s. Although better known as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), L.  Frank Baum is central to the history of the profession of window dressing. Following work in the newspaper business in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and Chicago, and a job as a china buyer at Siegel Cooper in Chicago, Baum was a traveling salesman for the china and glassware manufacturer Pitkin and Brooks, which distributed throughout the Midwest. For this work, Baum traveled to rural hardware stores where he helped to create window displays in order to boost that store’s sales of his company’s products. Baum founded The Show Window in 1897 to teach leading stores, as well as merchants outside of city centers, about the best and latest modes Grace Lees-Maffei has defined professionalization as the “setting up of professional organizations, the articulation and monitoring of standards and codes of conduct, the institution of clear educational routes and means of assessment, networking and gate keeping.” Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus in Interior Design History,” Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 1. 28 Sidney A. Sherman, “Advertising in the United States,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 7 (1900): 10. 29 For more on retail trade periodicals, see Chris Hosgood, “The Shopkeeper’s ‘Friend’:  The Retail Trade Press in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Victorian Periodicals Review 25 (1992): 164–72. 27

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of window decoration.30 Schematics as well as images and drawings of displays in situ presented these designs as reproducible and customizable. Photographs captured the display in real time, recording it for use in future learning, as well as extending the life of the otherwise ephemeral installation. In 1905, the British publication the Window Dressing and General Trade Review (WDGTR) was founded in a similar spirit of sharing information. It also aimed to bolster the nation’s support for this new profession. The first page of the first issue proclaimed a community message, “We propose to give shopkeepers the advantage of other people’s experience. It will be a medium for the mutual exchange of ideas; an Agency for obtaining information on every subject of interest to every and any shop or store-keeper.”31 At the same time, language in the inaugural issue suggests that the WDGTR was also founded with a competitive impetus in order to maintain Britain’s proud reputation as a “nation of shopkeepers”: The journal pledged to be “anxious to keep up the reputation for enterprise and progress that we still believe is the character of those who are the mainstay and backbone of our nation—the British Tradesman.”32 Their articles perpetuated the message that a well-dressed window constituted a central element of modern business.33 These sources persisted as the primary professional organs for the field, generated cross-Atlantic dialogue around the art and science of window display, and advocated for the skills of the displaymen who were their subject and audience. Guidebooks also provided an important platform for the sharing, as well as the codification, of display formulas. Baum authored The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors in 1900, the first American book publication entirely devoted to the subject.34 American texts such as the Butler Way Window Trimmer were aimed at “the busy retailer who has to do his own window dressing.”35 These journals and guidebooks Baum wrote in November of 1897, “By reproducing in its pages the most practical and artistic display windows that appear each month in the great cities, The Show Window believes it will be offering a privilege of inestimable value to those who are unable to see and study them in person. Moreover, each window will be so intelligently described that any clerk of average ability may be able to successfully duplicate it at home.” The periodical estimated 498,500 merchants as its target audience. See, “The Show Window,” The Show Window, November 1897, 19. 31 WDGTR, November 1905, 1. 32 Ibid. 33 “What We Advocate,” WDGTR, November 1905, 31. 34 Similar to The Show Window, Baum’s guidebook included grand displays attainable only through access to money, resources, and a professional display staff, side by side with schemes for effective displays appropriate for the regional shopkeeper who aimed to keep up sophisticated standards at minimal expense. 35 Butler Brothers, The Butler Way Window Trimmer: Designed to Help Our Customers Sell More Goods through Displaying Them Properly (New York: Butler Brothers, 1919), 6. The author stressed the importance of resourcefulness:  “One thing that will impress you is the absence of elaborate and expensive fixtures. Most of the units are constructed of such old waste materials as boxes, barrels and the like.” 30

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provided the basis for a self-education system. Meanwhile, other aspiring window dressers gained access to training via coursework, such as with the International Correspondence School that produced a series of four textbooks on “mercantile decoration” beginning in 1903.36 These volumes contain detailed photographs, diagrams, and descriptions. Although it is unknown how many men took part in this training, the notoriety of the school’s manager, E.  N. Goldsman, a British leader in the display field and later display manager at Selfridge’s, speaks to the prominence of the program. Goldsman lectured widely, opened his own school of window dressing in London following World War I, and served as founding president of the British Association of Display Men in 1919. Goldsman’s name and career history is one of the few known and published in the period. The International Correspondence School textbooks lay out a methodical sequencing of techniques, largely organized by material and theme. By the early twentieth century, display classes were also incorporated into some existing college programs on salesmanship, including at New  York University.37 Advertisements in retail periodicals reveal a number of private schools run by industry “experts,” which in the United States included the Koester School, founded in Germany with branches in Chicago and New York.38 New York’s investment in the field suggests the city’s support of the window dressers’ abilities to increase revenue and tourism. City retailers paid for the tuition of promising candidates to attend window display schools and supplied merchandise for the use of the pupils in learning window decoration. In London as early as 1887, the Drapers Record called for a national system of technical education for display in Britain. Smaller private schools centered on display also operated in the London area, including the Bond

International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, 4  vols. (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903). First volume on Backgrounds; second volume on Dress Goods, White Goods, Clothing; third volume on Foot, Hand, and Head Covering, Men and Women’s Furnishings, Handkerchiefs, Linens, House Furnishings; and fourth volume on Miscellaneous Merchandise, Decorations, Collection of Artistic Displays, Illuminations and Motion in Displays, Fixtures and Useful Information, Ideas for Window Decorations. 37 “Department Store Course at NYU,” New York Times, June 10, 1917, 7. In New York, under the influence of John Dewey, Pratt Institute and the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later Parsons) taught commercial art after 1900 and these courses trained men in advertising and color theory, two skills applicable to the window display field. In 1902, the New  York Times reported that for the cost of fifty dollars, workers could now earn college credentials in four or six weeks to advance in the visual merchandising field. “New School for Store Workers,” New York Times, October 5, 1902, 29. 38 The Koester School advertised heavily in periodicals; see, for instance, Popular Mechanics, May 1914, 43; Dry Goods Reporter, April 22, 1916, 36; MRSW, July 1920, 53. Albert Koester founded his window trimming school in Germany and published a series of books “Die Kunst of Schaufenster Dekoration.” Noted American window dresser George Cowan, a graduate of the school, became the president of the American branch of the Koester school and published the school’s textbook, thereby attaching Koester’s name to a method, in 1913. 36

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Institute of Mercantile Trading (founded 1899), the Premier School of Window Dressing (founded 1925), the Arundell Display School of Window Decoration (active ca. 1928), and the London School of Modern Window Display (founded 1934).39 The British Association of Display Men offered classes in display to its members. Photographs dating to the 1920s show scenes of hands-on learning sessions with mock-ups of window displays as well as a class taking a written examination. These photographs document a few women in the classroom, pointing toward the field’s greater inclusion of females by the late 1920s.40 Department stores in America and Britain ran substantial internal education programs that included classes on the principles of display.41 In 1902, when Harry Gordon Selfridge was employed as the retail manager at Marshall Field’s in Chicago, he called the retail section managers together and developed a plan for education. The store established a three-day-long period of training with pay for all new employees that taught principles of display among other basics such as store rules and how to approach customers.42 John Wanamaker called the department store “a university of business with a daily practical opportunity to practice what is being taught.”43 The principles learned in the classroom were directly incorporated into the daily operations of the department store and evaluated immediately. In his memoir The Romance of Commerce (1918), Harry Gordon Selfridge included an “Organisation Chart of a 20th Century Department Store.”44 Under the “Manager of Sales” appears a category “Displays and Trims” that contains “Windows, Outlying Windows, Interior Displays, Merchandise The charter for the Premier School of Window Dressing in London survives in the National Archives. It reads, “The objects for which the company is established were to carry on the business of teaching and contracting for window display, show case and shop dressing, salesmanship, and to act as consultant specialists to all trades.” See Premier School of Window Display Ltd Inc. 1925, April 22, 1925, BT 31/29037/205481, Records of the Companies Registration Office, National Archives, London. 40 Photographs, AAD 1993/13/4, British Display Society Records, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 41 By 1898, Debenham and Freebody had its own education department and offered three evening classes a week; in 1919, Lord & Taylor hired the New York photographers Byron Company to document its premises and there are images of an employee’s classroom and photographs of a group of graduates who had likely completed an employee training program: See Byron Company, An Employee’s Classroom at Lord & Taylor Department Store, gelatin silver print, 1919, Museum of the City of New York and Byron Company, Group Portrait of Graduates of an Employee Training (?) Program at Lord and Taylor Department Store, gelatin silver print, 1921 and 1923, Museum of the City of New York. 42 See Marshall Field’s Training Manuals, 1881–1920, Box 18002, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. In these classes, selling staff likely learned how to complete smaller arrangements for on top of and inside casework to complement the large-scale arrangements in the windows and interiors designed by full-time display designers. 43 John Wanamaker, Annals of the Wanamaker System: Its Origin, Its Principles, Its Methods, and Its Development in This & Other Cities (Philadelphia, PA: The Company, 1899), n.p. 44 Harry Gordon Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce (London: John Lane), 366–7. 39

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Displays, Flowers and Palms, Electricity, Flags, and Scenic Work.” This list shows the wide range of activities that demanded displaymen’s talents. These creative tasks crucially separated displaymen from the “mechanical, routine workers.”45 Selfridge himself wrote that the faculty of imagination was “one of the most useful that the real man of Commerce can possess.”46 By the turn of the twentieth century, the New York Times publicized the window dresser as being “at the top” of the department store structure: “That there is always room at the top is nowhere more fully demonstrated than in the great department stores of this country, from which there comes an incessant demand for men with energy and ideas.”47 This journalist attributed the window dresser’s promotion to his “energy and ideas,” or creativity.

Making Window Displays No matter the message or style of the show window display, the final result always required a great amount of skilled work, ranging from construction tasks to detailed handiwork and visual assessment. The Show Window advised, “To be worthy of the splendid title, ‘professional window trimmer,’ I  think one ought to master the following trades:  architect, carpenter, electrician, plumber, sign writer and scenic painter.”48 These trades, executed by hand and machine on site at the department store, represent the various forms of labor associated with the process of transforming a group of objects into an elegantly arranged set of commodities on display. Within the window display scheme, every factor worked to enhance the final appearance of commodities.49 Fixtures elevated, highlighted, and cradled objects. Lighting amplified the form and altered the color of the goods. Window dressers worked to develop strategies for the multiplication, movement, and enhancement of the commodity. One of the window dresser’s primary challenges was to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Display expert George Cole offered the advice that the consumer’s “attention must be secured first by some feature with which he is unfamiliar.”50Everyday commodities such as handkerchiefs and spools of thread became building blocks for commodity pictures of geometric patterns, flowers, bridges, and more. Simple wares were amplified by decorated backdrops and washes of colored light. Designers achieved these eye-catching effects by drawing on

“New School for Store Workers,” 29. Selfridge, Romance of Commerce, 16. 47 “New School for Store Workers,” 29. 48 John G. Rompel, “The Trimmer of Today,” The Show Window, August 1899, 87. 49 Sarah Burns writes about the decoration of the artist’s studio in this period in similar terms. See Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 53. 50 Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 473. 45 46

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the aid of guidebooks and tools and props of all kinds, specifically created and newly available to service their profession. The window display can be compared to a stage set, assembled in the wings and brought out in between acts in the evenings to greet its new audience the next day. In 1909, on the night before Selfridge’s grand opening one British journalist remarked on how the public was teased with hints of the show windows’ assembly:  “Most impressive of all were the lights and shadows behind the drawn curtains of the great range of windows suggesting that a wonderful play was being arranged.”51 The theatrical analogy was made even more literal through the frequent use of curtains that were raised in the morning for the viewing of the display and then lowered at night. The construction of the show window aligned with mechanics of stagecraft from the late nineteenth century. This parallel is particularly evident with the Victorian theater in Britain, where the scenic design method of moving background elements via fixed flats and grooves was under modification in favor of a more varied system of settings to allow for quicker and more ambitious changes. Both the department store and the theater were working on developments in flexible staging that aimed at awing the audience with frequent restyling. The changeable scenery of the theater was a draw in the spectacle, just as the window display heighted attraction for the store. While the majority of the time window dressing was completed out of the public eye, when it was necessary to assemble the window display during the day, some stores advocated for a policy of “open window dressing” as an effective form of advertisement. Window dresser A. W. Jungblut described this “open window dressing” method in The Show Window in 1899: As soon as I have the construction plans laid and the window looking neat and clean, I remove the curtains and begin the work of arranging the goods. All passersby are interested, and it not infrequently happens that the very goods I am using are in demand . . . there is a natural curiosity as to what will be done next, and goods unfolded and artistically arranged in view of the passersby, attract more than ordinary attention.52 In this case, the show window’s design production process was revealed, and passersby gained an appreciation for the manual skills of the window dresser as well as the time, creativity, and specialist tools necessary to compose the final display product. As the process of making window displays grew increasingly complex at the turn of the twentieth century, stores had to dedicate behind-the-scenes space for the creation of the design so as not to monopolize the window with

Daily Chronicle, March 15, 1909, quoted in Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 155. A. W. Jungblut, “Open Window Trimming a Good Advertisement for Your Firm,” The Show Window, August 1899, 77. 51 52

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FIGURE 2.1  Property Room or Workroom in International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 41, 18. Courtesy the University of Chicago Library.

this work during valuable selling hours.53 An International Correspondence School textbook pictured an image of a window dresser in his “Property Room and Work Room” in 1903 (Figure 2.1), with prefabricated large-scale props that would allow the window to be assembled quickly. Guidebooks offered advice on how to preassemble displays so the switchover could happen as swiftly as possible. This speed impressed consumers and increased their curiosity about the display’s design process.54 A  textbook article stressed how an overnight change in display excites shoppers:  “By this method elaborate decorations appear and disappear in a night, much to the bewilderment and interest of the general public, thus adding considerable impressiveness and consequent advertising value to the decorations.” Holidays in addition to sales and store openings offered many possible pretexts for changeover in display. This active calendar kept consumers

An article in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration advises on the advantages of enforcing a separation between the space of selling and the space of design production, “As much of the work as possible should be done in sections, which are fitted and trimmed in the shop and then put together at the place of display, thus minimizing the amount of work that must be done where the business of selling is being carried on.” International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 41, 18. 54 Ibid., 18–20. 53

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engaged and continually provided them with new experiences when they visited the store. Guidebooks and periodicals printed calendars for window dressers with week-by-week recommendations for themes and holidays to inspire new displays.55 Meanwhile, leading department stores such as Macy’s changed their most important windows as often as twice a week year-round.56 The continual redesign and reconstruction of the window display was the stores’ greatest commercial appeal and at the same time their greatest logistical challenge. To give a sense of the rapid pace of selling on the salesfloor, by 1900, on average, Marshall Field’s was selling one article of fur apparel every seven minutes.57 An emphasis on redesign impressed visitors. Upon stepping inside Whiteley’s in 1881, one reporter observed, “Goods were almost entirely fresh in style since our last visit; the leading character of the energetic management being to secure the very ‘last thing out.’ ”58 New technologies developed to aid the constant demand for changeover. Due to the introduction of electrical lighting in the retail interior in the late nineteenth century, windows no longer needed to be open at the top to allow natural light to flood the sales floor. Therefore, temporary backdrops could extend across the back of the window, from floor to ceiling. These walls were often made of composition board, “the display man’s best friend,” due to “its qualities which allow practically any style or character of finish.”59 Composition board could be easily repainted for a series of different scenes varying in theme and context. The material’s versatility gave it a great advantage over the stagnant state of a built-in wooden background, which was still phasing out of use in the 1920s.60 Meanwhile, devices including the patented H. Hunter’s “Show Window Construction” (Figure  2.2) helped to move the assembled displays from the basement upward to ground level in the show window. In his patent description, Hunter explained that the current challenges faced by the window dresser included “limited space” to do the assembly work at storefront level and “loss of the window” if the dressing was done during For an example of a window dresser’s calendar, see “The Trimmer’s Calendar,” The Show Window, January 1899, 52; “Notes for a Year’s Displays: Window Dresser’s Diary,” in Publicity: A Practical Guide for the Retail Clothier and Outfitter, etc. (London: The Outfitter, 1910), 34. 56 In 1916, a New York Times reporter went behind the scenes with W. F. Allert, display manager for R. H. Macy & Co. “The Art of the Display Manager: Inducing of Purchases by Means of Special Designs in Store,” New York Times, February 20, 1916, S8. 57 Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field & Co., 1852–1906 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 103. 58 Cabinet Maker, October 1, 1881, quoted in Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 41. 59 J. L. Cameron, “The Ability to Create,” MRSW, July 1920, 33. 60 Advocating for the use of composition board, MRSW explained, “While there are hundreds of stores maintaining permanent backgrounds of mahogany, walnut, and other hardwoods, and frequently mirrors, there is always that emergency or quick change to consider.” Cameron, “The Ability to Create,” 33. 55

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FIGURE 2.2  Hamilton Hunter, “Show Window Construction,” US Patent 709, 985, filed November 4, 1901, issued September 30, 1902. Courtesy United States Patent and Trademark Office.

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the day behind blinds or curtains.61 In order to address these issues, Hunter invented a “fixture-carrying floor” or a platform, holding the entire contents of the show window, that could be raised and lowered from the basement. This technology was implemented in stores, such as Lord & Taylor in New  York where by 1914 show windows were “constructed with movable floors” that “can be lowered to the mezzanine basement and rolled off on tracks.”62 Journalists’ attention to such construction details implies that the mechanics of display design production were of public interest. Frank L.  Carr’s publication, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, provides a rare interior view of a window dresser’s studio that contains all of the tools—the forms, frames, pedestals, racks, etc.—involved with the “bottom idea” or the framework for the design (Figure 2.3). This idealized image presents the workshop as a stage set and the tools as props in orderly rows. This interior appears like a sales floor, a message reinforced through the image’s title as the “window trimmer’s department.” The room has all of the trappings of a selling space with plenty of natural and electric light, the curtains to offer decoration and casework for smart display. Labels, similar to signage on the sales floor, identify the tools. These tools, the typically invisible support system for the goods, are here presented as eyecatching commodities in their own right. In order to be “Wide-Awake” in terms of display design, as the book’s title suggests, access to a wide range of tools such as mannequins, display blocks, lighting systems, and more was necessary. A dedicated well-stocked workroom allowed the window dresser to efficiently keep up a momentum of production. From the late nineteenth century, the window dresser often began the design process with a sketch or the making of a model. Once a plan had been developed, fixtures helped to secure the desired layout and allowed goods to fill the window’s entire dimensions. The shopfitting firm offered fixtures specialized for specific categories of wares, such as shoes, hats, drapery, haberdashery, millinery, and fashion. Since every category of goods had such different material and visual properties, an array of support systems was needed to flatter all of the merchandise. The Wide-Awake Window Dresser illustrated a series of mock show windows, by the American shopfitting firm Norwich Nickel and Brass, that showed a variety of useful fixtures that made the window display more readable for the consumer while also offering the opportunity for more complex, but still organized arrangements (Figure 2.4).

Hamilton Hunter, Show Window Construction, US Patent 709, 985, filed November 4, 1901, issued September 30, 1902. 62 “Lord and Taylor Opening,” New  York Times, February 25, 1914, 6.  Lord and Taylor’s window decorating platforms attracted the attention of “merchandise men from all over the country and abroad.” See “Where Ideas Come From,” MRSW, 28. 61

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FIGURE 2.3  “The Window Trimmer’s Department,” in Frank L. Carr, The WideAwake Window Dresser (New York: Dry Goods Economist, 1894), 36. Courtesy the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

Unavailable in this ebook edition

FIGURE 2.4  Norwich Nickel and Brass Works “Perfection” Fixtures for All Departments in Frank L. Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: Dry Goods Economist, 1894), 316. Courtesy the Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection.

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FIGURE 2.5  Pedestrians Viewing a Marshall Field & Company Window Display, 1910. DN-0008625, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

Stands and brackets were key to the dynamism and height achieved in the window display. For instance, a photograph, published in the Chicago Daily News, shows how tall stands helped folded textiles climb in a tree-like formation, hooks secured fabrics in dramatic swooping arcs, and fixtures held handkerchiefs in geometric arrangements in a Marshall Field’s window display of 1910 (Figure  2.5). The resulting display design reaches well above the heads of both male and female passersby who crowd around the window. Once the understructure had been determined, window dressers arranged goods in a great variety of display styles. Period guidebooks and textbooks as well as surviving photographs and accounts in the popular press and periodicals point to a canon of window display types that were presented to the public from the late nineteenth century onward. Varying and often competing approaches to display included the “stocky” window, the sculptural window, and the unit principle, all of which conveyed vastly different attitudes and approaches to commodities. As window dressers codified their work into this set of styles, they contributed to a cross-Atlantic conversation to determine which style was the most desirable and successful, in both a business and a creative sense.

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FIGURE 2.6  Bon Marché Christmas Window, Liverpool, 1900. Courtesy John Lewis Partnership Archives, Ref: 2872/h.

Stocky Style In the early to mid-nineteenth century, most merchandise presentation overwhelmed passersby with quantity and variety. This encyclopedic style persisted even into the twentieth century, particularly in Britain, as seen in a Christmas window display of 1900 at the Bon Marché Liverpool (Figure 2.6). From left to right, top to bottom, rows of dolls, handkerchiefs, gloves, hose, picture frames, floral gift boxes, and more crowd the entire space behind the glass. Retail expert Cole described a stocky window as “an object lesson which conveys at one glance more ideas than many columns of a newspaper description,” although ironically the packed pillared format of the window display indeed mimicked the condensed columns of a newspaper page, as seen in this Bon Marché Liverpool window.63 Some retailers believed that it was necessary to display as much of the inventory as possible in order to optimize profit return on the expensive glazing. This window display style

Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 469.

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placed emphasis on the amount, quality, and variety of goods that the store was able to show off from its holdings rather than artful presentation. For this reason, this style of window display may have earned the name the “stocky” window. Also referred to as “massed,” wares were often placed directly up against the glass. The serial imagery of the stocky show window also communicated the strength of industrial production that made possible the profusion and low cost of goods on the department store’s sales floors.64 The repetitive nature of such arrangements, the same commodity shaped and piled on top of one another, recalls Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament as it relates to capitalist production.65 These show window displays prefigured in material form what Kracauer later identified, in relationship to factory hands and the Tiller Girls in the United States, as “the mass ornament” or “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.”66 Kracauer observed that the logic and power of Taylorism had driven the similar appearance and actions of contemporary forms. Similarly, the window dresser was driven by the demands of increased production to secure increased consumption by displaying goods in large numbers and repetitive formats. The massed window persisted in department stores in London longer than in Chicago or New York. Some shopkeepers including the British John Lewis believed that the stocky window served as an honest advertisement for the establishment:  “My own belief has always been that a shop can safely afford to be shoppy and that it need not pretend to be a drawing room display in the house of a wealthy connoisseur of rather austere taste.”67 Lewis did not feel the need to dramatize his everyday wares. He considered such sophisticated presentation better suited for the luxury market.68 In Chicago and New York, the stocky style was used most often in five-and-dime stores such as Woolworths and drugstores, where the corporate message was quantity and affordability. When used by American department stores, this static massed method of presentation quickly appeared out of date. The stocky method’s lack of styling sent a poor message to the public. It was difficult for the consumer to decipher the window dresser’s skill, the Sherwin Simmons, “August Macke’s Shoppers: Commodity Aesthetics, Modernist Autonomy, and the Inexhaustible Wall of Kitsch,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 63 (2000): 56. 65 Thanks to Glenn Adamson for this interpretation suggestion. 66 Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79. 67 Pamphlet on display, John Lewis Partnership Archives quoted in Susan Lomax, “The View from the Shop:  Window Display, the Shopper and the Formulation of Theory,” in Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700, ed. John Benson and Laura Ugolini (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 285. 68 For a similar class-oriented viewpoint, see J. W. Hayes, Hints on Haberdashery & Drapery etc. (London: Clements and Newling, 1875), 13. 64

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details of the merchandise, or the store’s character in a stocky arrangement.69 As one British retail expert pointed out in 1875, the stocky window was a burden for the consumer, “a hopeless jumble of many kinds of merchandise which the weary foot passenger had laboriously to sort out for himself.”70 As window dressers increased the sophistication of the window display, consumer attention expanded beyond just the commodities, which were the only subject of the stocky window, to the manual expertise, props, and new technologies at work that made possible a range of new window display arrangements.

Draping Techniques and the Female Gaze While massed display strategy made no concerted attempt to personally engage with passersby, more advanced window display designs targeted the female consumer with cleverly manipulated textiles. Window display guidebooks were often organized by textile type implying that textiles should be handled and arranged appropriately to suit their properties, such as weight and sheen, which window dressers were required to master and pair with the appropriate lighting techniques.71 Designers used blocks, mannequins, and dress-like draping to simulate the female body; therefore, the window dresser’s manual skills of draping and shaping over a form resembled those of a tailor around the body.72 In order to achieve this level of accuracy, designers often covered a wooden stand in a pleated fabric base One American journalist warned in 1920 that the “heavily trimmed window . . . merely dazzles, and bewilders the observer leaving no definite idea.” See O.  Wallace Davis, “The Merchant’s Magic Mirrors,” MRSW, August 1920, 82. 70 Hayes, Hints on Haberdashery, 31. 71 “Color Lighting for Windows,” MRSW, October 1920, 64. As early as 1851 in the displays at the Great Exhibition in London, one can identify artistic attempts at draping swaths of fabric and hanging textiles over forms to give them shape and show off their material qualities. For sophisticated draping at the Great Exhibition see, “Group of Objects of British Manufacture: Lace and Embroidered Dresses, Shawls, etc.—Selected from the Contributions of Various Manufacturers,” in The Illustrated Exhibitor: A Tribute to the World’s Industrial Jubilee (London: John Cassell, 1851), 552. 72 As early as the eighteenth century, a female shopper observed “a cunning desire” in the show windows to show fabrics “as it would be in the ordinary folds of a woman’s dress.” Sophie von la Roche, Sophie in London, 1786; Being the Diary of Sophie v.  la Roche, trans. and intro. Clare Williams, fwd. George Trevelyan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), 87; also quoted in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society:  The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1982), 79. An International Correspondence School textbook devoted particular attention to “Skirt-Stand Draping,” encouraging readers that “in the display of dress materials, it has always been the aim of trimmers to imitate, as nearly as possible, the fashionable hang and drape of ladies’ skirts, in order to give the prospective purchasers an idea of how the goods will look when made up.” International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 2 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 15, 2. 69

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FIGURE 2.7  Back and Front Overdrapes in International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 2 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 15, 24. Courtesy the University of Chicago Library.

over which they arranged any style of skirt drapery, including plaiting, ball puffs, rosettes, fan-shaped puffs, and overdraping finished with a top puff and a long-train effect (Figure  2.7). Many female shoppers arrived at the show window with an understanding of textile properties and the design process of clothing construction and therefore would have admired the display staff’s adept handing of fabric. At the turn of the twentieth century, shop fittings for garments became much more lifelike as the design advanced from wooden blocks to flexible full-size mannequins.73 The mannequin industry also worked closely with the fashion industry in this era, following the shapes that the present style dictated.74 In the late nineteenth century, the British shopfitting firm Harris For more on the development of mannequin design, see Emily M. Orr, “Body Doubles:  A History of the Mannequin,” in Ralph Pucci:  Art of the Mannequin, ed. Barbara Gifford, Emily M. Orr, and Ralph Pucci (New York: Museum of Arts and Design/Marquand Books, 2015), 35–54. 74 Between 1869 and 1900, Stockman, a leading French mannequin manufacturer, developed more than twenty different dressmaker forms mirroring body shapes dictated by the best 73

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& Sheldon employed Jackie Lamb, a man who contributed an “intimate knowledge of the bust trade and future trends of shapes” to the design of the mannequins.75 An up-to-date mannequin was necessary in order to give an accurate impression of a garment’s fit on the body. The firm’s 1899 catalog featured an image of the Wire Working Shops, where mannequins were made, above an image of its latest product, a “New Shaped Jersey or Short Jacket Stand.” This product had been introduced “to meet the requirements of the present fashion. It is of an improved shape and has been submitted and approved by the London Mantle Houses”76 (Figure 2.8). Some stands were even offered with “adjustable improvers,” an extension whose distance from the rear could be modified according to the silhouette of the dress to be displayed. For the promotion of ready-to-wear garments and textiles, window displays often forged direct connections with consumers’ desires for selffashioning.77 As early as 1866, one account described women window shopping past London linen drapers’ shops assembling garments in their minds: How many ideal dresses do they not possess in the course of an afternoon’s walk! As the sculptor sees the statue in the block of marble, a woman perceives a full-trimmed body in the simple goods piece, and as she goes from window to window, a whole wardrobe passes through her mind like so many dissolving views, as she glances from the flaunting and profligate satins to the staid and sober-minded stuffs.78 In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the process of achieving a fashionable female ensemble reached a new stage of complexity and the combination of many materials and trimmings was required. Therefore, window shopping became an increasingly active engagement as passersby combined materials and colors in their imaginations in order to design a complete look. Just as the female selected and pieced together an attractive ensemble, the window dresser combined elements to present his store’s best front. couture houses. See Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2002), 31. 75 Harris & Sheldon Limited History, n.d., Harris & Sheldon Archive. 76 Harris & Sheldon, Red White and Blue Catalogue, 1899, 100, Harris & Sheldon Archive. 77 Further to the point, an article published in Lady Magazine on “Shopping in London” reported that while window shopping, “Madame’s more comprehensive feminine gaze has at once adapted the draperies and folds to her own requirements.” “Shopping in London,” Lady Magazine, June 28, 1888, 578–80. On self-fashioning and window display from the male perspective, see Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 143. 78 Andrew Wynter, Our Social Bees: Or, Pictures of Town & Country Life, and Other Papers (Detroit, MI: Singing Tree Press, 1861), 125.

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FIGURE 2.8  Wire Working Shops in Harris & Sheldon, Red White & Blue Catalogue, 1899, 100. Courtesy Harris & Sheldon, Ltd.

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Sculptural Style By the early twentieth century, the stocky window fell out of favor in part because of its practical shortcomings of not being a flexible enough system to allow for revision and variety.79 However, windows that were made up of textiles manipulated by hand offered endless opportunity for alteration. Cole advocated that the window dresser should “introduce variety by puffing or folding.”80 When simply piled up in the window via the stocky method, most textiles had a uniform appearance. However, puffing or folding them showed off their pattern, weight, sheen, and pliability while also advertising the skill of the window dresser and forming a strong mental impression on the consumer.81 Indeed, there were many such “puffing and folding” techniques (Figure 2.9). This page from the Handkerchief section of an International Correspondence School textbook instructed on how to make a handkerchief into an intricate quatrefoil or “cups fold.” The textbook advised, “Perhaps no other article of merchandise is capable of a greater variety of decorative folds, forms, or designs than the handkerchief.”82 Cotton goods, pliable yet still sturdy, could be folded, shaped, and layered into assemblages easily. Window dressers took particular care so that goods were not damaged in the making of the window display and were still saleable following their display use. The material, borrowed from the textile departments, was required to be returned unharmed. In some stores, the window dresser opened an account and every item that he borrowed for the window was charged against him. Upon the item’s safe return, he received credit for the stock.83 It was not financially viable to sacrifice the goods for sole use in the window. One window dresser elaborated on his textile “trials” for the New York Tribune in 1910, sharing that he had to create a “princess dress, a seven-gored skirt, or any old thing” and that he “must produce the desired effect without even cutting the goods.”84 This trial illustrates how the window dresser had to possess excellent manual skills with textiles, handle the fabric carefully, as well as operate with an awareness of the fashion system. Patented formulas were even developed Cole continued that “over-stocked windows allow of very little change, consequently the effect is soon minimized.” Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 487. 80 Ibid. While this design advice was referring to the physical puffing of the material, fashioning it into a sculptural arrangement, the term “puffing” had been used to describe the oftensensationalistic exaggeration that fueled the advertising industry since the mid-nineteenth century. British minister Dawson Burn identifies the shop windows as “regular puffing establishments.” See James Dawson Burn, The Language of the Walls: And a Voice from the Shop Windows; or, the Mirror of Commercial Roguery (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1855), 1. 81 The Show Window, August 1898, 67. 82 International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 3 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 28, 1. 83 “Art of Window Dressing,” 14. 84 E. Donehower, “A Window Dresser’s Trials,” New York Tribune, January 23, 1910, 14. 79

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FIGURE 2.9  Handkerchief Folding Instructions for a “Cups Fold” in International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 3 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 28, 27. Courtesy the University of Chicago Library.

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FIGURE 2.10  “Window Decorated with Napkins, Doylies, or Handkerchiefs. By Mr. E. Katz,” The Show Window, December 1899, supplement, 87. Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

to aid the draper in preserving the condition of the dry goods stock while creating attractive textile effects.85 Complicated work with white goods was some of the most challenging in the window dresser’s repertoire. In about 1895 Mr. E.  Katz, “the accomplished decorative artist of Messrs. Abraham & Straus, Brooklyn,” won a prize for the best linen display offered by The Dry Goods Chronicle. This display’s ambitious design won it a reproduction in a supplement to the December 1899 issue of The Show Window (Figure 2.10, see also Plate 7 in the plate section).86 Here Katz’s window is presented as the best example of this type of window display in the field. The accompanying article entitled “A Prize Linen Display: Details for Constructing It and Similar Windows” emphasized the great skill required to achieve a successful display design. It R. F. Downey, Method and Apparatus for Draping Dummies from an Uncut Length of Cloth, US Patent 1,024, 297, filed February 16, 1912, issued April 30, 1912. The patent instructed the window dresser in how to drape an uncut length of cloth upon a dummy to produce the effect of a completed garment or suit. 86 “Window Decorated with Napkins, Doylies, or Handkerchiefs. By Mr. E. Katz,” The Show Window, December 1899, supplement, 87. 85

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included step by step illustrated instructions on the design’s various folding elements as well as this important warning to the reader:  “If properly arranged, linens make a beautiful window display, but in unskilled hands they are disappointing and unattractive.”87 In a more artful and rhetorical way than the stocky window, this sculptural mode in textile display conveyed excess. Displaymen also hoped for more subtle messages around the strength of the global textile industry and trade. Author of multiple books on salesmanship, Nathaniel C. Fowler, Jr., suggested, “Handkerchiefs . . . can be built into pillars, arranged in cones, or an immense heap of handkerchiefs can be shown . . . to represent bulk, as characteristic of the size of the handkerchief business.”88 A multitude of handkerchiefs communicated the strength of the textile industry and the department store’s command of global trade since many of the handkerchiefs were imported.89 Out of this standard stock of handkerchiefs or other textiles, the designer created all kinds of geometric forms, plants and flowers, architectural elements, and more. As WDGTR pointed out in December of 1905, “The good window dresser must practically ‘think’ in arches, scrolls, and curves, for everybody recognizes the beauty of a well-shaped curve composed or made up in any material or substance.”90 Window dressers also built humble objects such as handkerchiefs and spools of thread into figures that carried symbolic weight. The Brooklyn Bridge was a particularly popular design around the time of its 1883 completion, representing democratization, specialization, and technological achievement, all concepts central to the department store itself.91 Frank L. Carr, author of The Wide-Awake Window Dresser designed a Brooklyn Bridge window out of wheel cotton that exhibited noteworthy technical prowess.92 An Australian newspaper reported in 1901 that his model had been “inspected by the chief engineer of the bridge, and he pronounced it an exact reproduction in every detail.”93 Such elaborate designs therefore also achieved a high level of technical precision. Ibid., 77. This distinction that could be made between skilled and unskilled hands or the work of amateurs and the work of professionals is notable. A parallel binary was also present within other developing design professions, including that of interior design in which, as historian Grace Lees-Maffei has described, the field needed to “shift its emphasis from taste to skill.” See Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus,” 1. 88 Fowler, Building Business, 430. 89 “Even So Simple a Thing as a Handkerchief,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 11, 1927, Scrapbook, 1852–1928, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 90 “The Window Artist: Attainments to Be Aimed at by a Good Window Dresser,” WDGTR, December 1905, 37. 91 In his Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, Cole illustrated an example of a Brooklyn Bridge window fashioned from rolls of cloth, undershirts, ties, buttons, and spools of thread. Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 530. 92 See a photograph of a Brooklyn Bridge Window display made of spool cotton, designed by Mr. Edward S. Smith in The Show Window, March 1898, plate no. 102. 93 “Frank L. Carr, An American Decorator,” The Brisbane Courier, May 15, 1901, 7. 87

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This “picture-building” mode of window dressing, requiring a great amount of labor and preparation, took hold in America much more than in Britain. In fact, the American press boasted of the time and effort required for their elaborate window displays.94 One journalist cited the active making involved with American windows as being an element that determined their superior quality:  “Other countries may dress windows, but Americans make Window Displays. America, without question, is the Utopia of the profession.”95 Meanwhile the journalists for the British paper WDGTR often pointed out that the ease of their windows set them apart from American display production “whose labour in the arrangement of large shows is enormously apparent.”96 Rather than simply arrange goods in their given state, American window dressers took pride in the amount of work they invested to reshape and build with commodities at an impressive scale. Being the most theatrical, this sculptural style of window dressing was ideal for competition, which propelled the production of new design ideas. In The Show Window, Frank L.  Baum positioned the show window as a site for contests among practitioners. One article explained, “The remark, ‘Brown has a pretty window,’ is usually followed by the sentence, ‘Brown has a good window trimmer.’ ” The show window was described as a site of rivalry and design success was directly linked to an individual maker. The journalist continued, “Competition in selling goods to-day is largely directed and influenced by the competition of window trimmers. These men are usually intensely interested in the success of their employers. They want to excel the efforts of all other trimmers and establish their own reputations as clever designers.”97 Officially arranged window display competitions were more common in America than Britain where the audience was not attuned to the production value of display as early and as intensely as American consumers.98 In December 1889, the New York newspaper The Evening World ran a window display contest that featured many ostentatious displays that fit into various conventions of the time.99 Many of the winning designs featured in then popular guidebooks, proving a direct link between prescriptive literature and design practice.

For instance, see remarks on a stationery display in the shape of the Capital at Washington at Marshall Field’s in Chicago in The Show Window, January 1898, 33. 95 Davis, “The Merchant’s Magic Mirrors,” 82. 96 WDGTR, January 1906, 68, and “A Few Words to Drapers,” WDGTR, December 1905, 57. 97 “Up-to-Date Ideas,” The Show Window, April 1898, 143. 98 Author George Sims wrote in 1904, “Occasionally there are window-dressing contests among the West-End shop assistants, but these do not appeal to the general public.” See George R. Sims, Living London:  Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes, vol. 3 (London: Cassell & Co., 1904), 264. 99 “Art in Window-Dressing: How the Famous Displays in Show Windows Are Designed: Talks with Men at the Head of the Profession,” The Evening World, December 13, 1889, 5. 94

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One winner of the Evening World’s contest was Sam J.  Besthoff, who worked at the establishment of J. Lichtenstein & Sons, with its “fourteen plate-glass windows” where “the goods [handkerchiefs] are deftly arranged into the form of plants and flowers.”100 Another contest winner, Patrick H. McMahon at Simpson, Crawford, & Simpson, was planning a handkerchief arrangement of “over one thousand dozen fine handkerchiefs . . . The handkerchiefs were arranged in gothic arches.” The article goes on to describe how “Mr. McMahon’s forte is in producing artistic effects with merchandise along, unaided by lay figures or mechanical devices.”101 His recent accomplishments included a “Brooklyn Bridge,” composed of spool and knitting, silks, and a “Capitol at Washington,” built out of linens and towelings. While these figural arrangements of commodities might at first appear exotic or bizarre, it is important to point out that displaymen were a part of a larger aesthetic movement around building with commodities that took hold in the nineteenth century. Both the department store and the world’s fair favored this sculptural approach to the arrangement of wares. Crop art and “food art constructions” at the world’s fairs expressed a symbolism of abundance much like the handkerchief windows.102 For instance, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, the state of California presented the “Old Liberty Bell” containing 6,500 oranges in the Agricultural Hall (Figure 2.11). Cole’s A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods featured a nearly identical schematic for a display design of a Liberty Bell in handkerchiefs.103 Meanwhile, to mark special occasions, many towns in Victorian Britain constructed arches of objects that symbolized the town’s strength in manufacturing. This tradition likely originated when London’s Marble Arch was moved from Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner in 1850 or 1851 and entered the public consciousness as a desirable form. High Wycombe was notable for its tradition of arches of chairs begun in 1877 to celebrate the visit of Queen Victoria, a custom that continued for years to follow (Figure  2.12).104 Therefore, department store displaymen contributed to a trend of the massed commodity as a form of visual communication and produced design templates that were used across exhibition contexts. For a template of a “Lily Window” see Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 334. For a photograph of a Capital at Washington display at Marshall Field’s, see The Show Window, January 1898, 33. For a related template, see Cole, A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 522. 102 See Pamela H. Simpson, Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Dairy Sculpture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 85–111. 103 Final Report of the California World’s Fair Commission:  Including a Description of All Exhibits from the State of California, Collected and Maintained under Legislative Enactments, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Sacramento, CA:  State Office, A.  J. Johnston, 1894), 75. See Cole, Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods, 342. 104 “Chair Arches,” Wycombe District Council, accessed August 15, 2015, http://www.wycombe. gov.uk/council-services/leisure-and-culture/local-and-family-history/chair-arches.aspx. 100 101

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FIGURE 2.11  Liberty Bell Constructed from Southern California Citrus, Inside the California Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Final Report of the California World’s Fair Commission . . . (Sacramento, CA: State Office, A. J. Johnston, 1894), 90. Courtesy Library of Congress.

FIGURE 2.12  Chair Arch for Visit of Prince and Princess of Wales, High Wycombe, 1884. Courtesy Wycombe Museum.

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Machinery of Display Mechanics became increasingly impactful to modern display design. The shopfitting industry produced fixtures to provide motion. In 1876, American inventor Albert Fischer patented a “Revolving Show Stand” with a rotating bottom tier “partly for steadying the rotation of the stand, and partly to attract the attention of passers-by to the mechanism and to the contents of the show-window.”105 The design and its accompanying patent copy explicitly demonstrate an awareness of the public fascination with visible mechanics and movement. The motor was not encased in the device but instead left exposed so that the public could view the mechanics of its inner workings. In 1905, WDGTR reported on the advantages of featuring the power of the machine in the show window, “The important point of a mechanical fitting is its irresistible attraction to the majority of men, women, and children whose eyes are instantly caught by the spectacle of anything moving in the window. ‘Machinery in motion’ is always put on the list of attractions of a popular exhibition.”106 Ehrich Brothers’ presentation of a three-ring Dolls’ Circus in 1881 was probably the earliest use of an animated window by a New York City department store.107 As early as 1883, Macy’s added mechanics to its Christmas shows, turning dolls and toys through steam power.108 Over forty years of innovation later, by 1925, Macy’s mechanical experiments had advanced to a “fantastical animated spectacle” made up of “twenty-six stirring scenes with hundreds of marionette actors in a continuous performance” that played on a six-minute loop.109 While mechanics were popular as an attention attraction strategy, in order to secure their position as a worthwhile investment, passersby must be persuaded to come inside and make a purchase. As L. Frank Baum advised, “It is very true that life or motion in a window attracts more attention than anything else. But judgment must be exercised as to what degree and class of animation

Albert Fischer, Revolving Show Stands, US Patent 184, 362, filed July 25, 1876, issued November 14, 1876. 106 “Mechanical Fittings,” WDGTR, December 1905, 55. In London, the stores’ introduction of mechanical movement coincided with the rise of shops devoted to automatic shows. According to the author, automatic shows were most popular in “Blackwall, Kentish Town, and Lambeth, as in Oxford Street and the more select ways of the West.” See A. St. John Adcock, “Slideshow London,” in Sims, Living London, 84. 107 William L. Bird, Holidays on Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, 2007), 23. 108 Leigh E. Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995), 161. See “Macy’s Holiday Window,” Saratoga Eagle, December 22, 1883, 8B Box 8, Macy’s Archive. 109 “Macy’s Big Christmas Parade” Advertisement, New York Evening Journal, November 25, 1925, Box 6, Folder 4, Messmore & Damon Company Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 105

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you employ.” He urged that attention always must be attracted “to some purpose,” in other words, to secure a sale.110 In 1899, The Window Motor Co. advertised that “by the occasional use of something that is full of life and motion, the particular window where it is seen will be well fixed in the minds of the people and the ordinary display will receive their attention because they are constantly looking for something new.”111 The use of a motor marked the store as worth returning to in order to observe how the display would feature motion in new ways. As well as sparking consumers’ imagination, mechanical fixtures also offered practical benefits such as rotation that allowed objects to be seen in the round.112 One story of a particularly striking mechanical window in London shows how the window display’s visual attraction had significant repercussions on city life by affecting the flow and speed of vehicle and pedestrian circulation. On December 9, 1909, London’s Metropolitan Police received an application for a summons against Mr. Wallace Morford, managing director of the London department store Swan and Edgar, for “willfully causing obstruction to the footway” from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. on the 8th of December at Piccadilly Circus. The report detailed that “the attraction was in the window nearest Regent St.” and was “found to be caused by a moving platform above four feet from shop level, which [had] about three divisions or scenes” and “on each scene were two models of well dressed women . . . Each scene was exhibited for about three minutes and the whole was revolved by some means, not visible . . . Around the platform which appeared like a miniature stage, were about 25 electric lights, and these were lowered as the scenes were changed.”113 This kinetic display was a celebration of the most advanced technology of the day at the service of commerce. The presentation of dresses, likely already exceptional for their beauty, was made even more captivating when activated in the window by modern machinery. Revolving platforms with mannequins gave a full view of the garment, encouraging a perspective shopper to wait to watch a complete rotation. The cyclical illumination held

The Show Window, November 1897, 25. “The Trimmer’s Calendar,” The Show Window, January 1899, 56. 112 In 1930, architect Frederick Kiesler published his “Dream of a Kinetic Window” that opened and closed, rotated, added light, and brought the merchandise closer at the consumers’ command. See Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), 10. 113 Application for a Summons against Messrs. Swan and Edgar Ltd., Mr. Wallace Morford, Managing Director, December 9, 1909, Mepo 2/910, Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives. 110 111

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FIGURE 2.13  Swan and Edgar, Piccadilly Circus, 1912. Courtesy of London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

the public in front of the window for three minutes at a time, therefore causing a blockage in the sidewalk traffic. When reports of this window display appeared in the London press, journalists devoted more copy to the description of the mechanics of the display than to the details of the merchandise. Along the prominent curve of Piccadilly Circus (Figure  2.13), on the western side between Piccadilly and Regent Streets, Swan and Edgar’s mechanical display drew up to a few hundred viewers at a time according to one newspaper article.114 The blockade made the sidewalk impassable, therefore causing foot passengers to step into the roadway and omnibuses to alter their stopping point.115 Despite a few police summons, the store’s managing director Mr. Morford at first declined to extinguish the lights and discontinue the exhibition. When told that he would be reported to the police as responsible for the obstruction, he replied, “What would you do if your firm had spent 100

“Shop Window Dressing Regent-Street Obstruction,” Daily Telegraph, December 18, 1919, Mepo 2/910, Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives. 115 Ibid. 114

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pounds in preparing the window.”116 His defensive retort gave recognition to the store’s financial commitment to window display design. With such money and effort invested in a temporary arrangement, the department store aimed for maximum exposure; a discontinuation of the display, as the police demanded, would ruin its advertising mission. When ten days following that first summons in 1909, the Swan and Edgar window was still causing a disturbance, the Daily Telegraph featured a follow-up story in which a Swan and Edgar employee, Mr. Bodkin, gave a defense for the display design that called attention to its practicality ahead of its entertainment value:  “Mr. Bodkin contended that the exhibition did not go beyond the fair limits of attraction allowed to a shopkeeper, especially as the dresses shown on the moving models were actually for sale to anyone who chose to buy them.”117 Bodkin pointed out that the window was not purely sensationalistic but instead “within fair limits of attraction” as a successful display with commercial goals. Following negotiations with the police and a public forum to discuss the incident, Swan and Edgar agreed to make their moving figures stationary and to showcase simply one scene per day rather than a series of changeable scenes that would be signaled by the turning on and off of spotlights as in the theatre. The store surmised that these modifications, that in essence froze the window display as a single view, would aid in “reducing the crowd round their window.”118 Without its mechanical and changeable aspects, the window design would not draw as many spectators. The agreement placated the police and may have in fact also benefitted business as it allowed more people clear access to the door to step inside and purchase what they had stopped to see.119 The police required Swan and Edgar to lessen the artistic impact of its window so that patterns of commerce and circulation in the city could proceed. The use of electric lights in the Swan and Edgar window display extended the attraction’s allure into the evening when the garments would have been dramatically lit. Electric light maximized the duration of the show window’s exposure and gave the department store building as a whole a new nighttime identity.120 Electric lights shining through on every floor and through every window further emphasized the building’s repeated use of glazing. As Reyner Banham has described, “The sheer abundance of light Application for a Summons, Mepo 2/910, Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives. 117 “Shop Window Dressing Regent-Street Obstruction,” Daily Telegraph, December 18, 1919, Mepo 2/910, Records of the Metropolitan Police Office. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 As Tag Gronberg has written with respect to the boutiques of Paris in this period, “Electricity put the object ‘to work’ by night as well as by day—the work of making itself noticed and desired.” Tag Gronberg, Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 91. 116

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FIGURE 2.14  Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, State St. Looking South, Chicago,” ca. 1915. Author’s collection.

effectively reversed all established viewing habits by which buildings were seen. For the first time, it was possible to conceive of buildings whose true nature could only be perceived after dark, when artificial light blazed out through their structures.”121 Marshall Field’s produced a postcard that showed its buildings alive with electricity at night. Windows glowed and lights of lampposts and headlights filled the evening city scene (Figure 2.14, see also Plate 8 in the plate section). In an advertisement for its show windows, Marshall Field’s, echoing Banham’s words, promoted, “Beautiful as the windows are by day they are perhaps even more beautiful at night when seen by artificial light only, and will amply repay those who make it a point to see them in the evening.”122 Selfridge’s similarly advertised, “By Night as well as Day Selfridge’s will be a centre of attraction. The usual custom after closing time, our windows will not be obscured by blinds, but brilliantly lit up every Evening until Midnight.”123 Due to electrification, the façades of department stores were

Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 70. 122 Advertisement, “At Night” by Frank Turner Godfrey in State Street Store Grand Opening Booklet, 1907, 03052 (26), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 123 See Advertisement, “Selfridges by Night,” by T. Friedleson in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (New York: Routledge, 2004), 198. 121

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focal points even at night and window shopping was incorporated into the evening leisure schedules of the urban public. Within the window display, lighting enhanced the appearance of commodities to secure the display’s success. Over the course of the turn of the twentieth century period, lighting technology advanced from problematic and cumbersome gas lamps to electrified systems that attracted the attention of passersby with the quality of their light rather than the view of their armature.124 As the technology matured, the electrical apparatus’s invisibility provoked curiosity for the source of the still visible lighting effect. The 1914 manual Display Window Lighting explained that if lighting fixtures are hidden, the prospective purchaser “would enter the store to satisfy his curiosity.”125 Then, if he did not purchase it would be the fault of the inside salesmanship, for artificial light would have performed its function as an “auxiliary outside salesman.” The author described this selling ability as “a function which every display window can be made to perform if the lighting is original and different.”126 Godinez identified the active role of lighting technologies in making consumers out of passersby. Lighting also served as another tool to amplify the rate and impact of change; washes of colored light required a simple switch of a colored lens on the light’s apparatus to give an entirely new look to the design.127 The use of such lighting technology enabled displays to become simpler as the color or pattern of the light added visual interest to even the most basic forms.

The Unit Principle In the first decades of the twentieth century, an increasing number of merchants strove for a sparser show window display. This paring down mirrored a larger shift in art and design trends that involved replacing nineteenth-century visual clutter with clean lines and simple geometries. “The unit principle” emerged, reversing the logic of the stocky window. Rather than the more is more approach of the stocky window, this “unit principle” promoted the philosophy that taking products out of the window helped the few remaining to sell more quickly. As Mr. R. W. Shorter, window dresser to London tailor Austin Reed, advised in 1910, “The dressing must

Francisco Laurent Godinez, Display Window Lighting and the City Beautiful:  Facts, and New Ideas for Progressive Merchants (New  York:  Wm. T.  Comstock Company, 1914), 33. When Marshall Field’s opened a new building in 1907, the Chicago Dry Goods Reporter detailed that “no lights are in sight.” See Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 03052 (24), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 125 Godinez, Display Window Lighting, 44. 126 Ibid. 127 For suggestions on weekly changes of colored light see “A Few Words to Drapers,” WDGTR, January 1906, 70. 124

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be light and ‘spacy,’ giving plenty of room to show each individual article off to perfection, for without doubt, in nearly every case, one thing put directly against another spoils the look of both.”128 These arrangements, dependent on fewer goods, allowed for greater flexibility and rapid response to the change of season or a contemporary event.129 Frequent and easier alteration of the show window’s contents also gave displaymen more chances to try out new designs.130 The trend became to use a small number of goods, clearly shown in outline and silhouetted against a decorative backdrop. Window dressers frequently used colored light to bring out formal qualities of line and shape in objects. Fewer wares did not mean, however, that there was less time or skill required for the completion of the arrangement. Instead, this new type of window display demanded that window dressers possess a knowledge of the concepts and theories of modern art. In 1906 WDGTR reported, “Far more art and judgment are required in the modern, simpler displays, than did the older affairs that depended entirely upon elaborate construction and scene painting, quite disconnected with the articles to be sold.”131 While a model of the Brooklyn Bridge made out of spools of thread may have been visually impressive, the overall effect did not communicate anything directly related to the form or function of the goods themselves. Simple display facilitated a more straightforward view of the wares for sale. “It has no independent existence,” Karl Osthaus wrote of the show window in 1913. He continued, “The regeneration of taste that we observe in all fields today has been integrated into its growth. It has become a venue for artistic experimentation, which is all the most important as it takes place in front of everybody on the street.”132 The display profession capitalized on its alignment with modern art as evidence of its “wide-awake” practice. Just weeks following the Armory Show, New York’s Economist Training School used a “Cubist Drape” to advertise its training program, advocating that “Current Tendencies in Art Find First Expression Here”133 (Figure  2.15). This drape no longer imitated the female form but instead embraced the nonfigural and took the shape of a cubist sculpture. The Dry Goods Economist encouraged displaymen, in April of 1913, to execute these new Cubist and Futurist drapes now, “when the particular fad or fancy is just beginning to gain the attention of the general public” so that “the display,

Publicity: A Practical Guide, 31. Lomax, “The View from the Shop,” 274. 130 “A Few Words to Drapers,” 70. 131 WDGTR, May 1906, 201. 132 Osthaus, “The Display Window” (Das Schaufenster), in Kogod, “The Display Window as Educator,” in Deamer, Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, 67. 133 See The Economist Training School, Advertisement, Dry Goods Economist, April 12, 1913, 24. Illustrated in Elizabeth Carlson, “Cubist Fashion:  Mainstreaming Modernism after the Armory,” Winterthur Portfolio 48 (Spring 2014): 14. 128 129

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FIGURE 2.15  The Economist Training School, Advertisement, Dry Goods Economist, April 12, 1913, 24. Courtesy New York Public Library.

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therefore, will prove most timely.”134 The form of these drapes, the Dry Goods Economist claimed, was not only eye-catching but also “easy to execute” since “Cubist and Futurist types of art” were “largely developed along straight lines [making] the work of draping a comparatively simple matter.”135 The artistic and the commercial concerns of the show window had therefore found a new and significant sense of balance in the “unit principle.” Minimalism was preferred for its readability, its greater flexibility, and rapid response to the change of season or a contemporary event.136 One American guidebook, Selling Service with the Goods (1911), reported on the success of the unit principle: “department store window men have mastered the art of simplicity and concentration, for they can, if they so desire cleverly stage the display so as to throw or force attention upon a single article in the window . . . that its message will be instantly ‘picked up’ by the passerby.”137 While it is difficult to determine from the historical record if these “unit principle” windows did indeed achieve financial success, it is certain that their visual disjunction from the past earned them attention as “sufficiently new and novel.”138 Window dressers conditioned consumers to expect variation in the style and ephemerality in the lifespan of display. These designers established a new visual language for the commodity that stressed diversity and revision. At times, communicating the strength of manufacture through material goods and at other times abstracting those material goods into artful pictures, the window display designer freely combined, shaped, and built with commodities. The show window was a predictable site of changeability. This great variation, technical innovation, and reinvention earned window dressing its often-evoked description as a “wide-awake” profession.

“Making Use of the New Art Sensation,” Dry Goods Economist, April 5, 1913, 93. Ibid. 136 Lomax, “The View from the Shop,” 274. 137 Woodward and Fredericks, Selling Service with the Goods, 86. 138 “Making Use of the New Art Sensation,” 93. 134 135

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3 The Shopfitting Industry

In 1916 the Dry Goods Economist editorialized, “While ‘What to Buy and How to Sell It’ has been the Economist’s slogan for over a generation, of late years emphasis has been transferred from the first three words to the last four.”1 At the turn of the twentieth century, retail trade periodicals shifted from stressing the axiom “Goods well bought are half sold” to suggesting that “Goods well displayed are half sold.”2 These modifications represented a shift in emphasis from the manufacture of the merchandise to the production of the display design for that merchandise. Harris & Sheldon, a leading British shopfitting company, fittingly took up this phrase “Goods well displayed are half sold” as its company signature.3 This slogan was not used exclusively in relationship to the department store; journalists writing for periodicals for pharmacies, grocery stores, hardware stores, and more, all invoked the motto, urging their readership to take full advantage of the commercial powers of up-to-date display. The department store with its grand scale and immense budget was able to embrace display at the most ambitious level, setting the example for a new approach to retail methods that was modeled in many smaller stores across the market and around the world. At the turn of the twentieth century, the department store’s investment in high-style shopfittings increased and the variety of tools available on the market expanded.4 In the case of Siegel Cooper’s opening in 1898 the “Seventy-One Years—and After,” Dry Goods Economist, November 18, 1916, 27, quoted in Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 36. 2 “How to Make a Full Line of Housewares Profitable in the Average Hardware Store, and Why the Hardware Dealer Is the Natural Distributor of Housewares,” Hardware Retailer, April 1914, 22; “Show Window Display,” The Iron Age, January 23, 1902, 59; “Goods Well Displayed Are Half Sold,” National Druggist, August 1919, 327. 3 “Harris & Sheldon Limited History,” n.p., Harris & Sheldon Archive. 4 An inventory of Ponting’s, administered in August of 1918 for insurance purposes in case of fire or damage, documented the store department by department and took scope of all shopfittings. The inventory enumerated stands, mirrors, casework, carpets, electrical fittings, 1

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headlines shared, “The Big Store cost over Four Million Dollars to build. Its goods and fittings cost Two Million Dollars more.”5 Similar to the design of show window displays, the style and arrangement of shopfittings served to distinguish one store’s shopping experience from its competition. For instance, while every store sold dress accessories, not every store sold feathers under the light of a dramatic atrium suspended on a brass stand set on a rounded wooden and glass case. While shopfittings were central to the presentation of an organized and rational presentation, the fixtures also played an integral role in the continual changeover of the department store interior. Compatibility between the fixtures, counters, and display stands established a coordinated background for the goods. As an advertisement for the 1903 opening of the new Schlesinger and Mayer praised, “Equipment and contents are in perfect harmony with the structure. The policy pervading the whole is as broad as the institution is beautiful and complete”6 (Figure 1.1). The department store’s design success was dependent upon cohesion of its many display elements. Repeated references and enumeration of shopfittings in the press and advertising materials drew consumer attention to the details of the staging and context for goods on offer. Interpreting shopfittings as industrial and technical elements positions the department store within larger nineteenth-century trends of technology in which the machine was progressively replacing the human agent, and public spaces, from factories to stores, were increasingly optimized and rationalized for superior performance. The ideal operation of the department store relied on cooperation between designers and technical tools as well as productive relationships between display-related professions. Fixtures were necessary to both the functionality and the impressive appearance of both the show window and the interior. The window dresser and shopfitter had to work together in order to create a visually compelling and financially effective presentation. The London Illustrated News reported in 1909 that the window dresser “is useless unless he has behind him those who have made a science of shop-fitting and are specialist in the all-important matter of impressing the public.”7 Eager to show off their spaces of production, shopfitters pictured their factories in order to give the viewer, and potential consumer, an idea of the and more. All together the fittings were valued at £18,591, the departmental plant (machinery and utilities) totaled £14,492, and the carpets and blinds totaled £2.097. This rare inventory documents the material culture of the department store by recording the value, placement, and variety of all of the shopfittings. Inventory and Valuation of Properties of Pontings, April 1918, FRAS 967, Records of Pontings, House of Fraser Archive. 5 Stuart C. Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York and Its Most Magnificent Store Being a Concise and Comprehensive Visitors’ Guide to Greater New York (New York: Siegel-Cooper, 1898), 142. 6 Schlesinger & Mayer, Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1903, 5. 7 “The Man behind the Window-Dresser,” Illustrated London News, July 17, 1909.

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specialized labor and technology that made their products possible. For its August 1890 catalog, the leading British firm Harris & Sheldon showed the exterior of its factory premises on the cover and images of its factory workrooms including the “Wire Working Shops” (Figure  2.8), “Brass Fitting Workshop,” and the “Joinery Department” on the inside amidst the merchandise listings.8 The publicizing of these factory spaces is particularly interesting to consider at a time when there was often an “obliteration of the factory” in advertisements for consumer goods, emphasizing the separation of the industrial spaces of production from the more pristine spaces of advertising and retail.9 In the case of the shopfittings, however, their mechanical, industrial nature was a positive trait that factory imagery reinforced, contributing to an understanding of the department store as a technical space.

Silent Salesmanship While “wide-awake” was the catchphrase often used to describe a striking show window display, shopfitters referred to their up-to-date products for merchandise presentation as “silent salesmen.”10 The show window was explicit in its aim to actively catch the eye of the passerby, meanwhile sophisticated casework and stands exhibited a silent functionality that was more passive and implicit. In the background, shopfittings facilitated visual access to the merchandise and dictated how and where consumers should interact with the merchandise. The Detroit Show Case Company aptly named a line of casework the “Silent Salesman” (Figure  3.1). The product line was advertised with the tagline “People Don’t Always Ask,” openly referring to older methods of retail design, wherein signs with phrases such as “If you don’t see what you want, ask for it” hung above casework.11 The Detroit Show Case Company was implying that its “Silent Salesman” case did the work of the salesperson, showing the merchandise so that customers did not have to ask at all in order to view an item. The cases’ glass construction allowed for clear threesided, and even four-sided, viewing when shelves were mirrored along the back. Such casework had a significant impact on consumer behavior; these “Silent Salesman” cases encouraged consumers to look but not touch, which Harris & Sheldon, Illustrated Price List (Birmingham: Harris & Sheldon, 1890), 88–90. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 77–80. 10 Earlier in the nineteenth century, the term “Silent Salesman” was used to describe the catalog for a mail-order service. Like a printed catalog, a showcase presented the merchandise for the consumers’ selection. 11 Thomas A. Bird,“Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” in Library of Advertising: Show Window Display and Specialty Advertising, vol. 4, ed. A. P. Johnson (Chicago, IL: Cree Pub. Co., 1911), 12. 8 9

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FIGURE 3.1  Detroit Show Case Co., Advertisement, Merchants Record and Show Window, February 1913, 63. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

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was the same message implied by the plate glass in the show window. The casework also had a number of practical, as well as visual, effects; the sealed glass containers maximized cleanliness, minimized dirt in the interior, and protected goods from overhandling. The telling sales copy for the “Silent Salesman” model read, “People Don’t Always Ask you to show them EVERYTHING they are willing to buy . . . The best you can do is to make a good display of your newest goods in a Silent Salesman All-Glass Show Case and let it do the suggesting to your customers.”12 Shopfitters promoted that their new fixtures could serve as a “silent” mediator between the customer and the commodities, therefore replacing customer contact with sales staff. In outdated setups in which most “merchandise was kept carefully stored away in dingy showcases, boxes and drawers,” the merchant filled “the wants that existed and was satisfied.”13 He or she retrieved the merchandise that the customer specifically requested. But by showing the consumers a great range of wares, beyond what their shopping list contained, the glass showcase produced new desires. The Welch-Wilmarth Company, a leading manufacturer of shopfittings in America with branch offices in New York and Chicago, advertised its glass casework with the tag line “When She Sees She Buys” (Figure 3.2). The copy elaborated “Welch-Wilmarth Method in Merchandising store equipment insures that she does see—focuses the interest your advertising has aroused into action—converts the prospect into the customer.”14 In this example, the glass casework was absolutely essential in enabling the consumer to make the purchase, converting interest into action. In 1901 the Dry Goods Reporter anthropomorphized the glass case in order to emphasize its selling abilities, drawing a direct connection between the material of glass and the effectiveness of the design, “The new glass combination case talks continually to any and everybody who ventures within seeing distance . . . it is a business creator in the fact that in forcing onto the attention of passing customers the goods, it creates wants which are immediately satisfied.”15 Shopfitters advertised a narrative of the department store as an increasingly mechanical space requiring less human interaction between salespeople and consumers and therefore more interaction between people and shopfittings. At the same time, scientific retailing strategy promoted that shopfittings should enhance the performance of the salespeople. In order to emphasize the efficacy of its products, the Grand Rapids Showcase Company purported that the shopfitter, like the factory, has found that “the

Detroit Show Case Co., Advertisement, MRSW, February 1913, 63. Bird, “Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” 12. 14 Welch-Wilmarth Company, Advertisement, “When She Sees She Buys,” MRSW, December 1920, 12. 15 Dry Goods Reporter, February 16, 1901, 15 quoted in Eileen S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 77. 12 13

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FIGURE 3.2  Welch-Wilmarth, Advertisement, “When She Sees She Buys,” Merchants Record and Show Window, December 1920, 12. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC.

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production of his human element is regulated largely by the machinery with which it works . . . If they [department stores] place at the disposal of their salespeople, devices which automatically force the showing of a greater amount of merchandise, they are going to increase the individual sales check very materially.”16 Shopfittings were a key component in the department store’s optimization of the sales floor.17 The surviving imagery that documents the department store selling space tends to lack human subjects since the majority of photographs were taken while the department store was at rest. This exclusion of people from the visual record tempts an even more dramatic reading about the power of silent salesmanship and shopfittings and the decline of personal contact on the department store sales floor. The various agendas of the photographs must be considered. Publicity departments staged their shots carefully so that all of the props were in place to invite the viewer to come play a part in the drama of merchandising. A  photograph of Ponting’s accessories counter (Figure 3.3) positions the viewer as consumer. This image sets up a direct visual relationship between the viewer and the array of merchandise, facilitated by the silent salesmen of the stands and casework. The scene appears open as if reassure the viewers that there is plenty of room for their participation. Chairs along the counter face outward to invite visitors to rest and linger; stands act as a set of arms, holding up multiple feathers at once to show their fluid shape; mirrored casework shows the shopper an object on all sides; and natural lighting from the atrium allows for accurate viewing of the merchandise. Blankets hang down from the balcony above to provide a background of color and pattern. The silent quality of “silent salesmanship” can be observed here both in the frozen quality of the image and the nonverbal character of its subject. Undisturbed and in its ideal state, this Ponting’s image shows the feather department just as the displayman had designed it. The introduction of people would add variables and alter the original conception. Attenuated metal stands that sat atop casework and filled department store show windows had arms that served as substitutes for the arms of the sales staff, reaching out to the customer and tempting them with merchandise (Figure 3.4). At 6 feet tall by 5 feet wide, Harris & Sheldon’s “New All-Brass Stand” would have stood taller and commanded more space than any sales associate. This model also offered a mirror, which may have encouraged the consumer to linger with the merchandise longer and try out those accessories on offer. This stand gives an extraordinary appearance to ordinary wares by forming hats and umbrellas into a dynamic, multidimensional, and layered Grand Rapids Showcase Company, Getting behind the Retail Business (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids Showcase Company, 1922), 23–4. 17 As Susan Porter Benson has described, well-designed shopfittings “saved labor and made larger volume and made higher-stock turn more feasible; they enhanced the disciplined, orderly, systematic use of resources within the department store.” Benson, Counter Cultures, 40. 16

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FIGURE 3.3  Interior of the Showroom at Ponting’s, January 1913. Photograph by Adolphe Augustus Boucher, Bedford Lemere and Company. By permission of Historic England Archive.

arrangement. In addition to the eye-catching theatricality of this display, the stand offered the practical advantage of showing hats and umbrellas side by side in order to encourage an ensemble purchase. As design objects, shopfittings were subject to seasonal or cyclical changes in style and taste, taking many forms from embellished and historically inspired to streamlined and contemporary. An article on mechanical equipment in the stores of John Barker & Co., Ltd., of London expressed

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FIGURE 3.4  K1868—New All-Brass Stand in Harris & Sheldon, Red, White and Blue Catalogue (Birmingham: Harris & Sheldon, 1899), 54. Courtesy Harris & Sheldon, Ltd.

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the vitality of shopfittings: “Fittings are almost as fickle as women’s fashions. What is considered good today will be superseded next year by something far more efficient and far more attractive.”18 A department store could update its appearance simply through the use of fixtures in a new style. Both the furniture and shopfitting industries were strong in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where in 1922 the Grand Rapids Show Case Company published a booklet Getting behind the Retail Business that analyzed display strategies to prove how its fixtures could attract consumers and improve business. The booklet encouraged that the design of a store’s casework and architectural elements should align with popular taste in interior decoration. The manufacturer presented three complete styles, among many other schemes, which included Adam, Italian, and Flemish styles. The copy read, “Could a more interesting or attractive setting be imagined? Here the equipment is nicely executed in one of the period designs, with the treatment of ceilings, walls, and floors, and other important features all in a universal spirit of harmony . . . Such character and dignity create an environment which draws a better and more profitable patronage.”19 The manufacturer here suggested that such a fashionable setting for the merchandise attracted a wealthy clientele and encouraged sales. Similar to many department stores’ exterior façades, here classicism, in the “Adam” and “Italian” styles, was chosen as an appropriate backdrop for the selling of goods. Stylistic cohesion of the shopfittings, interior architectural elements, and furnishings maintained a sense of visual balance in the midst of the variety of wares on offer. Built between 1900 and 1905, Harrods new building in London boasted an ornate Renaissance-style interior whose grandiosity was facilitated through a coordination between the architectural elements and shopfittings. A booklet produced by Harrods in 1909 mentions rich marble and woodwork, the latter “mainly composed of natural Ancona Walnut, Mahogany, inlaid Satinwood and Oak” and adds “the ceiling and frescoes are worthy of special note, being painted and modeled by French Artists in the Renaissance style.”20 The Harrods commission monopolized Frederick Sage’s output in the early years of the twentieth century and upkeep continued in the years following the opening of the new building in 1905.21 Upon visiting Harrods in 1906, “Mechanical Equipment in Stores,” FRAS 965, Records of John Barker & Co., House of Fraser Archive. 19 Grand Rapids Showcase Company, Getting behind the Retail Business (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids, 1922), 8. 20 Harrods Ltd., The House That Every Woman Knows (London: Harrods Ltd., 1909), n.p. 21 The Harrods archive holds Frederick Sage & Co. invoices for the Ladies Hairdressing Department, Ladies Outfitting Department, Flower and Feather Department, the Bank, Furnishing Drapery Room, Shipping Department and Railway Ticket Office, Sports Extension Department, Gents Tailoring, and the Motor Department as well as cross-departmental invoices for repairs to and additions of casework. See Invoices, Frederick Sage to Harrods, September 30, 1905; February 27, 1906; March 13, 1906; April 5, 1907; February 22, 1907; March 15, 1907; March 6, 1907; April 1, 1907; April 26, 1907, Harrods Archive. 18

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FIGURE 3.5  Harrods Ladies’ Boot Department, London, 1919. Photograph by Adolphe Augustus Boucher, Bedford Lemere and Company. By permission of Historic England Archive.

Joseph Appel, a manager at Wanamaker’s department store, caught himself “admiring the fixtures and really not seeing the goods.”22 As a department store manager, Appel would have been particularly attuned to the selling environment in addition to the wares for sale. An image of the Harrods Ladies’ Boot Department in 1919 exhibits how a whole host of these elaborate shopfittings were put to the task to bring theatricality and self-service to shoe display while competing with the visual energy of the surrounding architectural elements (Figure  3.5). The shopfittings suggested where, at what posture, and how closely to interact with the merchandise. The tall bracket in front of the mirror offers the shoes to be tried on while sitting in the armchair to its side after which the mirror could have been conveniently used for examination. Pairs of shoes rest at an angle supported by stands at their heels, angling toward the hands of the consumer. Other shoes are splayed at ground level as they would look on one’s feet. A symmetrical arrangement of shoes dances up a set of stairs and 22 F. H. W. Sheppard, ed., “Brompton Road: South Side,” Survey of London, vol. 41 (London: Athlone Press for the Greater London County Council, 1983), 22.

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onto a framed stage on which the shoes, furniture, and drapery appear as props in a permanent theatrical set. Although the shoes are static objects, the creative employment of stands adds visual interest and energy in the room. Since many of the forms are elevated on pad feet, even the furniture appears to stand on its tiptoes. The shoes are displayed in groupings whose dynamic rhythms mimic the flow of the curving lines and ornament on the plasterwork of the ceiling and columns. Precisely positioned by the fixtures, the shoes appear as additional decoration in this already grand interior. Dotted on the floor and along almost every surface, the shoes’ placement would have encouraged consumers to navigate through the room and immerse themselves in the grandeur of the space. This image gives a strong sense of how shopfittings and the merchandise worked together and interacted with the larger decorative scheme on the interior for effective results.

Science of Shopkeeping From the middle of the nineteenth century, a rationalized and increasingly scientific approach to technologies of display shaped developments in the retail realm. In 1857, author Charles Manby Smith observed, “Notwithstanding that the English have been so long a nation of shopkeepers, it was reserved for the living generation to make the grandest discoveries in the science of shopkeeping.”23 Here Smith foretells that the great advancement in the retail sphere in the coming decades would center around retailers’ focus on the technologies, tools, and methods of selling wares. At the turn of the twentieth century, shopfitting design became more sophisticated; economization and efficiency along with laborsaving and space-saving strategies all became guiding principles of the shopfitting trade. The department store deserves more attention as a site in which ideas of Taylorist scientific management were developed before the formal formulation of these concepts later in the early twentieth century and their application to the better-known contexts of the kitchen and the home. The “science of shopkeeping” was a term commonly evoked by late nineteenthcentury department stores and fixture manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic. John Wanamaker stressed, “Storekeeping with us is not a spasm or an experiment, but a system resting upon well-defined scientific principles.”24 Department stores typically displayed many of a single type of object to impress with quantity. Fixtures often helped to create a display that was suggestive of the regularized profusion of industrial production. For Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London: A. Hall, Virtue, 1857), 324. 24 John Wanamaker, Annals of the Wanamaker System: Its Origin, Its Principles, Its Methods, and Its Development in This & Other Cities (Philadelphia, PA: The Company, 1899), n.p. 23

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Unavailable in this ebook edition

FIGURE 3.6  Carson Pirie Scott and Company Store, Cleaning and Handkerchief Departments, Chicago, IL. Louis H. Sullivan, architect, ca. 1900. Courtesy of Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. Digital File #59982.

instance, rows of handkerchief pyramids, complemented with evenly spaced chairs and lighting fixtures at Carson Pirie Scott in about 1900 (Figure 3.6), communicated order while also showing how a simple handkerchief can take many interesting forms. This lineup of handkerchiefs, fixtures, and salesmen again brings to life Kracauer’s concept of the mass ornament as “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires,” also observed earlier in window displays with serial imagery.25 The exacting placement of the merchandise and the salespeople exhibits rationality, while suggesting the seemingly endless supply of replicable goods and orderly staff within the department store. The narrative of scientific management dictated that articles on department stores often included references to not only the stores’ profusion of products on offer but also their proficient sorting system. For instance, in 1890, London’s Marshall and Snelgrove was reviewed as “an ornament to the metropolis . . . the whole forming a splendid example of systematic

Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79. 25

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organization.”26 As this Marshall and Snelgrove review suggests, the “systematic organization” of the department store enacted its own set of aesthetics that earned the store the proud artistic reputation. Shopfittings’ aesthetics of rationalization and link with mass production secure them as examples of industrial design. In 1920, a MRSW article on “Modern Store Equipment” explained, “It is practically impossible to make a serious mistake in equipping the store. The reason for this is that store fixtures are now practically standardized.”27 The journalist attributes this development of a system of “standard store equipment” to the handling of merchandise in retail stores on “a scientific basis founded upon a general consensus of opinion.”28 For instance, shelving of particular heights and wall cases of certain dimensions were determined as the best fits for specific lines of merchandise. Shopfitters devised and patented specific stands to attractively and curiously display banal items such as buttons that might otherwise be difficult to show. Included in the button section of the Carson Pirie Scott Catalogue of 1893 was an advertisement for “Mosser’s Button Exhibitor.”29 The device was a revolving mesh stand onto which were pinned stacks of buttons on cards. The whole device was entirely enclosed in glass to keep it free from dust. When the customer was interested in a button, she could open the door to the case and examine a number of buttons at once on a single card. Once a selection had been made, the salesperson could then retrieve the button from a labeled drawer behind the counter. As the advertisement outlined, this method “saves the time of a clerk because he never has to straighten up a scattered button stock after showing a customer.”30 The masthead of the advertisement for Mosser’s Button Exhibitor boldly proclaimed that this device was “The Need of the Age” to amplify the importance and impact of this fixture. As “the need of the age,” this device incorporated all of the driving forces behind modern shopfitting: it was space-saving, flexible, movable, protected the merchandise, offered an attractive display solution, and most of all, minimized the need for a salesperson. The advertisement offered, “If you are busy you can send a lady to the case and she can select her own buttons while you are engaged.”31 Its name, “exhibitor,” suggested its active role in the marketplace. Carson Pirie Scott included this “exhibitor” in its product catalog, along with an array of buttons available in retail and wholesale quantities, implying that the

Modern London:  The World’s Metropolis, an Epitome of Results, Business Men and Commercial Interests, Wealth and Growth, Etc (London: Historical Publishing Co., 1887), 82. 27 “Modern Store Equipment,” MRSW, December 1920, 13. 28 Ibid. 29 Advertisement, Mosser’s Button Exhibitor, in Carson Pirie Scott, Illustrated Catalogue of Staple and Fancy Notions (Chicago, IL: Carson Pirie Scott, 1893), 293. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 26

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store endorsed this modern method of display. Shown side by side with the merchandise, this fixture was presented as a commodity itself. The department store was founded on principles of classification and organization that, with the advent of new shopfitting technologies, were exhibited in new ways. Shopfittings brought categories of goods into prominent view, while also providing more attractive storage solutions. Stores optimized their layouts by ranking and arranging wares according to their immediate appeal, price range, and likelihood of purchase upon a quick glance. Categories such as impulse goods, convenience goods, necessities, and utilities were applied to object types to identify their salability that then dictated their sales floor placement as well as their fixture usage.32 An article in the New York Times in 1924 advised that impulse goods be “placed along regular lines of traffic within the store so as to catch the eye of the consumer as she passes by.”33 These included dress trimmings, such as the feathers, gloves, hosiery, notions, handkerchiefs, umbrellas, and parasols. As consumer preferences shifted, so too did department stores alter the positioning of their merchandise, giving prominence to the goods that were in high demand. Wanamaker’s biographer Herbert Adams Gibbons told how the store adapted to the lifestyle of its consumers:  “The story of an establishment like Wanamaker’s was a history of changing styles. Departments of prime importance and large sales, such as veiling, corsets, gloves, and fancy underwear, no longer hold the place they used to occupy. In readjusting the space and sales force for departments like these (they are given only as illustrations—there are many others) the merchant has had to look ahead and study the habits of the people.”34 Therefore consumer needs and preferences of modern living also contributed to the continual modification of the design of the sales floor. Gordon Selfridge identified shopfitting as playing a central role in the creation of an optimized and attractive retail interior: Picture further this enormous space fitted with store furniture, every section and piece made especially for the purpose for which it is intended, each piece representing thought for the greatest convenience, economy of space, and beauty of design, and embodying every newest device to lighten manual labour and to give greater protection to the goods.35

“Department Store Layout of Goods:  What Experience Has Shown as the Best Way to Arrange Stocks,” New York Times, April 27, 1924, 13. 33 Ibid. In 1902, the Chicago Dry Goods Reporter defined impulse goods as those “countless little things that shoppers wish to buy quickly.” Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 16, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 34 Herbert Adams Gibbons, John Wanamaker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926), 39–40. 35 Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce, 366. 32

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FIGURE 3.7  Selfridge’s, Postcard, “Umbrella Section,” ca. 1909. Courtesy Grenville Collins Postcard Collection/Mary Evans.

Selfridge further identifies laborsaving advantages as well as protective features of shopfitting. All together these characteristics and systematic principles advanced the “science of merchandising” in the department store while also offering visual appeal. A realization of Selfridge’s vision can be seen in his store’s Umbrella Section (Figure 3.7). Specialized casework, “made especially for the purpose for which it is intended,” facilitated the viewing of many umbrellas at once.36 Mirrored casework multiplied consumer choice. Shopfittings created an organized layout of a great amount of merchandise while offering visual variety. This display functioned easily without the aid of a salesperson, whose primary responsibility was to retrieve merchandise and show it to the consumer. There is a conspicuous absence of people in this image that relates to shopfittings’ moniker as silent salesmen; the display does not need to make any noise or movement in order to perform its service of showing merchandise and increasing temptation. Instead, the shopfittings and their arrangement of merchandise do the talking: the chairs suggest that customers could seat themselves and the mirrored casework invites the potential user to test the umbrellas’ mechanism and scale, model a few, and formulate an

Ibid.

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opinion. Along the back wall, umbrellas hang in rows within easy reach for customers to help themselves.37 Through its creative yet efficient arrangement, this umbrella section achieves, in Selfridge’s words, the “greatest convenience, economy of space, and beauty of design.”38 Umbrellas lay flat, stand vertically, point at all angles, and hang from the wall. The umbrella’s basic geometry of a stick form with a curved handle becomes a component in a larger pattern to attract visitors to the whole group before they concentrate on a single model. While the umbrella was a most familiar everyday form, in the department store display context, the umbrella turned into an element of an energetic arrangement whose finesse was reserved for the space of the shop. Specialized shopfittings facilitated these striking visual arrangements that brought dynamism to the otherwise unsophisticated product of the umbrella. A handful of parasols have been opened and extend at all angles with the aid of stands to support them. A group of walking sticks spread apart in a spray thanks to an “umbrella ring” that held them together at their centers.39 Such specialized tools of the trade exemplify the systematic nature of display in the department store. In addition to clips to hold umbrellas, shopfitters such as Harris & Sheldon also produced Cutlery Stands, Corset Stands, Flower and Feather Stands, Glove Stands, Golf Club Stands, Hat and Coat Hooks, Mantle Shoulders, Shirt Racks, and Waistcoat Stands and so many more specialized apparatuses that advanced the science of merchandising.40 The table of contents of a shopfitter’s catalog could therefore read similarly to a department store sales catalog, servicing every category of goods. By 1906, the Harris & Sheldon illustrated catalog included about 4,000 items, most offered in six or eight sizes and up to ten finishes.41 The expanding range of consumer goods had new and specific requirements for storage and display.42 A rack that could hold thirty-eight umbrellas, many more than any single salesperson could balance, and similar to that used here, was advertised in Carson Pirie Scott’s Illustrated Catalogue of Staple and Fancy Notions in 1893. The catalog promoted that the device answered the “necessity for saving space and the better display of umbrellas.” Its selling points were practical, sanitary, and enticing: “taking the umbrellas off the floor, out of the dirt, and off the counter out of the way, still showing them to better advantage, by placing the handles immediately in front of every customer.” See Carson Pirie Scott, Illustrated Catalogue of Staple and Fancy Notions (Chicago, IL: Carson Pirie Scott, 1893), 312. 38 Selfridge, Romance of Commerce, 366. 39 Examples of these devices can be seen in Harris & Sheldon’s Red, White and Blue Catalogue of 1899 that featured an assortment of fixtures specifically for umbrellas. Harris & Sheldon, Red, White and Blue Catalogue, 1899, 51, Harris & Sheldon Archive. 40 Ibid., vii. 41 Harris & Sheldon Limited History, n.d., Harris & Sheldon Archive. The catalog had a worldwide circulation of sixty thousand. 42 Historian Kenneth Ames has pointed out how these needs also extended to the domestic environment, “The burgeoning output of industrially produced goods in the nineteenth century necessitated a corresponding increase in the number of furniture forms produced to accommodate and display those goods.” Kenneth L. Ames, “Trade Catalogues and the Study of History,” in Accumulation & Display:  Mass Marketing Household Goods in America, 37

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The design of retail fixtures was determined by the form and aesthetics of the variety of merchandise. A journalist for the Illustrated London News visited the showroom of Harris & Sheldon in July 1909. His remarks give an idea of the variety and specificity of the shopfitter’s production: Your first impressions as you stand in their showrooms are those of bewilderment at the manifold needs of the shopkeeper before he can start to attract the buyer. Telescope knife-stands, toothbrush-tacks, doorhandles in brass, in ebony, or what not, parasol holders, pipe-brackets, umbrella-sockets, marble stands for grocers, glass sandwich or cake covers for buffets, the trying-on stools of bootmakers, boot-brackets, contrivances for hatters, for tailors, confectioners, drapers, fascias in gilt or glass, swing signs, designs for mosaic pavements: these are just a few of the medley of clever exhibits you come across as you walk round.43 Just as in the image of the window dressers studio in the Wide-Awake Window Dresser, the shopfittings are in the foreground and showcased as commodities in their own right, rather than receding to the background and functioning as backdrops to the goods. Furthermore, the shopfittings are interpreted as both products of the manufacturer as well as producers of a set of display design operations. The review positions the shopfitter and his products as essential to the shopkeeper’s abilities to “attract the buyer,” reinforcing shopfittings’ agency in the retail setting. Shopfittings supported the department store’s policy of division that encouraged consumers to think categorically about goods. At the core of the retail business was the amassing as well as the tactful splitting up of goods: The term “retail,” deriving from the French term “retaillier,” means “to cut off, clip and divide” in terms of tailoring.44 This program of division was driven by efficiency but articulated through differently styled displays. In the 1880s, most American department stores had fifteen small departments, but by 1910 many offered upward of 125.45 Pittsburgh-based W. B. McLean Manufacturing Co. advised that its “unit system” guaranteed an “orderliness in planning or the correct placing of departments” that was the “secret of dispatch and quick handling in retail business.”46 The manufacturer aligned the modern retail environment with other major complex systems of infrastructure, defense, and urban planning 1880–1920, ed. Simmon J. Bronner (Winterthur, DE:  Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1986), 68. 43 “The Man behind the Window-Dresser,” Illustrated London News, July 17, 1909. 44 Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums:  The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 13. 45 Leach, Land of Desire, 23. 46 W. B.  McLean Manufacturing Co., Business Building Units:  Goods Fixtures (Pittsburgh, PA: W. B. McLean Manufacturing Co., 1918), 3.

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due to its efficient and compartmentalized structure.47 In an essay on “Simplicity is the Keynote of Unit Planning,” the manufacturer explained that each shopfitting or “Good Fixture” Unit is “an individual piece of furniture with a purpose of its own and a definite work to perform.”48 This explanation endowed the shopfittings with an active role of “definite work to perform” on the department store sales floor. This unit-based concept facilitated clear performance evaluation between the departments and methodical sales floor distribution of the various merchandise groups during their seasonal peaks. The W. B. McLean product catalog included a blank page for the readers to draw the approximate plan of their current store to send for review and comment by the manufacturer’s planning and design service “who are glad to extend whatever ideas or helpful suggestions of practical nature that they might have.”49 The additional offer of a professional design service helped stores in planning their increasingly complex shopping environments with both aesthetics and efficiency in mind. Categories of goods, such as bolts of textiles, that were some of the most time-consuming and onerous goods to show consumers, were heavily dependent on the technology of shopfittings for proper display.50 The “Gem” and “Handy” stands for textiles, manufactured by J.  H. Wilson Marriot of Baltimore, Maryland, and illustrated in the guidebook Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows (published by the manufacturer), were distinctly designed to attract attention, address the challenges of displaying bulky bolts of cloth, and minimize labor of sales staff and handling of the goods (Figure 3.8, see also Plate 9 in the plate section).51 The “Gem” on the right revolved for easier viewing and self-service. Meanwhile, the name “Handy” referenced the stand’s convenience. These devices were also space-saving; their stacked design made it such that the customer could In an essay “Simplicity Is the Keynote of Unit Planning,” the company defended its system of units: The unit idea is the natural, logical sequence of order and system. All things orderly are in “Units.” The national army is divided in “Units” of brigades, regiments, companies, and squads. Railroads are divided into “Units” by “divisions” and “sections.” Cities are divided into “Units” by “wards” and “districts,” and great retail stores are divided into “Units” by “departments.” Ibid. 48 W. B. McLean Manufacturing Co., Business Building Units, 3. 49 Ibid., 1. 50 In April of 1912, an investigator at System magazine “performed time studies in selling areas and announced the results with horror” at the current methods in operation. The report found that one of the major problems was that “inefficient fixtures required clerks to spend more time handling goods and less time attending to customers. In particular, the report found that for one clerk, twenty-three minutes “were devoted to removing bolts from shelves, rewinding, returning to shelves, and adjusting the stacks.” Edward Mott Woolley, “ ‘Lost Motions’ in Retail Selling,” System 21 (April 1912), 371–2, quoted in Benson, Counter Cultures, 41–2. 51 The advertising copy reads, “The Gem and Handy are just the thing to set at the door and attract the attention of passers-by. Best thing you can get to show off the goods in your store. It will save you clerk hire in handling goods. It will save the appearance of the goods because they are not handled so much.” J. H. Wilson Marriott, Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows (Baltimore, MD: Show Window Publishing Company, 1889), n.p. 47

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FIGURE 3.8  J. H. Wilson Marriott, Advertisement, in J. H. Wilson Marriott, Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows (Baltimore, MD: Show Window Publishing Company, 1889), n.p. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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clearly see multiple patterns at once while the physical footprint of the stand was fairly small. Textile display demanded clever solutions that minimized salesperson contact with the goods and maximized viewing potential. In 1917 the fixtures manufacturer A.  W. Shaw & Co., with offices in Chicago, New  York, and London, published the pamphlet Making Your Store Work for You to illustrate the practical benefits of its products in use on the retail sales floor. A. W. Shaw’s publication included a series of photographs showing “The Old Way” versus “The New Way,” to make the advantages of its fixtures visually apparent, illustrating outdated methods side by side with modern systems to call attention to shifts and developments in display strategy. The unwieldy category of rugs was one example pictured in this binary format of old versus new (Figure 3.9). The image captioned “The Old Way” shows a sprawling light-filled layout of rolled and unrolled rugs, some wrapped around columns as decoration. Rugs hang vertically or lay flat on the floor for examination. The caption pointed out the aesthetic and financial advantages of the efficient product: “It is true that extremely striking effects are often obtained by showing rugs in this way, and the confusion caused by showing several rugs at one time is avoided. However, because of the immense amount of expensive floor space required to adequately display rugs it often costs much more than to use the modern fixtures.”52 “The New Way” shows an A. W. Shaw “swinging fixture” that has compressed the display and takes up a “small amount of space” compared with “the amount of goods that can be shown.”53 Not only was this “swinging fixture” practical in terms of its small footprint but it also dictated a new visual presentation for rugs. The caption noted, “Another advantage is that any sample can be shown with almost no effort,” meaning that a salesperson did not have to go to the trouble of unrolling rug after rug for the consumers’ perusal; the consumers could flip through the rug selection on their own.54 Shopfittings, including this rug-flipping fixture, signaled to the consumer that the store had invested in the latest technologies of retail practice, many of which encouraged self-service.55 Even though stores used display systems to establish structure, the ability to adapt to, in Selfridge’s words, “new and workable ideas for improvement” was necessary to the department store’s maintenance of a modern shopping environment.56 Therefore, the design of the layout and the shopfittings was under continual reinvention. The fixture maker McLean pointed out, “Successful retail stores such as Wanamaker’s, Field’s, and

A. W. Shaw Company, Making Your Store Work for You (Chicago: A. W. Shaw Co., 1917), 49. Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 One of these A. W. Shaw Company rug fixtures, or a nearly identical model, was in use at the furniture and furnishings store W. J. Sloane in New York by 1902. See the photograph: Byron Company, W.J. Sloane, Carpets Rug & Furniture, 19th St. & Broadway, 1902, Museum of the City of New York. 56 Selfridge, The Romance of Commerce, 368. 52 53

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FIGURE 3.9  “The Old Way” and “The New Way” of Displaying Rugs. A. W. Shaw Company, Making Your Store Work for You (Chicago, IL: A. W. Shaw Co., 1917), 49. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.

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Gimbel’s employ what are perhaps the most skilled experts in the planning and designing service; yet there is never a time that carpenters and fixture men are not busy ‘making alterations.’ ”57 The display program altered in response to changing attitudes of retail strategy and the influence of new technologies.

The Shopfitting Industry and Exhibition Culture Historians have drawn alliances between the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum and department store in terms of their shared goals of categorization and attractive presentation of an impressive array of objects from around the world. Both venues also attracted great crowds. Their interiors were marked by broad aisles that managed the busy flow of people and goods, showcases and fixtures that were designed to present objects at a glance, and rooms that were organized by thematic groupings.58 Museum and department store leaders were also aware of these similarities at the time, as they were trying to determine what their institutions could and should offer a comparable constituency.59 Flexibility as well as continual redesign of the interior setting and contents were also at the core of the success of both establishments. An examination of shopfittings, as an element of the material culture of display in the museum, exposition, and department store contexts, illuminates new connections between these sites. The use of the same or similar shopfittings, strategies, and layouts in all of these venues makes it possible to identify a continuum of approaches to display; major shopfitting firms worked internationally for clients in museums, trade exhibitions, and department stores at the same time. At these venues, similar display W. B. McLean Manufacturing Co., Business Building Units, 3. Bruno Giberti identifies that “how these things [commodities] were organized, how they were housed, how they were arranged, how they were displayed, and finally, how they were judged as commodities—these were all issues facing the organizers of world’s fairs and their kindred institutions, like the bazaar, the museum, and the department store.” For more on display connections between the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and its kindred institutions, see Bruno Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), x. 59 John Cotton Dana, founder and director of the Newark Museum, was an advocate for the comparison between department store and museum, writing in 1917, “A great city department store of the first class is perhaps more like a good museum of art than are any of the museums we have yet established . . . it displays its most attractive and interesting objects and shows countless others on request; its collections are classified according to the knowledge and needs of its patrons . . . it is well lighted . . . it advertises itself widely and continuously; and it changes its exhibits to meet daily changes in subjects of interest, changes of taste in art, and the progress of invention and discovery.” John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (Woodstock, VT: Elm Tree Press, 1917), 93. 57

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strategies set up conditions in which to view and assess objects as well as to educate the eye. The increasing use of vitrines in museums and trade fairs, and by extension casework in department stores, set up new “regimes of visibility to which objects were subject” that dictated new relationships between people and museum artifacts and commodities.60 Nineteenth-century exhibition culture expanded demand for the products of the shopfitting trade while also heightening popular appreciation for shopfitting practices that improved the visitor experience. One London newspaper claimed in 1884, “Previously to the Exhibition of 1851 showcases were of clumsy construction, and wholly destitute of either artistic conception or satisfactory workmanship. The Great Exhibition gave an enormous development to the [shopfitting] trade.”61 A number of the same shopfitters who contracted with department stores found their first work fitting out museums and expositions. The presence of more sophisticated casework in exhibition venues from the mid to late nineteenth century ideally coincided with the advancement of the department store. Museum curators and exhibitors at national and international exhibitions as well as retail display staff, all had a sensitivity to the presentation of wares and a belief in the ability of casework to flatter the appearance of its contents. The shopfitters served both sets of clients with analogous products and many merchants also organized exposition displays themselves. Commonalities among shopfittings across venues encouraged the public to visually identify these spaces of display as related to one another. The shopfitters’ presence at exhibitions was not only to show off other manufacturers’ wares but also to promote the shopfitting trade itself. Shopfitters earned fair medals that they proudly advertised.62 For instance, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, J. R. Palmenberg’s Sons was awarded three medals for general excellence for Metal Display Fixtures, Papier Mâché Forms, and Wax Show Forms.63 St. Louis, Missouri-based case manufacturer Claes & Lehnbeuter published a product catalog in 1887 that cited its success at the Philadelphia Exposition, which included medals and the recommendation of the Judges Awards for substantial workmanship, good taste, and finish. The catalog pictured “No. 53: Centennial Premium Case” (Figure 3.10, see also Plate 10 John C. Welchman and Kate Nichols, Sculpture and the Vitrine (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 61 “Old Gray’s-Inn-Lane,” Morning Post, January 29, 1884, 2. 62 The cover of a late nineteenth-century catalog for the shopfitting firm Frederick Sage & Co. boasted, “Prizes at the London, Vienna, Philadelphia, Cape of Good Hope, Exhibitions.” See Frederick Sage and Company, Shopfittings of Every Description for Home and Export (London: Frederick Sage and Company, ca. 1898), Museum of St Albans. Frederick Sage and Co. provided casework for the museum (then the Hertfordshire County Museum) when it was founded in 1898. 63 J. R. Palmenberg and Sons, Display Fixtures and Forms: Supplement D to 300 Page Pocket Catalog (New York: J. R. Palemberg, ca. 1893), inside cover. 60

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FIGURE 3.10  Centennial Premium Case in Claes & Lehnbeuter Manufacturing Co., New Illustrated Catalogue (St. Louis, MO: Claes & Lehnbeuter, 1887), 22. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington DC.

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in the plate section). The catalog claimed that this double-strength glass case with a German silver frame, brass stands for glass shelves, set on a walnut table, was “the most handsome and the most economical case ever constructed.” The form of the case itself references exhibition architecture, appearing as a scaled-down glass and iron exposition building. The manufacturer’s appropriation of this recognizable building type reinforces the message that casework was built for the purposes of display, using the modern industrial materials of exposition buildings. One American manufacturer that worked across exhibition venues, both cultural and commercial, was Charles F. & E. Biele “artisans in metal, glass and wood,” a little-known but leading maker of showcases and vitrines for merchants and museums “from Massachusetts to California.”64 Biele, located at 45–47 West Broadway, made cases for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library upon their openings. The New York Sun reported that its clients included “dealers in paintings, sculpture and antiques bring their special show-case problems to the old firm.”65 A surviving photographic album of eighty-four of the company’s products includes glass-fronted and glass-topped showcases, mirrors, and stools.66 Some cases, customized with a merchant’s name and specialty, such as a showcase made for the hat maker A. Abrams, suggest their use in a trade fair. C. F. and E. Biele also produced ornamental cases used on countertops for the close inspection of notions or jewelry, facilitating an attractive arrangement while also preventing theft. The architectural styling of many of the Biele company’s cases aimed to aggrandize their contents, showing off the wares in a context that implied quality and value.67 The robust exhibition culture of the era provided lucrative possibilities for the expansion of the shopfitting trade. Founders Sydney Harris and John Sheldon of the noted British manufacturer Harris & Sheldon met as apprentices to Alfred Field, a Birmingham bronze merchant, where they worked in the Dispatch Department until about 1877. They formed a partnership in 1879–80 and opened their first factory in 1880 on Newton Street in Birmingham where they produced household furniture, brassware, and outdoor lamps. Established resources and “Cases are a Special Problem,” New York Sun, December 31, 1938. The family business was first established in 1867 and Charles F. Biele took over his father’s business in New York City in 1875. During the late 1880s, he and his brother Emil expanded the company and established operations in downtown New York. 65 Ibid. 66 See C.F. Biele Trade Catalogue, 1882–4, Hagley Museum and Library (92.246). 67 In fact, this strategy of aggrandizement could also have an adverse effect as one American shopper in 1912 remarked on a recent department store experience that “unduly handsome fixtures” created an “idea of costliness,” which led “the masses to conclude that customers have to pay for the concern’s lavish expenditures in the form of high prices.” “Building and Equipment,” Dry Goods Economist, July 17, 1912, 31, quoted in Benson, Counter Cultures, 89. 64

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skills in metalwork and joinery provided for a smooth transition into the exhibition and retail markets. By 1893, Harris & Sheldon’s casework was being used in exhibitions in America, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.68 Following its success in Chicago and sensing the growth of the retail market, in 1894, Harris & Sheldon opened a new factory and formally expanded into shopfitting. The Display Fittings department employed about 150 men to start.69 The house of Frederick Sage & Company, Harris & Sheldon’s major competitor, was founded in London in 1860.70 The firm earned its reputation first in the museum field. Sage began patenting shopfitting equipment as early as 1861.71 In 1876, Sage was earning top business contracts including wall cases for the South Kensington Scientific Exhibition, fittings for a store on Queen Victoria Street, and cases for a museum in Brisbane. On January 29, 1884, the Morning Post flattered Mr. Frederick Sage as “the chief developer of a new industry” that met a need for display fixtures across sectors. The article continued, “This gentleman has laid himself out to supply an admitted want . . . we now find a single manufacturer employing two to three hundred skilled workmen in the making of show-cases and other adjuncts for the display of costly goods, whether in the shops of the vendors or at international exhibitions.”72 The Natural History Museum in London retains correspondence dating between 1900 and 1912 that tracks a number of orders for casework from Frederick Sage. The firm’s stationery shows the manufacturer’s growth by featuring illustrations of its buildings and listing its branches of operation. Paralleling the department store’s use of architecture as advertisement on postcards and pamphlets, here the shopfitter has chosen a series of factories to represent the diversity of their production. In 1906, the border was made up of the “Show Rooms,” “Joinery Manufactory, Floor Area 2 Acres,” the “Show Case Manufactory” and at the bottom the “Glass Polishing Beveling and Metal Fittings Factory.” A caption additionally revealed that all together In the manufacturer’s 1899 Red, White and Blue Catalogue, the shopfitting firm Harris & Sheldon featured a “Handsome Exhibition Case” (Item K1543) along with the caption “The above Case was designed, made, and fixed by us at the Chicago Exhibition.” K1543, Handsome Exhibition Case in Harris & Sheldon, Red, White and Blue Catalogue (Birmingham: Harris & Sheldon, 1899), 144. 69 Harris & Sheldon Limited History, n.d., Harris & Sheldon Archive. 70 The son of a journeyman carpenter, Frederick Sage, trained as a carpenter in Ipswich and arrived in London in 1851. He worked at two builder’s yards for his first few years in London and after being discharged from that work, he founded his own business. See Harris & Sheldon Limited History, n.d., Harris & Sheldon Archive. 71 See “List of Patent Awardees,” London Gazette, January 4, 1861. “To Frederick Sage, Builder No. 11, Hatton-garden, St. Andrew’s, Middlesex, for the invention of ‘improvement in brackets for carrying trays, shelves, glass cases, &c., in windows and glass cases.’ ” 72 “Old Gray’s-Inn-Lane,” 2.  The article additionally notes, “He has been asked to supply the majority of English exhibitors who have displayed their wares at all the international exhibitions.” 68

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these spaces added up to “5 Acres of Factories and Show Rooms.”73 By 1910, the masthead expanded from the simple “Shopfitters” as used in the earlier years to include “Shop Front Builders, Shop Fitters, Show Case Makers and Decorating Specialists” with a “Museum Showcase Department” qualifier.74 This shift in terminology from “shopfitter” to “show case maker,” similar to the shift between “window dresser” to “displayman,” emphasized the expanding responsibilities of the profession, not solely tied to the space of the shop. Correspondence between museum staff and Frederick Sage includes a debate over crowded versus more spacious display strategy, which was also a chief point of contention in the planning of the department store sales floor. In the fall of 1906, Ernst Hartert, the director and bird curator of the Zoological Museum at Tring, was in touch with Frederick Sage to order a set of new cases. On October 22, 1910, Frederick Sage wrote to suggest a revision on the order based on a review of the museum’s “Plan of the Premises”:  “So far as we can tell without knowing your definite reasons for arranging for these sizes, the lengths of the Centre Cases might, with advantage, be altered, viz:—shorter one reduced by about 6 ft., and the longer one increased by that amount.”75 Two days later, Dr. Hartert replied, expressing trepidation at decreasing display space: The reason why Mr. Rothschild [the museum’s founder] wanted the cases as long as possible was: in order that as much as possible could be put into the given room. We do not think that your proposed alterations are desirable, but we can discuss the matter on Saturday.76 Founded and designed on the premise that visitors would learn best by viewing as much material as possible at a single time, museums and, by extension, department stores struggled in representing their complete and comprehensive holdings while still leaving room for visitors to appreciate them.77

From Density to Openness An expansive impression became a perceptible factor in the department store’s embodiment of modernity. Architectural historian John Siry has written that Letter, November 22, 1906, Mr. Frederick Sage to Ernest Hartert, TR1/1/27/479, Natural History Museum Archives. 74 Letter, September 20, 1910, Mr. Frederick Sage to Ernest Hartert, TR1/31/505, Natural History Museum Archives. 75 Letter, October 22, 1910, Mr. Frederick Sage to Ernst Hartert, TR1/31/505, Natural History Museum Archive Archives. 76 Letter, October 24, 1910, Ernst Hartert to Frederick Sage, TR1/31/505, Natural History Museum Archives. 77 Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 107–10. 73

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the age of a department store could be determined by an examination of its floor plan: “the lack of interior structural walls was representative of a building’s modernity. In older assemblages of annexed properties, masonry partitions survived as remnants of party walls between adjacent buildings formerly used as separate stores.”78 For instance, Whiteley’s was originally arranged as a series of small shops with dividing walls due to the adaptation of its existing buildings being joined together. In this configuration, traffic flow was limited by the door openings, leading to a crowded and cramped series of salesrooms. In contrast to Whiteley’s earliest iterations, Louis Sullivan’s Carson Pirie Scott building in Chicago, for instance, purpose-built from the ground up, had a steel frame that allowed for a spacious floor plan. Sullivan’s building had an open area of 26,000 square feet on every floor, with all special elements such as stairways and elevators, set  along south and east walls at the edges of the sales areas.79 The introduction of the open-plan, glass-fronted casework and lower fixtures in many stores in the late nineteenth century all linked to a sense of openness that designated the stores’ layout as modern when compared to the dense, piled-high displays most popular earlier in the nineteenth century.80 The persistent use of packed displays in some stores marked them as lagging in their methods by the early twentieth century. This shift from clutter to spaciousness in the interior is part of a larger attitude shift within retail aesthetics and parallels the transition of window display design from the stocky window to the unit principle. The style and the materials of the shopfittings themselves influenced and framed the view of the merchandise, greatly impacting the consumer experience. In her shopping guide of 1912, American author Frances Waxman keenly observed how differing strategies of casework affected the shopping experience in London’s stores. When reviewing Selfridge’s in London, she pointed out how the store contrasted with the other “British institutions,” such as Harrods. Unlike Putnam’s review of Whiteley’s in the 1880s, Waxman, writing over thirty years later, likened Selfridge’s to the spacious and organized shopping experience of leading New York department stores: Selfridge’s does not look in the least like London, once you are inside. It might be a bit of Twenty-third Street or Broadway set down in the British metropolis. Its aisles are wide, its displays are coherently isolated. It is entirely possible to find what you are looking for, without delving though piles of irrelevant things in which you have no interest.81 78 John Siry, Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 192. 79 Ibid., 193. 80 Stores’ increasing use of stockrooms for surplus merchandise rather than heaping excess goods in piles on top of cabinets or stacked on the floor also helped to neaten the sales space. 81 Waxman, A Shopping Guide to Paris and London, 10–13.

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Upon visiting Whiteley’s in 1892, one American reviewer, a Mrs. S. A. Brock Putnam, reported on how a dense display gave the impression that the store was not keeping pace with modern methods as practiced more widely in American shops: The building itself is straggling, homely and rude in effect, sadly contrasting with our palatial [American] mercantile structures; and although, so conveniently laid out in compartments, these, to an American, accustomed to the airy spaciousness of our great stores, are narrow, close and stuffy, an impression which is accentuated by the mirrors set at each end, duplicating and reduplicating the effect until the narrow vistas with their piled-up counters seem to end nowhere.82 Not until Whiteley’s remodeling in 1909 did the store achieve the stately magnificence, and openness, afforded by a steel frame that allowed for the elimination of interior dividing walls. In contrast to London stores, American department stores were commended for their spaciousness as early as 1870.83 As stores grew to take over entire city blocks, they boasted unobstructed views “one block long,” as in the case of Marshall Field’s (Figure 3.11, see also Plate 11 in the plate section).84 The rounded glass casework lined the view and gave a sleek streamlined appearance. The magnitude of the department store led to its frequent description in urban terms, which also integrated its floorplans within the gridded layout of the city’s thoroughfares. This alignment physically suggested the department store’s interconnectedness with the city. Gridded “block-long” aisles and show window-like merchandise arrangements extended the city streets to the store interior at ground level. One article in the Chicago Dry Goods Reporter even went so far as to suggest that walking down the grand aisle of Marshall Field’s ground floor could be an alternate route to navigating through the city: “Many thousands will naturally assume the privileged pleasure of wandering through this great aisle on their way up or down town in preference to walking along State

Mrs. S. A. Brock Putnam, “A Remarkable Shop,” The Decorator and Furnisher, September 1882, 224. 83 One visitor to A. T. Stewart’s marble palace remarked, “With no obstructions to the eye upon entering, the visitor has before him at one glance the two acres of floor upon which he stands.” “A. T. Stewart & Co.’s Marble Stores,” 22. 84 In addition, in 1914, B. Altman claimed that a visitor could see across its sales floor from Madison to Fifth Avenue. “Surveying the interior from the Fifth Avenue entrance, on the Main Floor, the visitor’s gaze—following the course of the broad central aisle—meets a perfect perspective, which terminates only when it reaches the vestibule on Madison Avenue.” B. Altman & Co.’s Enlarged Store, 20. Stern’s also offered a block-long view. See “Guests Inspect New Stern Store: Building in Forty-Second Street Will Be Thrown Open to the Public on Next Tuesday,” New York Times, August 28, 1913, 18. 82

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FIGURE 3.11  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, Retail Store, State Street Aisle, One Block Long,” ca. 1908. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, G82.

Street.”85 A London journalist remarked on the pedestrian experience at John Barker in 1905, “The visitor can walk from one end of the establishment to the other, and see what is to be seen, exactly as if she were passing from shop window to shop window in Regent-street.”86 At Marshall Field’s, low, rounded, glass-fronted casework was essential to shaping a traffic pattern and bringing the window display effect indoors. In 1902, one journalist described walking down the grand aisle on the ground where “on either side tempting merchandise divided into sections, which in reality are ‘shops’ complete in every detail. The handsome rounding showcases take on the form of show windows and serve the purpose to a nicety.”87 From the late nineteenth century, casework changed form in order to facilitate an atmosphere of openness on the sales floor. From the 1890s stores typically replaced high shelving and storage cabinets, often towering above the salespeople at 7 or more feet tall, with lower units from 5 to 5½ feet in height.88 Advertising and journalism impressed upon consumers the

Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 19–20, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 86 “Successful Shopping, John Barker & Co., Kensington,” The Times, November 3, 1905. 87 Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 19–20, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 88 Benson, Counter Cultures, 40. 85

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difference that up-to-date shopfittings could make in the design and therefore the experience of a particular department store. When Selfridge’s was built in 1909, shop fixtures such as counters were purposely built lower than the usual height so that as one architectural critic claimed, one could “see from end to end of the building.”89 Just as dividing walls were undesirable, so too were tall cases that blocked the visitor’s view through the sales floor space. In 1898, one American trade periodical praised new “low-type fixtures” that had “apparent advantages” over the old models, “which tend to wall in the customer and obscure the premises.”90 Due to the great amount of casework present on the sales floor, the design of these shopfittings and the visual weight of their materials affected consumers’ overall impression of the space Stylistically, casework modified from a solid wooden mass that was laid out in long stretches along aisles and grew tall to lighter glass-walled fixtures that assumed a shorter profile by the early twentieth century. For instance, Lord & Taylor’s new building of 1870 had “counters of dark, polished wood, varying from 20 to 50 feet in length” that lined the aisles of the sales floor.91 Meanwhile the British shopfitter Frederick Sage remarked as early as 1884 that it was his method to employ “as little as possible of that material [dark wood], preferring, when practicable, the introduction of hard wood of light construction and plate glass, which impart a peculiar lightness and elegance to his manufactures.”92 Thus, casework became increasingly transparent at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1890, Harris & Sheldon introduced glass into its case models by way of glass boxes, “Square Front Counter Case” (L 411) and “Bent Front Counter Case” (L 357), that sat on top of solid wood counters (Figure 3.12, see also Plate 12 in the plate section). Designed with a door at back and fastened with a spring catch, these boxes required opening and closing by the hands of the store employees. The same year Harris & Sheldon began to offer paneled wooden counters fitted with a glass case on top, as seen in the “Special Cheap Counter and Case” (L 417 and 420). These wooden and glass designs mark a transition to the entirely glass-walled cases of later years. By 1899, the shopfitter sold an elegant four-sided glass case with a wooden base that was emblematic of the style that became the standard for well-appointed department stores.93 Mirror-lined sides and doors allowed Bylander, “Concrete and Steel Construction at Selfridges,” Builders Journal, March 31, 1909, 280, quoted in J. C. Lawrence, “Steel Frame Architecture versus the London Building Regulations: Selfridges, the Ritz, and American Technology,” Construction History 6 (1990): 37. 90 “The advantage of the newer type of fixtures over the old, which tend to wall in the customer and obscure the premises, is apparent.” With the lower fixtures, “a complete view of the store is afforded.” “Modern Store Fittings:  Suggestions from State Street,” Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, June 18, 1898, 17. 91 “The New Building of Lord and Taylor,” Christian Union, October 1, 1870, 2. 92 “Old Gray’s-Inn-Lane,” 2. 93 The K839 “Circular-Ended Plate Glass Counter” of “Best quality, Air Tight, in Mahogany, Walnut, or Ebonized, Mirror-Lined Doors at Back, Cloth-Lined Bottom, Fitted with One 89

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FIGURE 3.12  Cheap Counter and Counter Case List in Harris & Sheldon, Illustrated Price List (Birmingham: Harris & Sheldon, 1890), 82. Courtesy Harris & Sheldon, Ltd.

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for the case’s contents to be seen in the round, therefore offering visual selfservice. Stores’ investment in modern glass casework frequently featured in articles on retail openings and renovations. For instance, when Stern’s department store opened a new location in New  York in the summer of 1913, the press reported, “A special feature of the establishment which has been carried out on almost every floor is the enclosure of practically all stock in glass cases . . . The new fixtures for this store represent, according to the authorities of the establishment, an expenditure of some one million dollars.”94 The shopfitting trade developed along with the rise of exhibition culture in the nineteenth century, advanced with the growth and sophistication of commercial retail, and fully matured in the department store. Fixtures were used in the department store interior in order to show off merchandise in new ways; glass casework allowed for the viewing of an abundance of merchandise and stands made accessories into towering and energetic arrangements. In all of these examples, the fixtures acted as “silent salesmen,” facilitating visual access to goods, organizing the wares, and multiplying the amount of material that could be seen clearly at the same time. These shopfitting designs also added a sense of theatricality to the display and lessened the need for the salesperson in the purchasing process.

Row of Plate-glass Shelves and Fittings.” See in Harris & Sheldon, Red, White and Blue Catalogue, 155. 94 “Guests Inspect New Stern Store,” 18.

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As the window dresser’s oversight extended to the interior, the designer became known by the more all-encompassing title of displayman and the name itself implied responsibility beyond windows. The interior sales floors were another site for professional skill and creativity. Parallel display skills applied to both the show window and the interior, including the creation of commodity pictures, an informed use of fixtures, and the ability to catch the consumers’ attention, all driven by the desire for continual revision and visual variation. Arthur Fraser, famed display manager at Marshall Field’s, gave an address at the meeting of the International Association of Displaymen in the summer of 1920 that reflected on the “Evolution of the Display Man” from “window trimming” to decorating in a more expansive sense: “There was a time, when I  first started to do window trimming, that we called window trimming what I am talking about just now,—window trimming. I  want to forget that we are trimming windows. I  want to think that we are all decorators, to elevate ourselves to the point where we adorn the body and we adorn the home with beautiful artistic expression of our own temperament.”1 This short statement touches upon a number of the skills and issues central to displaymen’s professional progress. Fraser described the arrangement of the store display as akin to a coordinated approach to design also practiced on the body and in the home; his analogy was fitting at a practical level, as displaymen possessed the knowledge of dressmaking and interior design. He aligned the work of the displaymen with the emerging professional role of the interior designer in order to validate and improve upon their impact. Retail strategists emphasized that interior decorations should uphold the standards set by the window displays. As one American manual warned in 1921, “The store must maintain the atmosphere and appeal of the

1

“The I.A.D.M. Convention,” MRSW, August 1920, 31.

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FIGURE 4.1  Selfridge’s, Postcard, “Linen Section,” ca. 1910. Courtesy Grenville Collins Postcard Collection/Mary Evans.

windows—there must be no depreciation in display arrangement.”2 Smallscale displays, typically involving textiles, on top of casework or shelving on the sales floor, directly borrowed layouts from the show window and provided visual continuity.3 An image of Selfridge’s “Linen Section” shows a series of tables topped with stepped arrangements of folded linens; here each tabletop holds the equivalent of one complete window display (Figure 4.1). Goods spilled out over corners and metaphorically into the hands of the consumers passing by, inviting their handling of the wares, unlike linens off limits behind the plate glass of a show window. Just as in the windows, textiles received the most dramatic treatment, therefore display work on the store interior continued to require knowledge of “methods particular to the stock to be exhibited,” as A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration explained.4

Woodward and Fredericks, Selling Service with the Goods, 128. A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration explained that these “stock arrangement features of store decorating” are related to window trimming because “the same forms, layouts, and units are used in both,” the differences being only in the size and shape of the spaces to which the stock display had to be adapted. International Correspondence Schools, A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration (Scranton, PA: International Textbook, 1903), vol. 4, section 38, 1. 4 Ibid. 2 3

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Seasonality Seasonality was one of the primary motivators for restyling in the department stores’ program of interior merchandising. Large-scale immersive decorative schemes marked time in the consumer calendar by celebrating many seasonal or holiday occassions. For these large decoration events, the department store nearly erased commodities in the name of promotional and creative endeavors. As Jerome Koerber, Austrian émigré decorator at Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia advised in MRSW in 1912, the aim of the interior decorator was to “eliminate the store by weaving through it some central ideas.”5 For instance, Siegel Cooper showcased an Easter fertility theme in April of 1900 with cages of live canaries suspended from the ceiling and huge stuffed rabbits throughout the store.6 The most ambitious displays were primarily planned on the ground floor and along the interior of a central atrium, where a view of their effects could be taken in at a single glance. In 1911, Wanamaker published the Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, a lavishly illustrated volume in celebration of fifty years of business. In addition to the traditional images of the store’s exterior façade, the publication also included “Views of the New Wanamaker Store in New York,” which comprised two illustrations of the same atrium space dressed alternatively for Lincoln’s Birthday and Christmas.7 Wanamaker’s atrium space lent itself well to such changeable large-scale decorations.8 Seasonal displays on the interior often emphasized material and visual abundance through the beauty and profusion of nature (Figure  4.2). One “magnificent fall-opening display” with “harvest-home decoration” featured in A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration. It was an exemplary model that was “indicative of the fullness of the season when plenty reigns supreme” and “typified a similar bounteousness of the stocks of merchandise provided in

MRSW, April 1912, quoted in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon), 1993, 83. Although Koerber’s biography is not known in detail, the designer’s Austrian heritage signals a likely awareness with the Viennese secession’s development of the gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts, which promoted an all-encompassing and coordinated interior scheme, a strategy widely adopted by the department store. 6 Leach, Land of Desire, 83. 7 Rotunda of the Stewart Building of the Wanamaker Store, Decorated for Lincoln’s Birthday and Christmas in John Wanamaker, Joseph H. Appel, and Leigh Mitchell Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores: Jubilee Year, 1861–1911 (Philadelphia, PA: John Wanamaker, 1911), 296–7. 8 Display multiplied the variations possible for the consumer experience in one store over time or even in one store during a single visit. The captions to these photos are labeled as “the Stewart Building at the Wanamaker Store” referencing the building’s historical lineage as A. T. Stewart’s Cast Iron Palace, suggesting how the architectural shell of a store can be inherited and reworked over time. Wanamaker, Appel, and Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 296–7. 5

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FIGURE 4.2  Fall-Opening Display in International Correspondence Schools. A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4 (Scranton, PA: International Textbook Co., 1903), section 38, 12. Courtesy the University of Chicago Library.

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that store for the consumer.”9 The color scheme was a dull yellow. The display staff executed a central arch, decorated with corn and grain and implements of farming, crowned with the figure of Ceres, the goddess of plenty. On the stage below the arch is a ‘rural tableau’ complete with farmers hauling a load of sheaves of wheat.10 Crops, farming equipment, and hay form an arch that shows off the staff’s mastery of commodity pictures and the sculptural mode of window display. At the same time, the theatrical representation of the work of farming also points to the department store’s ability to bring anything and everything under one roof, even agricultural tools and products. The “rural tableaux” brought the bounty of nature and the rural farm, cloaked in classical symbolism, to the shopping arena. Such a display signified a clear break with the urban exterior and the crude commercialism of the store itself. The metaphor of prosperity and plentitude between the fall harvest at the farm and the fall offerings of merchandise at the department store was overt enough for the consumer to interpret. And yet the decorative scheme entirely overwhelmed the merchandise. Husks of wheat even outlined the balustrade of the atrium, obscuring the view of the sales floor beyond. The decorative theme dominated the visual impact of the store. Guidebooks and retail trade periodicals encouraged displaymen to look to the swift and recurring changeover of the seasons as inspiration for the spirit, pace, and ever-alteration of their own display work. In 1898 The Show Window advised, “The trimmer should always keep in mind the season for which he is trimming, and trim accordingly. Make your spring trim light and airy. Your summer trim should be the lightest of the year, to give your store a cool appearance.”11 Within this seasonal, rational framework, displaymen also exerted their individual creativity. Christmastime was a highlight in the calendar when displaymen were encouraged to design interior decorations to an artistic extreme and to make, as one article in The Show Window elaborated, “your Christmas trim as gay and elaborate as possible.”12 As is the case today, holiday decorations were critical to the success of the profit-making Christmas season. Displaymen filled out their holiday window display and interior schemes with themed props provided by specialized manufacturers such as Chicago’s Botanical Decorating Company that supplied crepe paper poinsettias, festooning chrysanthemums, folded tissue bells, and papier-mâché Santa Clauses. Messmore and Damon, Inc., a New York-based manufacturer of display decorations, drew in a particularly large business around Christmas, providing over 60 percent of the largest stores in America with papier-mâché Christmas decorations.13 International Correspondence Schools, Textbook on Mercantile Decoration, vol. 4, section 38, 25–6. 10 Ibid. 11 Will W. Sawyer, “Interior Trimming,” The Show Window, February 1898, 49. 12 Ibid. 13 Messmore and Damon Inc., Advertisement, “Christmas Decorations,” MRSW, October 1920, 11. George Harold Messmore and Joseph Damon met while working on the parade for the 9

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In the late nineteenth century as the large dry goods stores and department stores began to offer annual sales events, consumers fell into the rhythm of making seasonal purchases at particular moments.14 Fresh batches of merchandise were accompanied by elaborate decorations. The department store created a new buying rhythm for the year with the White Sale in January in order to clear out stocks and stimulate sales again following the Christmas rush. The White Sale had both a practical and a symbolic message. While for the rest of the year the department store was teeming with a diverse mix of wares of various patterns, colors, and forms, the White Sale typically cloaked at least the atrium and the first floor in an array of solely simple white textiles. The whiteness of the interior decoration suggested a clean slate and aligned the interior with the metaphor of a blank canvas, prime for the next year’s events.15 At his Philadelphia store in January of 1878, John Wanamaker may have been the first to stage a White Sale at an American department store.16 An International Correspondence School Textbook explained the sale’s concept in 1905: During the white sale, special prices are quoted on sheeting, table cloths, napkins, bureau scarves, handkerchiefs, ladies’ muslin underwear, shirt waists, men’s shirts, collars, cuffs, etc. Window and counter displays, and the style, setting, and illustration of the advertisements should harmonize with the “white” idea. Because there is no special reason for buying white goods in January, their sale must be forced by price inducements . . . The displays and the salespeople will effect the proper volume of sales in all the various lines.17 The dramatic and uniform atmosphere, along with price cuts, did much to encourage sales. The concept for the White Sale was inherited from the Bon Marché. Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames, based on the theatrics of the Bon Marché and other Parisian stores, features a dramatic white sale, “What gave the ladies pause was the stupendous Great White Sale . . . the

Hudson Fulton Celebration of 1909 and founded their display business in New York in 1917. For more on the company’s history see Messmore and Damon, Company Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 14 John Henry Hepp, The Middle-Class  City:  Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876–1926 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 83–4. 15 The simplicity of whiteness was also in line with the clear visible break from the clutter of previous decades, a visual effect that was championed by then contemporary interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe who reimagined the modern home against a backdrop of bright white walls. 16 Michael J. Lisicky, Wanamaker’s:  Meet Me at the Eagle (Charleston, SC:  History Press, 2010), 25. 17 International Correspondence Schools, Advertisement Display, Mediums, Retail Management, Department-store Management (Scranton, PA:  International Textbook Co., 1909), section 17, 36.

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galleries led away in a dazzling whiteness, a boreal vista, a whole landscape of snow, extending to infinity in steps hung with ermine like glaciers heaped and shining under the sun . . . There was nothing but white . . . a riot of white.”18 In Zola’s description, the white textiles enveloped the interior in a dramatic composition of wintery weather. In a 1909 article in Munsey’s Magazine, the journalist Anne O’Hagan wrote of the White Sale’s French cachet, “There is one special sale for which every department store must provide, and which it must conduct even if it has failed to make suitable provision for it. That is the after holiday ‘white sale.’ The ‘white sale’ originated in the Bon Marché in Paris. It was copied in this country [America], and has now become such a feature of the shopping winter that it would be a bold concern which would dare ignore it.”19 The sale’s origination with and embodiment of the glamour of the French shopping culture helped it to gain attraction. Historian Tag Gronberg has observed, “ ‘Paris’ functioned as the sign and guarantor of the fashionable . . . it was in this sense that ‘Paris’ itself became a commodity to be marketed and sold to both a national and international clientele . . . it was through association with high fashion and luxury that ‘Paris’ aroused desire in the consumer.”20 This global phenomenon of The White Sale offers an example of how display concepts traveled between Paris and America’s major shopping cities. Contemporary events as well as notable milestones in the stores’ own developments offered a whole other set of possibilities for celebratory display. A  weekly log of profits from the London department store D.  H. Evans, dating to years at the turn of the twentieth century, is marked in the margins with notes on current events, holidays, and store achievements, implying that these occasions directly affected sales. This log is a compelling record of how the department store coordinated its business dealings with the events of contemporary life. Some examples of notations include the following:  the week of April 2, 1898, as Boat Race Week (Oxford versus Cambridge, presumably); the week of October 15, 1898, as when the new shopfronts were completed; the week of October 29,, 1898, as the inauguration sale after rebuilding; the week of June 17,, 1899, as Ascot Week; the week of October 7, 1899, marked the first autumn show of the year; the week of June 2, 1900, was Derby week; and the week of January 26, 1901, was annotated with the death of Queen Victoria.21 The frequency and number of the occasions listed indicates how display changed as often

Émile Zola and Robin Buss, Au Bonheur des Dames (London: Penguin, 2001), 387–9. Anne O’Hagan, “Behind the Scenes in the Big Stores,” Munsey’s Magazine, January 1909, 537. 20 Tag Gronberg, Designs on Modernity:  Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 156. 21 Private Book of Weekly Figures, FRAS 374/1, Records of D. H. Evans & Co., Ltd., House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow. 18 19

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as week to week, offering a continuously redesigned shopping experience for the consumers.

A Great Decoration Event Marshall Field’s upgraded its original structure at State and Washington Streets (built 1878–9) to a modern building, neoclassical in style with a fivestory light court crowned with Tiffany’s glass mosaic dome, in September of 1907 to great fanfare. This opening was significant not only in its showcasing of the store’s architecture but also for its promotion of the profession of the displaymen and their ability to beautifully and temporarily transform the retail interior. Records of the display scheme survive in great detail due to the store’s documentation and promotion of the work of its display staff as well as the reporting of these achievements in the press. One article featured that the merchant spent $100,000 on an interior decoration scheme called the “Feast of the Seasons,” which was publicized as the “most elaborate artistic conception ever made use of for temporary purposes.”22 Coverage of the store’s expansion was dominated by the details of classically inspired decorations under the theme The Feast of All Seasons. In spring of 1908, the Dry Goods Review ran an illustrated article whose title “A Great Decoration Event” promised focused coverage on the interior design. The opening events showcased the immense talents of the store’s display staff and proudly demonstrated the superiority of Chicago as a fashionable retail center. This “Great Decoration Event,” as the Dry Goods Review reported, had “magnificent interior and window displays” on which “more money was spent than for any similar event in history.”23 Commodities were not present amidst the decorations in Marshall Field’s grand opening. The Drygoodsman and General Merchant reported, “It is worth noting that for the entire opening period there were absolutely no specific offerings of merchandise.”24 With even less than typical attention on the wares for sale, this event was seminal in the history of the display profession. Many merchants even closed up shop to allow their employees to visit Marshall Field’s on opening day to learn and be inspired by the design of the Feast of All Seasons.25 One journalist called the opening “the most significant and the most instructive event in the history of retailing in this or any other country in the world.”26 Displaymen flocked to Marshall

“A Great Decoration Event,” Dry Goods Review, Spring 1908, 52. Ibid., 51. 24 “Formal Opening of a Great Store,” Drygoodsman and General Merchant, 1907, 15, 03052 (29), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 25 Leach, Land of Desire, 31. 26 “Formal Opening of a Great Store,” 15, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 22 23

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Field’s to witness and analyze their colleagues’ latest creative achievements. Mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, was so impressed with the success of the event that he invited the store to extend the opening show by a week.27 This opening was also noteworthy due to the store’s elaborate promotional scheme for the display designs. In addition to illustrated advertisements and postcards, the store also produced an engraved invitation as well as a booklet An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons that decoded the meaning of the imagery chosen for the decorations (Figure 4.3, see also Plate 13 in the plate section). On the cover was one of the central groupings in the store’s atrium: Mercury, the god of Commerce, was surrounded by a group of figures representing the four seasons each “bringing their tribute of fruits, flowers, and foliage appropriate to each.”28 With this grouping, the displaymen made art out of commerce, choosing to use Mercury as the centerpiece for their sculptural arrangement. The booklet enumerated a checklist of the many stock elements of classical symbolism that filled the store’s interior and pictured a numbered guide to themed window displays. This breakdown of the individual elements of the display system, ranging from the statuary to the show windows, suggests the store’s encouragement of close consumer engagement with the display designs. All of the allegorical figures were executed in house and the scheme was overseen by a Belgian sculptor Mr. Van Derbergen who had a hand in many of the decorations of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.29 Filling the two rotundas (one on the main aisle near Washington Street and one on the main aisle near Randolph Street) were impressive compositions including the following: “The Four Seasons . . . gathered about a large vase bearing the offerings of the season,” altars “decorated with the ram’s head and festoon, an ancient symbol of sacrifice and devotion,” and the twelve months “represented by twelve Cupids, bearing festoons appropriate to the time of year.”30 While these allegorical figures were intended for shortterm display, an impression of solidity aligned them with the endurance that classicism symbolized. The Drygoodsman and General Merchant reported that the decorations “had the appearance of permanent sculpture.”31 A visual sense of permanence was likely achieved through the use of the popular material of papier-mâché, which the displayman modeled as a sculptor. The booklet An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons described the quality of the display work, “Though comparable to an exquisite stage Leach, Land of Desire, 31. Marshall Field & Company, An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, n.p., 03052 (28), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 29 “Formal Opening of a Great Store,” 15, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 30 Marshall Field & Company, An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, n.p, 03052 (28), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 31 “Formal Opening of a Great Store,” 15, Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 27 28

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FIGURE 4.3  An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, Cover, Marshall Field and Company, 1907, 03052 (28), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, ICHi-79030.

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setting, or to some of the great mural paintings, they [the decorations] are nevertheless unique in their appropriate representation of the spirit of the occasion, and may justly, we believe, be considered a notable artistic achievement.”32 The text points to display practice’s alignment with other arenas of exhibition culture, such as set design, while also stressing how the decorations’ temporary nature, association with a special event, and particular theme make them specific to the store itself.

Virtual Travel via Display While displays tied to holidays and store events celebrated the present retail moment, display also had the power to offer virtual travel to a time or a place faraway. Virtual travel was a particular merchandising strategy whose shared practice across exhibition contexts at the turn of the twentieth century reveals new links between the department store, world’s fairs, the museum, and the theater. Department stores duplicated interior schemes and design elements from other settings and events to mentally immerse consumers in new realities. The department store was a fractured experience in which consumers were continually present in different manifestations of time and place, foreign and familiar, and historical and contemporary. The phenomenon of design duplication was illustrated well in the appearance of the Statue of the Republic, a landmark and symbol of the World’s Columbian Exposition, in the entrance of New  York’s Siegel Cooper (Figure 4.4). With the central use of this statue, department store founder Henry Siegel aligned his retail experience with the grandeur of the world’s fair grounds.33 At the fair, the Statue of the Republic rose 65 feet tall out of the waters of the fair’s central Great Basin and at the time of its completion was the second tallest statue in the country, after the Statue of Liberty.34 In Siegel Cooper’s 1898 guide to New York, A Birds-Eye View of Marshall Field & Company, An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, n.p, 03052 (28), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 33 Siegel Cooper was not alone in its deliberate insertion of sculpture and statuary as attraction. Abraham & Straus exhibited a 9-foot-tall solid silver version of Justice, which had also been on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Wanamaker’s placed an immense eagle, a relic of the 1903 St. Louis World’s Fair, in its Grand Court in Philadelphia and “Meet Me at the Eagle” soon became a catch phrase. Alfred Messel’s Wertheim Department store in Berlin commissioned a new statue for the space; the sculptor Ludwig Manzel designed Labor, a large-scale sculpture of a female industrial worker leaning on machine parts and holding a shopping basket. 34 The American sculptor Daniel Chester French modeled the female goddess figure in plaster, covered in gold leaf and wearing a crown of electric lights, with outstretched arms holding the emblems of the fair, a globe with an eagle atop, and a staff supporting a liberty cap. According to one fair guidebook, “Her beauty would satisfy the sculpture of the old Greek school.” John J. Finn, The Best Things to Be Seen at the World’s Fair (Chicago, IL: Columbia Guide Company, 1893), 39. 32

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FIGURE 4.4  The Interior of Siegel Cooper, New York, January 1, 1900. Photo by Chris Hunter. © Schenectady Museum; Hall of Electrical History Foundation/ CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

Greater New York and Its Most Magnificent Store, the author equated the visual experience of the store’s entrance hall with that of the recent world’s fair spectacle, “On entering the Big Store by the imposing main entrance in the center of the 6th avenue frontage, the effect is again similar to that produced by the first view of one of the great industrial buildings of the late Chicago exhibition.”35 The scaled-down 13-foot-tall statue of marble and gilded bronze facilitated a striking link between the world’s fair and the department store, particularly with the repeated use of a surrounding pool. The New York Times reported that Siegel Cooper’s arrangement of benches surrounding the State of the Great Republic was “a scheme that will operate without any aid.”36 The store’s guidebook described that here “the visitor sits down to watch the hurrying crowds to wonder at the vast proportions of the building.”37 The design of the department store included places, such as these benches, for visitors to marvel at more than the merchandise; architectural Stuart C. Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York and Its Most Magnificent Store Being a Concise and Comprehensive Visitors’ Guide to Greater New York (New York: Siegel-Cooper, 1898), 127. 36 “Big Store Thrown Open: A Dress Rehearsal at the New Shopping Resort,” New York Times, September 13, 1896, 16. 37 Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York, 96. 35

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schemes, layouts, and interior design were arranged to stimulate consumers’ meditation on the scale and the speed of the operations of the store itself. In 1896, the New York Times marked the opening of the Siegel Cooper store with an article whose title evoked the launch of a theater production, enhancing the implicit theatricality of the store’s design: “Big Store Thrown Open: A Dress Rehearsal at the New Shopping Resort.” The author detailed the lighting effects around the Statue of the Great Republic as stagecraft, “By an arrangement of electric lights and color devices, the tint of the water is changed constantly.”38 These lighting effects turned the staid statue into a variable visual attraction and enhanced the drama of the presentation. In installing this statue at its entrance, Siegel Cooper aimed to create a landmark for his store and the city at large. As the guidebook A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York proclaimed, “Here all are invited to make their common meeting-place for their own profit and convenience. So thoroughly has the populace of Greater New York accepted this invitation that ‘Meet Me at the Fountain’ has become a familiar household expression.”39 As a landmark, the statue became a recognizable symbol for the store that was used in promotional material and pictured on souvenirs, including folding fans and more.40 Siegel Cooper also sold a coin purse with a metal plate at the clasp bearing the image of the Statue of the Great Republic accompanied by the catchphrase “Meet Me at the Fountain” (Figure 4.5, see also Plate 14 in the plate section). This purse captures an average consumer’s visual impression of the store as permanent decoration; the souvenir transforms an ephemeral experience or memory into a lasting object.41 The store has commodified its emblem into a souvenir that is ironically a facilitator for future spending; on the opposite side, the purse’s metal plate includes the phrase, “Put Money in Thy Purse by Dealing at the Big Store.” The language and imagery included on this purse and similar souvenirs show how the department store was actively messaging the importance of its architecture and interior design via advertising and commodities. An early and effective use of virtual travel via display can be found at The Great Exhibition of 1851, which was comprised of a presentation of compartmentalized interiors, defined by geographic region; the department store later adopted this strategy for the display of its expanding range of global commodities. The decorations of the Courts of the Crystal Palace were in historical styles correspondent to the nationality of the work displayed “Big Store Thrown Open,” 16. Wade, A Birds-Eye View of Greater New York, 127. 40 See Siegel Cooper Co., Fan, wood and printed paper, 1890–1920, New  York Historical Society, New York. 41 Other examples of this phenomenon in material culture studies include printed representations of contemporary events, monuments, and political figures serving as the basis for transfer printed decorations on ceramic objects of everyday use and fabrics for clothing and household furnishings. Kevin Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll, Studies in Ephemera:  Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 10. 38 39

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FIGURE 4.5  Siegel Cooper & Co., Coin Purse, 1896–1917, Leather, Paper, Metal, Celluloid, 2 1/2 × 2 5/8 × 1/2 in. Gift of Bella C. Landauer, 2002.1.4813. New York Historical Society.

within them.42 For instance, Owen Jones designed an imposing series of decorated columns in the Egyptian manner for the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Historian Christopher Whitehead has pointed out how this method of presentation had practical benefits as well as artistic ones; the simulation of the context of origin furnished “greater possibilities of object comprehension” and “formed at the same time a means of physical orientation and demarcation between different sections of the exhibition.”43 So too at the department store did specific schemes of decoration distinguish particular departments, a visual effect aided also by the use of specialized shopfittings. Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain:  The Development of the National Gallery (Aldershot; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 40. 43 Ibid., 41. 42

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A few decades later at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, visitors experienced culturally specific settings in the exhibition’s marketplace. Situated behind the main exhibition building, Turkish and Japanese bazaars took the form of freestanding pavilions. The Turkish bazaar and café “had a domed ceiling painted in the Turkish colors and ornamented with Turkish designs” while “on the east side was a dark walnut carved counter on which were ranged glass dishes filled with all kinds of oriental delicacies . . . Dispersed through the room, at the sides, were small bazaars where were sold rich costumes, carpets, pipes, swords, daggers, hilts, and many other novel ornaments.”44 The market setting that mimicked the objects’ point of origin lent the wares an authenticity and offered the public the opportunity to experience the simulation of a shopping trip in a faraway location. In the same way, the department store offered many store-withinstore experiences that reproduced a range of global contexts for purchasing wares. Leon Mandel claimed in a company history that Mandel Brothers (established in Chicago in 1855) was the “first to build special foreign shops where one might wander as if in a foreign city.”45 Department stores staged simulations of the foreign marketplace in order to close the gap between objects’ locations of production and consumption via display. A Marshall Field’s postcard, printed in about 1910, features “A Portion of the Rug Department” and shows a colorful bazaar of rugs hanging down from the ceiling and mounds and drapes of textiles ready for consumer perusal (Figure 4.6, see also Plate 15 in the plate section). This immersive representation positions the viewer as consumer. This department’s presentation dually connected the rugs to their country of origin and set them apart due to their special display treatment. As opposed to the regimented “new method” of rug display, whereby rugs could be flipped through individually on an upright rack (Figure 3.9), Marshall Field’s gallery here enriched the desirability of the goods by encouraging their viewing in an immersive environment. In addition to exuding a sense of exoticism, foreign objects also symbolized the strength of global trade and the significant role that the department store played in the international marketplace as distributor. The creation of a diverse range of spaces across time and place, under one roof, was a technique that the department store borrowed also from the realm of the museum. From the mid-nineteenth century, museums aimed for contextual display that eventually matured by the turn of the twentieth century into the acquisition of entire historical interiors.46 In its interior of J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition Described and Illustrated:  Being a Concise and Graphic Description of This Grand Enterprise Commemorative of the First Centennary [sic] of American Independence (Philadelphia, PA: Hubbard, 1876), 544–5. 45 Leon Mandel, “Seventy-Five Years Young; A Store’s Romance,” Chicago Commerce, March 22, 1930, Box 1, folder 1, Mandel Family Papers, Chicago History Museum. 46 The South Kensington Museum acquired its first period room, the Serilly Cabinet of 1778 (unfurnished), in 1869. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first room, the Bosco Reale Room of 40–30 bc, in 1903. Following the Hudson Fulton exhibition in 1909, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the Hewlett House paneling in 1910, the first in a 44

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FIGURE 4.6  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “A Portion of the Rug Department, Marshall Field & Company, Retail, Chicago,” ca. 1910. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, VO1997.

interiors, the department store’s repeated use of contextual display fostered a sense of believability, another objective at work in the museum prior to its use in the department store. In an essay in the Art Journal of 1853, German art historian G. F. Waagen advised, It is, therefore, the duty of those entrusted with the arrangement of Museums, to lessen as much as possible the contrast which must necessarily exist between works of Art in their original site, and in their position in a museum . . . to realize in some degree the impression produced by a temple, a church, a palace, or a cabinet, for which those works were originally intended, and where a certain general hegemony reigned.47

sequence that resulted in the opening of the new American Wing in 1924. Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1989), 294–6; Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance (London: V & A Publications, 2006), 11; John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2007), 5; Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Design and Decorating during the Great Depression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, 2004), 17. 47 G. F. Waagen, Art Journal, 1853, quoted in Whitehead, The Public Art Museum, 39.

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Here Waagen calls attention to the importance of a historically sympathetic setting in the presentation of objects in order to create an accurate atmosphere for their interpretation and viewing. While the museum’s aim was more academic than the commercial goals of the department store, their strivings for visual unity and an authentic experience were similar. On the upper tiers of many department stores visitors experienced a fragmented presentation of departments, a number of which were distinguished by their contextual displays. In 1902, the Chicago Dry Goods Reporter included a description of a “special feature” of the lingerie department in Marshall Field’s—“a special French room for displaying the handmade garments is designed after the high-grade specialty shops in Paris.”48 A 1913 illustrated brochure for the store, which guided the reader through the departments, advertising the store’s wealth of merchandise, showed the lingerie section that still fit such a description (Figure  4.7). This pamphlet sets up a striking visual comparison between the “French Lingerie,” shown on mannequins amidst elegant French style furniture against a painted backdrop of open windows and flowers, and the “Domestic Lingerie” presented in uniform piles on heavy and utilitarian wooden casework. This imagery emphasized the context for the goods rather than specific qualities of the merchandise. Such a comparison provided readers with a preview of the store’s shopping experience while encouraging them to scrutinize the contrasting interiors for signals of the quality and type of the stock that they contained. Wanamaker’s was particularly proud of its offerings of French fashions and its selling environment, which evoked the glamour of French dressmaking salons, differentiating these foreign wares from the rest of the ladies’ dress department. The store’s promotional material purported, “The likeness, more than that, the very atmosphere of the exclusive dressmakers’ atelier has been captured by the gray and pink salons of L’Art de la Couture . . . It is Paris dress making at moderate cost, without the trouble of voyaging to Paris.”49 In this case, Wanamaker’s offered French fashions and even a copy of the French shopping experience claiming that consumption could obviate travel. Wanamaker’s imported French fashions were consistent with those currently available for sale in Paris, therefore reinforcing the accuracy of the French experience.50 The store’s visual and temporal alignment with Chicago Dry Goods Reporter, October 11, 1902, 17, 03052 (24), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 49 “Is Wanamaker’s Different and Why?,” Evening Telegram, January 19, 1910, 5. 50 Wanamaker’s claimed, “The fashion exhibits that are held at this store each season are looked forward to by New  York women as sounding the authoritative note from Paris. So close is the connection of Wanamaker’s (through its permanent Paris staff) with the great artists and designers of Paris, that new things keep coming by every steamer, and students of fashion say that the new things are shown at Wanamaker’s almost (if not altogether) simultaneously with the Paris shops.” John Wanamaker, What to See in New York (New York: John Wanamaker, 1912), 22–3. 48

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FIGURE 4.7  French Lingerie and Domestic Lingerie Departments, Marshall Field & Company (Chicago, IL: Marshall Field & Company, 1913), n.p., 16023 (2), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, IChi-79031.

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Paris endowed the fashions with great appeal and authenticity while also justifying their high price. A salon dedicated to showcasing the work of the French milliner Marcelle Demay, located on the second floor of Wanamaker’s older building, was copied after the designer’s salon at 11 Rue Royal, Paris. A  brochure explained, “The decorations are in soft French gray. Thick, heavy carpet that is harmonious with the surroundings covers the floor. To complete the picture the salesgirls wear gowns of French gray. In the salons are many long mirrors in which gowns and hats may be seen at the best advantage.”51 The hats were purportedly made by French milliners in the atelier immediately adjoining the salons, and all the attendants were French.52 In this case, Wanamaker’s constructed a complete replica of a contemporary salon in Paris, complete with staff and décor. While Wanamaker’s may have been one of the first to design French décor for departments of French wares, other New  York department stores soon followed suit, suggesting the popularity and success of this interior design strategy. In 1913, Stern’s department store opened a new location on 42nd Street and a report in the New York Times revealed that the store also embraced an elegant display of French wares very similar to that of Wanamaker’s, including details of a mirrored wall and the choice of gray shades for the woodwork and carpet, “expected to appeal to women shoppers.”53 By 1912, on the main floor of the new Wanamaker building stood an accurate reproduction of London’s Burlington Arcade fitted out with a tailoring shop and stores that sold fashions that reflected the “habits of the Englishman, as well as of the demands and requirements of the American man.”54 In addition to the English quality of the goods, Wanamaker’s also promoted the accuracy of this London-style experience with fittings that had been “carefully reproduced” from the Arcade itself and shop windows dressed in an “English style.” Therefore, Wanamaker’s equally promoted the Englishness of the goods and the display environment as attractions. The attention to detail in the Arcade with the “fittings of the English shops” and Wanamaker, What to See in New York, 29. John Wanamaker, New York City and the Wanamaker Store (New York: John Wanamaker, 1916), 56. 53 The New York Times reported, “The French parlors for the display of imported goods are expected to appeal to women shoppers. Inclosed [sic] from the general sales floor by glass grillwork, they present a delicate and most attractive appearance. The woodwork within is a soft French gray, wit [sic] ha [sic] thick carpet of the same pale shade. The chairs are of an attractive French pattern in a darker smoke gray and there are innumerable full length French mirrors mounted in gray, with special showcases and tables of artistic design.” “Guests Inspect New Stern Store: Building in Forty-Second Street Will Be Thrown Open to the Public on Next Tuesday,” New York Times, August 28, 1913, 18. 54 Wanamaker, What to See in New  York, 28. Meanwhile, a promotion in the New  York Tribune promised, “Garments as thoroughly English as the banks of the Thames. Not to be confused with the imitation with which American manufacturers have flooded the land.” John Wanamaker, Advertisement, New York Tribune, January 26, 1912, 4. 51 52

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the shop windows “dressed in the English style” implied that consumers would have been attuned to these differences in fixtures and display strategy. As well as a fitting setting for the selling of English goods, the complete recreation of this Burlington Arcade was also a physical manifestation of a cross-Atlantic conversation around the profession of visual merchandising. Wanamaker’s Burlington Arcade was also built in response to a specific consumer need. William Rowland Hotchkin, an employee at Wanamaker’s in New  York at the time of the structure’s construction, recalled that the concept grew out of a meeting in which Wanamaker’s employees were discussing “changed conditions in the trade.”55 In his book Making More Money in Storekeeping, an advice manual based on his career experiences at Wanamaker’s and Gimbel’s in New  York, Hotchkin shared that “some members of the conference were astounded when they learned that more than three hundred thousand automobiles were owned by people living in the State of New York.”56 Following that discussion, the men’s clothing buyer was sent to London to buy a fifty thousand dollar stock of automobile garments in “the accepted styles of Europe.”57 Thus, this Burlington Arcade installation also reveals how a department store was able to react quickly to market demand with the ideal merchandise and develop a coordinated display strategy. Hotchkin wrote that “thousands were glad to be shown what was the correct thing in motoring apparel.”58 The presentation of motoring apparel, a decidedly modern need, in the historical setting of London’s Burlington Arcade, built in 1819, calls attention to the fractured histories and geographies that the department store presented to its consumers. In the case of the Burlington Arcade, Wanamaker’s was also capitalizing on the cultural authority of London for menswear; meanwhile, the lingerie salons aligned themselves with Paris as the cultural authority for women’s wear. In 1910, the press reported on the shopping experience of one Wanamaker’s customer, a well-traveled woman who had known perhaps “twenty years of Europe” and a “cycle of Cathay.”59 Following her stroll through the French salons and the Burlington Arcade, stood in the rotunda of Wanamaker’s and was quoted in the press as saying, “This place is just like a mirror—it reflects every part of the world,” and then she added, “I could spend days here without going tired.”60 This customer’s assessment of her shopping experience reveals how the department stores’ display strategy of geographical variability energized and captivated consumers. The 1910 newspaper article went on to boast, “Much traveled folk who love their

William Rowland Hotchkin, Making More Money in Storekeeping (New York: Ronald Press Company, 1917), 129. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 130. 59 Wanamaker, What to See in New York, 28. 60 “Is Wanamaker’s Different and Why?,” 5. 55

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Paris and London and Berlin, their Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Canton, are always impressed by the comprehensive atmosphere of this store, when they come to Wanamaker’s straight from the steamer. They tell us it reflects the exclusiveness of the little Rue de la Paix or Bond Street shop, but reflects them COLLECTIVELY.”61 By stressing the department store’s variety of global shopping opportunities and their accessibility under one roof, this journalist drew attention to the dual fragmentation and combination at the core of the modern department store experience.

The Model Room: An Interior of Interiors The strategy of the model room, whether used in the show window or presented in the store interior, facilitated the exhibition of a succession of styles of interior decoration simultaneously. By the time the concept of the model room reached the department store, the public would have been familiar with its framework from a number of other cultural contexts, including the museum and the theater. With the popularity of “parlor room dramas” in the late nineteenth century, the public scrutinized assemblages of home furnishings as stage sets at the theater. Furniture and Decoration magazine elaborated on the educational value of the theater and the department store in 1897, “As a rule the examples exposed in the shop windows, and more especially the drawing-rooms reproduced on the stage, offer the public a fair idea of the prevailing fashion.”62 The domestic interior, the same ensemble that the department store was repeatedly merchandising, was also popular as a stage set. In both of these contexts, the work of the display and theatrical designers shaped the public’s critical understanding of styles of interior decoration. From the late nineteenth century, links between the department store and the museum can be identified in terms of style education as well as display strategies. Retail designers also looked to the museum period room for guidance. In 1922, display expert G. L. Timmons advised, “Such places as museums are frequently visited by display men in search of inspiration, and many period settings used by the big London stores have been the outcome of such visits.”63 Befitting its founding mission, the Victoria & Albert and other museums taught displaymen good taste by example. As historian Jeremy Aynsley has observed, “Many overlaps and interconnections existed between the exhibited interior and another category of room, the commercialized Ibid. Furniture and Decoration, February 15, 1897, vol. 24, no. 764, 1, quoted in Helen C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 25. 63 G. L. Timmins, Window Dressing: The Principles of “Display” (London: Sir Issac Pitman, 1922), xii. 61 62

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and commodified period interior—that which was for sale.”64 Since the department store supported the antique trade and exhibited rooms in historical styles, knowledge of the chronology of design and decoration was paramount to the success of displaymen’s performances.65 In September of 1920, the MRSW emphasized the importance of a historical grounding in display design training, “It is of utmost importance for the window man to study period interiors, general interior construction, painting, glazing, high-lighting, polychrome coloring, antiquing in general, draperies, fabrics, upholstery material . . . One should study the five architectural orders that assist materially in planning.”66 An early twentiethcentury Marshall Field’s postcard shows how this historical training could have been applied to the presentation of period rooms in a series of show windows. The caption on the reverse reads as follows:  “A series of display windows giving an exact reproduction of the interior of a Large Hall, or Gallery, in an English Mansion of the 17th Century. Suggesting the resources and high standard of the Interior Decorating Section of Marshall Field & Company’s Retail Store, Chicago.”67 In this case, a single period room display, of a grand subject, spreads across a series of three windows encouraging the viewer to read them as a continuous image. This postcard is particularly noteworthy for the credit it gives to the store’s interior decoration staff—the “Interior Decorating Section of Marshall Field”—and their successful engagement with historical decoration. The caption notes that the display is an “exact reproduction,” implying the department store’s commodification of a historical setting and evocation of authenticity in order to increase desirability. The displaymen’s exercise of reproduction via display suggested to the consumer that what they observed in the window could also be re-created in their own home. More than a design and exhibition trend, the model room as a coherent grouping of objects was also a practical strategy to encourage coordinated ensemble purchasing. As Aynsley has pointed out, “It is clear from looking at a range of trade journals and popular magazines that the idea of viewing or purchasing a complete historical interior was a familiar one in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”68 One 1890’s promotional pamphlet for Wanamaker’s drew attention to how the model room as a Aynsley and Grant, Imagined Interiors, 25. For more on the British department store’s use of the model room, and in particular, their encouragement of the antique trade and education on historical styles, see Patricia LaraBetancourt, “Displaying Dreams: Model Interiors in British Department Stores, 1880–1914,” in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, ed. Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty (New York: Routledge), 31–46. 66 Paul F. Lupo, “Period Furniture Displays,” MRSW, September 1920, 32. 67 Marshall Field & Company, Postcard, “A Series of Display Windows,” ca. 1910, 14005 (5), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company, Chicago History Museum. 68 Aynsley and Grant, Imagined Interiors, 25. 64 65

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display device secured the sales of a range of harmonized merchandise: “No need to guess that this or that will match, you can see the things together and know. You can see entire rooms fitted as they will be in use. You can be sure that the Carpets and Rugs and Upholstery and Furniture and Wall Paper harmonize as you wish.”69 Wanamaker’s advocated that the presentation of a range of coordinated merchandise also eased the onerous process of decision-making for the consumer. The pamphlet claimed, “We have made a dream of delight of the picking and choosing that used to be a drudgery and a dread.”70 Thus, the interior decoration staff utilized the device of the model room as a silent salesman. The immersive nature of the model room setup allowed the consumer to browse freely and learn and shop through observation. Decorating advice literature and department store catalogs that pictured and listed one style of room after the next amplified consumer choice and gave the reader the impression that stylistic alteration was feasible and in fact encouraged. Therefore, an approach to the domestic interior as flexible and changeable was directly in line with how these spaces were shown in the department store context. In 1907 Wanamaker’s in New York debuted The House Palatial, “the very acme of the house designing, furnishing and decorative arts.”71 More than a model room, The House Palatial was a magnificent model home complete with a summer garden. Built into the central atrium of the Cast Iron Palace, the House Palatial was a two-story twenty-two-room house of decorative color schemes, period furniture groupings, drapery, and art taken from the store’s departments (Figure 4.8, see also Plate 16 in the plate section). The structure contained “a library, music-room, bed-rooms, play-room, nursery, dining-room, rooms for college girls and boys, bridal-chamber, guest-rooms, parlors, living-rooms, kitchen, bath-room and Italian garden,” which were all “shown completely furnished in every detail.”72 Connecting these rooms were the house’s own halls and staircases. Wanamaker’s interior decorators built The House Palatial as a memorable and impressive setting for the presentation of furniture and decorations, asserting the store as a style authority. This grand context enhanced product identity while educating the visitors on how to assemble similar groupings in their own home or the homes of clients. The Louis Quinze drawing room (Figure 4.8), for instance, was one of the most elaborate in the house, emblematic of “the home of a family of taste and wealth,” and as the Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores advertised, linking fantasy to reality, “the best of its type that can be seen in Fifth Avenue, or Hyde Park, London.”73 John Wannamaker, Interior Decoration (Philadelphia, PA: Times Printing House, 189?), n.p. Ibid. 71 Wanamaker, What to See in New York, 23. 72 Ibid., 32. 73 Wanamaker, Appel, and Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 296. 69 70

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FIGURE 4.8  Louis XV Drawing Room, House Palatial, New Wanamaker Building, New York, in John Wanamaker, Joseph H. Appel, and Leigh Mitchell Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores (Philadelphia, PA: John Wanamaker, 1911), 283. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.

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Wanamaker’s promoted that the display staff presided over “every room in the house obviously different in character, although all help make up a harmonious whole.”74 Each room offered an entirely different interior experience, therefore mirroring the fragmented and multidimensional nature of the department store itself. A series of interiors all distinct in their style, time period, and geographical orientation created a diachronic experience for the visitor. This creation of “rooms of a special character for the ordinary dwelling” was in line with one of the “major new preoccupations of 19th-century design,” as historian Stefan Muthesius has observed.75 For instance, the House Palatial contained a Jacobean Dining Room, Voysey Sitting Room, and a Sheraton Morning Room and from there the visitor could explore the other departments at Wanamaker’s that included a Louis XV dress salon, “Little French Store” of imported lingerie, and a Moorish Room in the Upholstery department. Theatrical effects provided a lived-in sense of legitimacy. In 1908, one Connecticut journalist reported, As you enter the foyer hall you will find it hard to dispel the illusion that you are intruding for at the end of this hall the dining room can be seen with the maids in attendance. The table is set for dinner, lamps are lighted in various rooms and the whole atmosphere is that of a house that is lived in. It is difficult to believe that the furnishings and things, even to the books lying open on the library table, are new and have been “assembled” from the stocks of the various galleries.76 While the House Palatial was made to appear permanent and its “real” qualities were notable, the structure was nonetheless an invented display scheme whose lifespan lasted about a decade. As an ideal environment for living, The House Palatial was part of a trend of the constructed interior that began in the early twentieth century with the Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibitions in Britain (first in 1908) and peaked later in America in the 1930s in World’s Fairs such as The Town of Tomorrow at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The House Palatial revealed the domestic interior’s potential as an instructional format for home decoration in the retail context. This educational goal was clear to one reporter who wrote, “In the owner’s suite on the second floor the choice of Sheraton furnishing was made probably because it is the most difficult known style to assemble.”77 The House Palatial therefore particularly engaged with those in the rising Ibid., 295. Stefan Muthesius, The Poetic Home:  Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 201. 76 “  ‘The House Palatial’ in Wanamaker’s Store,” Meriden Morning Record, October 24, 1908, 10. 77 Ibid. 74 75

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interior design profession and those members of the public wanting to take a more active role in the shaping of their domestic interiors. One pamphlet explained that the rooms representing various periods were laid out “to enable architects and home-makers to study and select proper furniture and house adornments, and to enable them to individualize their homes from the mere commercial furnishing way.”78 Through the House Palatial, Wanamaker’s established its authoritative role in the production of taste, and an innovative format for the display and communication of that taste. New York’s Evening Telegram reported, “Instead of writing reams of preachments about how to furnish and how not to furnish, the Wanamaker Store has given the House Palatial as evidence of its furniture beliefs.”79 An advancement from the two-dimensional visualization of themed and historicized interiors on the pages of pamphlets and merchandise catalogs, The House Palatial afforded the visitors a chance to immerse themselves in an interior and imagine it as their own.80 As Penny Sparke has described, “The evocatively designed interior became, therefore, both a means (of selling) and an end (the location for the consumed goods) in this context.”81 The believability of the setting lent a sense of reality and encouraged the consumers’ imaginary mapping of that interior onto their own lifestyle. Attendance numbers of more than seventy thousand visitors on opening day corroborated the House Palatial’s novelty and justified its incredible expense of over a quarter of a million dollars, artwork and furniture included.82 The papers proclaimed that no event in the mercantile world in recent years had attracted more widespread attention than this opening.83 But even the seemingly permanent House Palatial was prey to the department store’s unceasing cycle of change. By 1912, the in-store home had been completely redecorated, and in 1920 Rodman Wanamaker, son of John Wanamaker, tore down the miniature building to make way for more elevators and what he deemed to be more efficient display space.84 The furniture and interior decoration department was renamed Belmaison and dedicated to a single floor.85 The void of the atrium so celebrated in the grand stores of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had fallen out of favor in exchange for floor-through construction that maximized sales floor space.86 Wanamaker, Appel, and Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 295. “Is Wanamaker’s Different and Why?,” 5. 80 Wanamaker, Appel, and Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 295. 81 Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008), 55–6. 82 Wanamaker, Appel, and Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores, 295. 83 Ibid. 84 Leach, Land of Desire, 81. 85 Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 1996, 313. 86 Macy’s had no rotunda, “the object being to utilize every square inch of floor space.” “Macy & Co.’s New Store,” Dry Goods Economist, November 15, 1902, 19, 8B Box 10, Macy’s Archive. 78 79

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Professional Development While the field of interior decoration did not formalize until the 1930s (in Britain the Society of Industrial Artists was founded in 1930 and in America the American Institute of Interior Decorators was founded in 1931), department stores can be identified as promoting their display staff as a voice of authority in the field as early as the late nineteenth century. Department stores developed and codified services via publications, encouraged networking between display staff, and educated consumers on style and arrangement, all of which directly impacted the professionalization of the field of interior decoration at large. As early as the 1870s, William Whiteley started a house-building and decoration service.87 Wanamaker’s established an Advisory Bureau since, as one newspaper reported in 1910, “The Wanamaker Galleries of upholsteries, carpets, rugs, furniture and paintings are not alone sufficient to make a beautiful home. It requires knowledge of art and a suitable outlay of time to choose and assemble the proper furnishings for the entire house.”88 Wanamaker’s promoted the necessary role of its interior decoration staff in the artistic arrangement of the domestic interior. Meanwhile, a letter in the Mandel Family Papers, presumably addressed to a potential client as “Sir,” dating to September 14, 1904, boasted of the Chicago store’s decorating services, not only for the domestic interior but also for public institutions: As no doubt you are aware, we have among the many departments of our immense mercantile establishment an admirably equipped organization for the complete decorating, furnishing, and fitting up of office and similar buildings, in the most appropriate and harmonious manner. The list of such buildings already fitted up by us, including banks, theaters, and other large structures, though too long to mention, is one that attests the artistic perfection of our corps of workers and the thoroughness of our craftsmanship . . . Our department of interior decorating, wall finishing and papering is conducted by experts whose skill and experience are the best obtainable and may be wholly relied upon.89 Thus, the design professionals employed in major department stores were not only in charge of planning a pleasing presentation for the sales floor, and setting up model rooms, but their services extended beyond the store walls and into the domestic and public realms. In 1914, B.  Altman

87 Illustrated London and Its Representatives of Commerce (London:  London Printing and Engraving Co., 1893), 83, BF108849, Whiteley’s, The Architecture of Shopping Project, English Heritage. 88 “Is Wanamaker’s Different and Why?,” 5. 89 Letter, September 14, 1904, Box 1, folder 1, Mandel Family Papers, Chicago History Museum.

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FIGURE 4.9  The Building Department Showroom of John Barker & Co., December 27, 1912. Photograph by Adolphe Augustus Boucher, Bedford Lemere and Company. By permission of Historic England Archive.

boasted, “Several of America’s best known hotels and theatres, as well as a large number of private residences, owe their interior beauty to the artistic resources of the Altman studios. A specialty is made of period interiors.”90 Customers experienced the displaymen’s work across multiple urban contexts. An image of the “Building Department Showroom” in 1912 at John Barker & Co. in London shows the materials, architectural elements, and decorations that the department store had on hand to outfit interior spaces (Figure  4.9). The Barker’s showroom appears like the office of a decorator, presenting the domestic interior as a kit of parts that needs to be professionally assembled with the input from the consumers as to how they would like to personalize it. Two chairs pose around a table beckoning discussion between the staff and the customer. Wallcoverings are unrolled for customer perusal. Along the right-hand side of the image are a series of room displays segmented with false half-height walls, holding hanging B. Altman & Co.’s Enlarged Store: Fifth Avenue-Madison Avenue, Thirty-Fourth and ThirtyFifth Streets (New York, New York: B. Altman, 1914), 30. 90

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pictures, as demarcation between the scenes or categories of merchandise. The interior decorators’ act of assembling these accents and the many other furniture pieces, art objects, and architectural elements was a form of creative fabrication, therefore emphasizing again the department store as an active site of design production. Interior design, as it related to the home and whose concepts and elements sold through department stores, became an area where women took on an important role. Professionalized interior decoration by women was practiced in America from the end of the nineteenth century and by the outbreak of World War I, it was well established.91 Two of the first figures who emerge in the profession are Nancy McClelland and Ruby Ross Goodnow, both of whom are tied to the history of interior decoration at Wanamaker’s in New  York. Nancy McClelland, who would become the first female president of the American Institute of Decorators in 1931, joined the advertising department of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia in 1900 where she created window displays and store exhibits.92 Her work in the window, studying the art of “proper and effective arrangement” and “working out background for the various home furnishings,” was a stepping stone to her later assignments of arranging store interiors, following the typical professional trajectory of the window dresser as her responsibilities expanded.93 In 1907, McClelland went to France as a “representative and buyer” for Wanamaker’s and while she was abroad she studied art and art history and visited palaces, chateaux, and museums.94 Upon her return to the United States in 1913, John Wanamaker asked her to rearrange the first three sales floors of his New York store; her new configurations purportedly increased sales immediately.95 On the heels of that favorable outcome, Wanamaker asked McClelland to redesign the fourth floor, where she established a decorating and antique shop, Au Quatrième. This first interior decoration department of an American department store took the form of a series of

Penny Sparke, “The Domestic Interior and the Construction of Self: The New York Homes of Elsie de Wolfe,” in Interior Design and Identity, ed. Susan McKellar and Penny Sparke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 73. See two of the earliest works on interior decoration written by females, as cited by Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a Focus in Interior Design History,” Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 1: In Britain, Rhoda Garrett and Agnes Garrett, Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture (London: Macmillan, 1876) and in America, Candace Wheeler, “Interior Decoration as a Profession for Women,” The Outlook, April 6, 1895, 559–60 and April 20, 1895, 649. 92 Therefore, McClelland is the sole named female that this research has uncovered as being active in the arrangement of the window display. 93 “In Memory of a Pioneer: Nancy Vincent McClelland, 1877–1959,” Interiors, 119 (1959), 79, cited in Bridget May, “Nancy Vincent McClelland (1877–1959): Professionalizing Interior Decorating in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Design History 21 (2008): 60. 94 May, “Nancy Vincent McClelland (1877–1959),” 60. 95 “Au Quatrième, 1913–22,” n.p., Box 4, Nancy McClelland Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 91

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shops, along a faux promenade. A  1916 pamphlet described, “Down a red-flagged walk, with green vine-covered trellises, there are little painted shops” that included a Sports Shop, a Riding-habit Shop, a School Shop, and a Novelty Shop.96 The Novelty Shop sold all kinds of “strange and beautiful old and modern objects” presumably as interior accents. Au Quatrième even featured designers at work; a promotional pamphlet described, “Over by the windows is an open studio where artists are painting trays and flower-pots, and old trunks for wood-boxes and many other things.”97 These craft demonstrations became a part of the display, educating consumers on technique and encouraging them to marvel at the skill of the makers. Past the shops stood the Little House, the ultimate design product of Au Quatrième’s interior decorators. With open doors, the house of five rooms showed “how charming the new decorative ideas look when put into practice.”98 These model rooms contained ensembles of furniture and decorative elements, which were also arranged separately by object category in the salesrooms for browsing nearby. In 1918, McClelland hired designer Ruby Ross Goodnow (née Wood), Elsie de Wolfe’s first disciple. Before working for Wanamaker’s, Goodnow had ghost authored de Wolfe’s articles on interior decoration for the women’s magazine The Delineator, which formed the basis for her book The House in Good Taste (1930). By 1921 Goodnow was the head of Belmaison, Wanamaker’s “house of beauty” that offered twelve distinct rooms with rotating displays. By 1922, McClelland had established a decorating firm, Nancy McClelland, Inc., that specialized in the accurate reproduction of period interiors for private clients and historic houses.99 For both McClelland and Goodnow, the department store served as an important training ground for their professional careers, giving them access to material resources, travel, chances to exert their leadership and test new ideas, build a client base for their own private practices, and establish their reputations within the field. The stories of these two women extend beyond the historical scope of this narrative; yet, this brief mention of their stories within the culture of display helps to call attention to the department store as significant site in the history of the professionalization of interior decoration. McClelland’s and Goodnow’s biographies also draw attention to a gendered shift in the display field, from male to female, as interior decoration solidified as its own branch of the department store’s client services. The department store aimed to achieve a balance between creative expression and profit-making strategy with its interior decoration scheme. In Wanamaker, New York City and the Wanamaker Store, 59–60. Ibid., 60. 98 Ibid. 99 Important clients included John D.  Rockefeller and Electra Havemeyer Webb. McClelland also worked at Mount Vernon in Virginia and the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Portland, Maine. 96 97

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facilitating travel via commodities, the department store evoked the objects’ place of origin in order to communicate exoticism, luxury, and authenticity. The model room rationalized display into a series of distinct experiences that educated visitors on interior decoration styles while also leaving room for them to imagine possibilities for customization and how their domestic environment could merge with the department store’s staged ideal. Last, the department store played a prominent role in the shaping of the domestic interior at the turn of the twentieth century. The stores not only gave access to objects of furniture and decoration but also built entire homes, performed utility installation, improved living conditions, and offered personalized advice on the latest styles. For instance, in 1886, London-based cartoonist and illustrator Linley Sambourne engaged the store Maple & Co. for work in the “Best Bedroom” and “Dining Room” of his home at 18 Stafford Terrace, later hiring the store to lay his carpet in 1894, and electrify his home beginning in 1896. In 1909, he hired John Barker for repairs to the windows.100 This documented example is representative of how the design practice of the department store’s decorating and building staff extended outside of the retail realm and directly into the domestic sphere. While many of the names of these interior decorators operating within the department store realm are still unknown, their influence is well documented; archival records show how the department store structured and promoted the skills and services of interior decoration from its earliest years as a design profession.

See Maple & Co. Receipts, ST/1/6/102/4, ST/1/6/102/11, ST/1/6/102/16, 17, 18, and 20; John Barker Receipts ST/2/4/5/3/5, Sambourne Family Archive, 18 Stafford Terrace, London. 100

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The Modern Displayman At the turn of the twentieth century, display designers were typically employed by and had an allegiance to the department store as they formulated the display moment in the life of the commodity. However, a few particular evolutions in department store culture, which began to take place toward the end of this narrative’s timeline, altered the relationship between the store, the displayman, and the merchandise. The first was the increased amount of branded merchandise in the department store marketplace and the second was the department store’s hiring of commercial artists, industrial designers, and fine artists for particular design projects. While these developments lie largely outside of the time period of this study, their significance indicates that the issues and debates around art and commerce, temporality, attention strategies, and profit-making that played out between about 1880 and 1920 were later amplified in new ways that deserve brief recognition here. The turn of the twentieth century period served as a laboratory for later developments in the professionalization and influence of department store display. When working for an independent manufacturer, displaymen’s allegiances shifted to lie with the brand rather than with the place and space of the department store. The manufacturer’s standardized approaches to window display with a national reach directly clashed with the department store display’s core principles of variation, creativity, and artistry that were formulated with a particular urban location and its population in mind. By the 1920s, display, as a space and a medium, became a valuable commodity itself, subject to styling and made available for reproduction and purchase. For industrial designers, fixtures were projects in their own right whose forms were susceptible to trends in modern art and design. Window and interior schemes were not only included in guidebooks for burgeoning displaymen to copy but also were bought, sold, and industrially replicated

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through manufacturers who shipped internationally. The window display space became the site of special edition commissions by artists and industrial designers, either hired by the store or the manufacturer, and shopfittings were transformed under the influences of these new collaborations. While at the turn of the twentieth century, displaymen aspired for recognition as artists, by the 1920s, fine artists and designers were eager to play the role of displaymen as fine art and commercial art melded within the department store’s culture of show. In the 1920s, Macy’s established a program in “Promotional Training” that included a course in “appreciation of color” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 The high standards for cunning use of color in the show window and interior display schemes may have helped to open up the display field to fine artists. Joseph Cummings Chase, noted American portrait painter, was a consultant to the window display department at McCreery’s department store in New York from 1914 to 1929. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported in 1929, “Joseph Cummings Chase is one of the foremost authorities on color in the United States. He is also an authority on window displays. While this may seem odd, a little consideration of the highly artistic window displays in some of the larger stores will prove of itself there is no incongruity in a real artist being consulted in the matter of attractive displays.”2 This journalist points to a new consideration of the window display as a suitable canvas for fine artists. The article concluded, “It is no wonder that a real artist is extremely valuable to a shop. Joseph Cummings Chase does not consider his work as advisor to display departments a prostitution of his art. He considers it just another worthy phase of true art endeavor.”3 Art and commerce benefited from one another; the display window gained a fashionable reputation and credibility from associations with the fine art world; meanwhile, the artists and designers who completed projects for department store show windows benefitted from the additional publicity and an opportunity to diversify their audience. Along with a product’s form, materials, and package design, retail display increasingly became another styling responsibility of an industrial designer working for a manufacturer in the interwar period. For instance, from 1930 to 1932, Norman Bel Geddes designed a line of radio cabinets for the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company and also devised their window display, and in the following year Yardley hired Bel Geddes to develop a display set for Yardley soap. Geddes proposed a mechanized display that rotated every few minutes, bringing dynamism to the everyday substance.4

Promotional Job Training Chart, ca. 1921, Box 9E, Macy’s Archive. Mathilde Kinglsey, “Tells Secrets of Artists’ Models,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 10, 1929, 88. 3 Ibid. 4 For more on Bel Geddes work with Philadelphia Storage Battery Company and Yardley, see Jobs 199 and 261, Norman Bel Geddes Collection, Henry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 1 2

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Manufacturers hired full-time display staff, such as Ernest Williams, display manager at Kodak Ltd., in order to devise national campaigns of point-ofpurchase displays and window and interior merchandising schemes. Williams later became the second president of the British Association of Displaymen. In addition, if displaymen worked to the satisfaction of a manufacturer with their product in the context of the department store, sometimes the designers were hired on a contract basis to develop the manufacturer’s window display program for other stores or arrangements for trade expositions.5 These developments beyond 1920 attest to the importance of the role of displaymen in the history of design and the history of design professions at the turn of the twentieth century. Debates in the balance between art and commerce, central to the mission and message of the department store, were also at the core of a rising professional class of commercial artists and industrial designers, who worked across a great range of media, including display design, by the 1920s. The department store fostered significant crossovers between design professions of commercial art, set design, industrial design, interior design, and fine art. This series of connections and its accompanying shared set of skills and approaches contributed to the interdisciplinary nature of design at large into the twentieth century. While before 1920, the names of many display designers have been lost to history, in the 1920s and 1930s, department stores benefited from the engagement of noted individuals. The retail environment provided the springboard for a number of important designers at the start of their careers who were in need of employment and a creative outlet. Norman Bel Geddes, John Vassos, Donald Deskey, Joseph Urban, Edgar Brandt, Frederick Kiesler, and Raymond Loewy, among others, all engaged with the design of the American department store, ranging from window displays and graphic design to ironwork and architecture. This history deserves closer attention as it relates to the development of these designers’ careers, the success of the particular stores that employed them, as well the growth of display field in the early twentieth century. The show window’s contradictory nature of permanent impermanence was traditionally one of the fine art world’s primary criticisms of the medium. Yet this ephemerality was one of the space’s appealing qualities for young designers looking to make a short-lived original statement that prompted challenges to the hierarchy of artistic formats.

In Summary This narrative has recounted the history of display via a modernist outlook in which display practices in this period were gradually improving, and it Duplan silk contracted with Herman Frankenthal following his successful displays for the manufacturer at B.  Altman in New  York. F.  F. Purdy, “Notes from New  York,” MRSW, September 1920, 41. 5

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has traced a story of progress, highlighted by the literature of the display profession and embraced by the press. It is important to note that the display profession was self-congratulatory in nature and advertising language describing the displays was often superlative in tone. Didactic literature implied with certainty that up-to-date displays would yield financial gains. Yet a closer look at the primary material also produces acknowledgment of the challenges and even failures, large and small, of retail architecture, show windows, shop fittings, and sales floors, as new and changing concepts of display were introduced. Fires harmed and even destroyed major establishments, show windows were smashed, and goods depreciated in value due to light damage and mishandling when put out on view in show windows.6 Even though displaymen followed the guidance of advice manuals, and shopfittings suggested a particular set of interactions between salespeople, merchandise, and consumers, the success of the script of display was not guaranteed and sometimes had unintended consequences. For instance, the mechanical Swan and Edgar window display discussed earlier, drew great crowds, marking it as a success, at first. But the magnitude of the crowd was too large and had the adverse effect of blocking the city’s flow, therefore causing the order for the motion of the display, its major element of novelty, to be eliminated. The traffic obstruction caused a failure in the program of the display altogether. Since the department store was constantly in flux, reliant on multiple layers of interaction between objects and people, under the influence of new techniques and technologies, nothing was fixed. Therefore, although the department store can be metaphorically compared to a machine, complete regularization of the reciprocal influences and outcomes of the combinations of its many elements was impossible.7 Shopfitting firms and the professional literature of display made great promises of profit with the implementation of modern tools and strategies. In 1910, one American retailer testified that “store arrangement . . . is the greatest force in modern merchandising” and attributed 40 percent of total sales to effective shop arrangement.8 While the historical record of the business of display is populated with such percentages, little to no evidence has been given as to how these figures were obtained. A  trustworthy, centralized method to test the efficacy of particular display techniques was not fully in place during the turn of the twentieth century period. The formation of the National Retail Dry Goods Association in 1911 and the Retail Research Association in 1916 were two important advances in the accumulation and centralization of data. While periodicals such as System “Miscellaneous City News: A Heavy Fire in Sixth-Avenue,” New York Times, April 13, 1880, 2; “Grogan Loves to Smash Plate Glass Windows,” New York Times, June 5, 1906, 9. 7 Benson, Counter Cultures, 126. 8 C. E. Cake, “Arranging Goods to Make the Shopper Buy,” System 18 (December 1910), 590, quoted in Benson, Counter Cultures, 43–4. 6

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and the Dry Goods Economist sponsored trials and surveys, the retrieval of reliable quantitative measurement was still difficult due to the interconnected nature of the department stores’ design elements and the variation between stores. Shopfitters and stores were quick to cite great numbers of customers as a sign of success, but the crowd itself was not a sure indicator of financial gain and did not translate directly to purchases. For instance, one retail expert warned that mechanical effects “attracted big crowds outside the window but not into the store. The mechanical effect monopolized all the attention and the goods received little notice.”9 Through engagement with the primary literature, these difficulties come to the surface and raise new questions about potential gaps between the reality of the display world and the narrative of progress that the profession itself forwarded. It was not until 1920, under Dr. Norris A. Brisco, first dean of the New York University School of Retailing, that the members of the faculty began a systematic study and evaluation of retailing practices in order to discover and record the principles of successful store operation. A  few decades following, in 1949, the National Association of Display Industries in New York reported on its first efforts to determine the selling effect of the show window. The study conducted store interviews and counted “lookers” versus “passers.”10 Regardless of the accuracy of the quantitative evidence supplied by the display profession itself, it is certain that at the turn of the twentieth century, stores invested more money, time, and personnel in the production of display. The shopfitting industry alongside the display staff worked continuously to devise new methods to attract crowds and influence urban dynamics. In addition, primary sources have revealed that displaymen devised and followed calculated templates and strategies in order to achieve visual impact. The approaches to and styles of display design were recorded and shared in guidebooks and trade periodicals and these instructions were followed by practitioners. Standards and recommendations of store layout, management of the flow of goods, and the best practices of display strategy were systematized, shared, and replicated between cities and across the Atlantic. At the turn of the twentieth century, many of the most important innovations in department store culture can be located within the realm of display design whose significance impacted retail architecture, strengthened the development of merchandising tools and technologies, and formed the focus of a new multifaceted design profession. The architect, shopfitter, window dresser, and interior designer were essential participants in display design and thus in the department stores’ transformation and growth during these years. The methods, materials, and technologies with which Bird, “Window Trimming and Commercial Display,” in Library of Advertising: Show Window Display and Specialty Advertising, vol. 4, ed. A. P. Johnson (Chicago: Cree Pub. Co. , 1911), 50. 10 Iarocci, Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, 6. 9

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these employees worked, accelerated the impact of the visual presentation of merchandise and shaped new meanings for commodities. Displaymen drove a major historical shift in retail practice as the department store’s guiding principles broadened from wealth and variety of stock to include and even prioritize the creative and changeable staging of wares in order to earn and condition the public’s attention and investment. Stores’ commercial imperative was both challenged and complemented by an artistic drive in decoration, and display grew out of this duality. In Chicago, London, and New York, display design was not only significant to the retail realm, but the show windows and sales floor interiors also performed as ever-transforming sites of communication for themes of contemporary culture and current events. Expanding outside of these three cities that steered developments in retail display, larger cross-Atlantic exchange and competition drove the practice’s recognition, industry, and professional growth. There are a number of factors that combined to determine how display achieved an unprecedented level of influence during these years:  the architectural profession’s clever responses to the needs of display in terms of building configurations and new technologies; the expertise of a new professional class of designers who made the displays into a fluctuating and eye-catching feature of the store; the adaptability of the shopfitting industry that provided the tools and technologies for the displays to develop; and the fascination of consumers who became attuned to the production value of this increasingly sophisticated form of advertisement and retail identity. Architects responded to the needs of display by managing construction and planning spaces on behalf of the presentation and movement of goods while considering the user of the building specifically as a consumer in relationship to those goods. The show window dominated the façade. Architects provided tiered atriums, open sales floors, and ample natural light for the viewing of merchandise. A program of continual construction communicated that the department store was ever adapting to offer a modern experience. The structural framework of the store adapted to the temporary and variable nature of the wares it sold. Working with the vast dimensions and up-to-date technologies that the architect provided to amplify the visual impression of merchandise arrangements, the displaymen diversified the potential of display to attract customers and transform commodities, particularly in the show window. From sculptural handmade groupings in the show window to carefully configured ensemble displays that filled the stores’ interior sales floors, the creative work of these men made display into a key factor of department store identity by which consumers compared stores. Shopfitters provided the displaymen with a supply of fit-to-purpose fixtures that made wares increasingly visible and covetable. Under the influence of Taylorist principles, the sales floor, from the ground level to the upper tiers, was optimally fitted with fixtures and casework for the dynamic

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presentation of merchandise. These shopfittings were serially produced commodities in their own right, standardized for use with particular sets of merchandise and then positioned by displaymen to function in particular merchandising contexts. Due to the increased use of fixtures and technologies, the department store became a technical space in which the agency of these objects eased, and even replaced, the tasks of the salespeople. In addition, while shopfittings were designed to give the consumer seemingly boundless choice, a closer look at the shopfittings and their placement reveals the calculated nature of the displays that drove consumer vision and movement. A history of design approach has opened up the department store’s material and visual connections to the city, theater, interior design, advertising, international expositions, modern art, and more. All of these cultural and artistic institutions and events share with the department store a transitory and variable nature that helped to define their modernity. The department store was a dynamic environment of transition as everyday wares were transformed into commodities and passersby became consumers. Displaymen aimed to stay “wide-awake” to trends, new strategies, and technologies. Architecture, interior layouts, and the arrangements of goods themselves were continually reevaluated and reconfigured to garner consumer acclaim. All together, display design showed off display talents, registered the energy of the surrounding city, and increased store profits. With knowledge of color theory, style, and decorative arts history, as well as an intimate familiarity with the store’s own stock, the interior decoration staff repeatedly received credit at the turn of the twentieth century for uplifting the taste of the public and expanding consumers’ knowledge on design. Marshall Field claimed, “I have often thought of the esthetic influence of such a store and have wondered if there is any institution in Chicago, whether commercial or artistic, that has done so much to develop the taste of the public.”11 Stores considered this educational mission as key to their impact as a cultural institution, proving, as Wanamaker’s explained, that department stores have always been “more than a mart for buying and selling.”12 With display as a focus, the parameters of the material culture of the department store expand beyond the merchandise to include plate glass windows, brass display fixtures, mannequins, lighting technologies, window display backboards, casework, interior architectural elements, and more. Stores themselves performed an extensive examination of the many design elements of the department store, from large to small, and considered their combined impression as an advertising tool. As one Chicago business magazine encouraged in 1906, “Formal Opening of a Great Store,” 15, 03052 (29), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. 12 John Wanamaker, Joseph H. Appel, and Leigh Mitchell Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores: Jubilee Year, 1861–1911 (Philadelphia, PA: John Wanamaker, 1911), 300. 11

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Window display, fine fixtures, and decorations inside of the store are really advertising as much as outside signs or display ads in newspapers. The extra coat of paint on the store front or delivery wagon is intended to attract attention, and to remind the public that the owner is prospering, and therefore quite logically deserving of more prosperity and patronage.13 As the department stores broadened their scope of advertising from just merchandise to include architecture and display design, consumers took notice. Never before this turn of the twentieth century period had the retail sphere made such great investment in terms of cost, time, and creative energy toward its visual presentation to the public and the messages that it contained. Never before this time period had the public paid such close attention. Attractive and smart display conveyed up-to-date merchandise as well as financial stability, cutting edge business practice, and an awareness of contemporary trends in fashion, art, and design. Considering such elements as the façade of the store, electrical lighting, the layout of departments, and the casework broadens the ways in which we can explore the environment designed for the merchandise. Display’s multifaceted program of architecture, shopfittings, show windows, and interior design provides new contexts from which to draw a much more nuanced picture of how the department store both shapes and reflects modernity. The production, appearance, and experience of department store display exemplify fragmentation, variation, speed, rationalization, and theatricality. Fragmentation and variation were present in the piecemeal construction of the department store, the division of merchandise, its selling spaces, its distinct fixtures, and the eclectic nature of the interior layout and its various thematic presentations. Speed was the motivator in the wide-awake nature of the display profession and its keeping pace with trends in art and architecture in terms of styles, technologies, and new materials. A swift momentum also drove the communication of display styles and strategies within the profession as well as its promotion to the public. Scientific approaches and rationalization prompted stratification of the retail interior, the specialization of the sales staff, and the optimization of the sales floor. Meanwhile, the overall presentation of the department store embraced theatricality and spectacularized the everyday, seen most overtly in the ample use of plate glass and displays that amplified the visual impact of commodities with mechanics and lighting. This display history has shaped new lines of thinking around the department store as a site of design production. Elaborately folding textiles, painting backboards, hanging lighting, and arranging fixtures were some of the many calculated yet creative processes of the display design process.

Hubert F. Miller, “A Nation of Shopkeepers,” Chicago, The Great Central Market: A Magazine of Business 3 (1906): 41. 13

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Ongoing building construction, continual reinvention of window and interior displays, and the recurring fabrication of new contexts for commodities all contributed to an active program of design creation in the department store. In all of these aspects of display production, the assets of imagination and creativity were tempered by the business goals of rationalization and diversification. The window display space and sales floor should be recognized as stages for the building and acting out of professional skill, which displaymen documented, disseminated, and commemorated. The ephemera of the history of display in the form of guidebooks and retail periodicals has produced new insight into the complexity of the display moment in the life of the commodity. At the same time, an in-depth review of department store ephemera has produced a better understanding of display practices shared between the cities of Chicago, London, and New York. The identification, isolation, and evaluation of these display moments have revealed the diversity, multiplicity, and speed that characterized mediation in the department store. A poetic narration, “written after a tour, for the first time, through Marshall Field & Company’s Retail Store,” leads off the store’s pamphlet A Store of Service published in about 1920. The narrator enumerates a litany of individual features, including exotic merchandise, showrooms and salons, and tearooms and observes many of these elements coming together as an assemblage: “the world condensed—its sciences, arts and crafts interwoven into a wonderful tapestry called ‘Merchandise.’ ”14 This narrator then brings this description alive by perceiving a compelling sense of speed and motion that energized the shopping environment. Shaping an overall picture of the department store, the narrative continues, “In the vast spaces illusion transformed a stream of shoppers into a trickle of trade. Yet there was left no sense of size, for the mass had unfolded into so many gorgeous particles.”15 While this narrative began with a clear list of distinctly designed parts, from casework to architectural elements and lighting fixtures to decorative swags, once set into motion, the rhythm of the department store achieved such speed that the distinctions could no longer be identified. The “stream of shoppers” and the “trickle of trade” or the interactions of goods and people through the space were so accelerated and integrated with the department store’s program of display, which by its nature was constantly expanding and revolutionizing itself, that nothing solid or permanent remained. Thus, a new picture of the department store has emerged that places display at the center of an ever-evolving, contradictory, complex, yet distinctly designed modern experience.

Marshall Field & Company, The Store of Service: Marshall Field & Co. (Chicago, IL: Marshall Field & Company, 1920), 2. 15 Ibid. 14

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Collections Abraham & Straus Collection, Brooklyn Historical Society, New York. The Architecture of Shopping Project. English Heritage (now Historic England), Swindon, England. British Display Society Records, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. Harris & Sheldon Archive, Harris & Sheldon Group, Ltd., Coventry, England. Harrods Archive, Harrods Corporate Affairs, London. House of Fraser Archive, University of Glasgow (contains Records of D. H. Evans & Co., Ltd., Derry & Tom’s, Dickins and Jones, John Barker & Co., and Ponting Brothers), Glasgow, Scotland. John Lewis Partnership Archives, Cookham, England. John Wanamaker Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia. Macy’s Archive, Macy’s, Brooklyn, New York. Mandel Family Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago. Messmore & Damon Company Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Nancy McClelland Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Natural History Museum Archives, London. Records of the Companies Registration Office, National Archives, London. Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives, London. Records of William Whiteley Department Store, Westminster City Archives, London. Sambourne Family Archive, 18 Stafford Terrace, London. Sullivaniana Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. William L. Bird Holidays on Display Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Original Works of Art Abraham & Straus. Model of Abraham & Straus Department Store, color lithograph on paper, ca. 1894, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

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189

INDEX

A. T. Stewart’s 7, 32–5 A. W. Shaw & Co. 117–18 Abraham & Straus 1, 8–9, 26, 83 design of retail environment 1 interior imagery 3 model department store 1–4 optical engagement 3 promotion 1, 3 advertisements 8, 15, 24, 26, 58, 92, 110, 139 for consumer goods 99 newspaper 9, 159 on postcards and pamphlets 123 retail periodicals 65 signage 8, 72 statistics 41 theory 1, 65 Anglo-Italian palazzo style 33 Appel, Joseph 107 architects 5–6, 23, 168 arc lighting 6 artistic influence 6, 10, 21, 32, 57, 64–5, 120, 138 The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors 64 Arundell Display School of Window Decoration 66 Astor Place 43 Austin Reed 93 B. Altman 26, 55, 157–8 Banham, Reyner 86 Barker’s 7, 41, 52 Baum, Frank L. 58, 63–4, 85, 89 behind-the-scenes equipment and technology 50–5 Benjamin, Walter 21 Besthoff, Sam J. 86 Bird, Thomas A. 9, 15

Bon Marché Liverpool 75, 136, 137 Bonwit Teller 26 Boston Store 42 Botanical Decorating Company 135 branded merchandise 163 Brass Fitting Workshop 99 brass stands 122 British Association of Display Men 8, 63, 65–6 British Museum 39 Broadway 8, 24, 32, 122 Brooklyn Bridge 5, 8, 84, 86, 94 Burnham, Daniel 11 Butler Way Window Trimmer 64 Carr, Frank L. 72–3, 84 Carson Pirie Scott and Company Store 7, 36, 42, 109–10, 125 casework 21, 99–102, 112, 120 glass-walled 19, 42, 128 cast iron columns 33, 35 Cast Iron Palace 32, 35, 153 cast iron storefronts 6 Central Line, London 7 changeable design of the storefront 30–43 Charles A. Stevens & Bros. 42 Charles F. & E. Biele 122 Chase, Joseph Cummings 164 Chicago Association of Commerce 42 Chicago City Council 10 Chicago Daily News 74 Claes & Lehnbeuter Manufacturing Co. 120–1 classicism 30, 33, 36, 106, 139 Cole, George S. 9, 57, 67, 81, 86 color 37 lights 68, 93 scheme 37, 44, 46, 135, 153

190

190

index

commercial artist 14 competition 11 architectural display 43–9 for consumers 85 window display 85, 98 A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods 59, 86 congratulatory correspondence 12 construction and renovation 23–30 consumerism 15, 58 cotton goods 81 Crystal Palace 37, 41, 143–4 cubism 96 D. H. Evans Department Store 7, 23, 32, 44–5, 137 Daily Mail Ideal Home exhibitions 155 Dana, John Cotton 119 decoration events 133 department store culture 15 geographical and historical context 5–12 history 13–22 interior 6, 126–7 perception 6, 36 stylistic development and impact 13 design duplication 141 innovation 5, 13, 49, 88, 167 process 58, 69, 72, 78, 170 production 13, 19, 26, 35, 54 Detroit Showcase Company 12, 99 Dickie, Edward P. 40 Display 18, 63 displaymen 5, 6, 14, 63–4, 164, 165 role of 164 skill and artistry 16 training 10 displays 8–10, 59, 70 see also window displays artistically effective 6 behind-the-scenes construction process 13, 67–74 creativity and efficiency 3 mechanical 72, 90 product categories 6 Drapers Record 65 Dry Goods Economist 10, 27, 60, 63, 94, 96–7

Economist Training School 94 education Arundell Display School of Window Decoration 66 International Correspondence School 65, 69, 81, 136 Koester School 65 London School of Modern Window Display 66 Premier School of Window Dressing 66 textbooks 65, 69, 74, 81–2 Ehrich Brothers 88 exhibition culture shopfitting industry and 119–24 factory spaces 99 the Fair 42 fashion intermediaries 16 Feast of Seasons 138 female consumer 14, 62, 77 Fifth Avenue, New York 26, 153 Fischer, Albert 87 fixture-carrying floor 72 Fowler, Nathaniel C., Jr. 20, 84 Fraser, Arthur 131 Frederick Sage Co Ltd. 106, 120, 123–4, 128 French, Daniel Chester 141 gender 14, 60, 62, 159, 160 Getting behind the Retail Business 106 Gibbons, Herbert Adams 111 Giedion, Sigfried 37 Gimbel Brothers 11, 119, 150 Godinez, Francisco Laurent 93 Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores 133, 153 Goldsman, E. N. 63, 65 Grand Rapids Showcase Company 101, 103 guidebooks 10, 14, 20, 54, 61, 64, 68– 70, 74, 77, 96, 115, 135, 142–3, 163, 167, 171 Hammon Publishing Company 29, 53, 127, 146 The Handbook of Window Display 9 handkerchiefs 18, 67, 74–5, 84, 86, 109, 111

191

index

Harris, Sydney 122 Harris & Sheldon 80, 97, 99, 113–4, 123, 128 all-brass Stand 103, 105 cheap counter and counter case 128 Harrodian Gazette 26 Harrods 7, 26, 50, 106–7, 125 Hillman’s 42 holiday calendar 133 Christmas 75, 135 Easter 133 seasonal 133 House Palatial 153, 155–6 Hugh Lyons & Company 21 impermanence 6, 16, 165 impulse goods 111 individual creativity 67, 135, 171 industrial designers 14, 18, 163–5 Inland Architect and News Record 37 interiors 151–2 Great Decoration Event 138–41 imagery 3 model room 151–6, 160–1 professional development 157–61 sales floors 131 seasonality 133–8 virtual travel via display 141–51 interior decoration 8, 31, 106, 131, 136, 151, 153, 157, 160, 169 International Association of Displaymen 131 International Correspondence Schools 65, 69, 81, 136 J. H. Wilson Marriot 115, 116 J. R. Palmenberg’s Sons 120 Jamestown Exposition 60 John Barker & Co., Ltd. 52, 104, 127, 158 Jungblut, A. W. 68 Katz, E. 83 Kellum, John 33 Koerber, Jerome 133 Kracauer, Siegfried 76, 109

191

Lady Guide Association 7 Lamb, Jackie 79 Larkin, W. F. 60 Lewis, John 76 Liberty Bell 5, 86 lighting 40–41, 50, 58, 62, 67, 70, 91, 93, 143 Lit Brothers 11 London County Council 32 London Illustrated News 98 Lord & Taylor 8, 11, 24, 41, 72, 128 Luxfer Prism Company 40 Macy’s 8, 23, 27, 51, 70, 88 Mandel Brothers 7, 27–8, 38, 145 mannequins 6, 72, 77, 78. 79, 90, 147, 169 Maple & Co. 161 Marble Palace 32–3 Marshall Field & Co. 6, 10, 11–13, 16, 23, 30, 32, 42, 51, 66, 70, 74, 92, 126–7, 138, 140, 145, 169 displays 74, 131, 141 Feast of the Seasons 139 French Lingerie and Domestic Lingerie Departments 147–8 monumental building 16 Marx, Karl 18 mass ornament 76, 109 McMahon, Patrick H. 86 mechanical industrialization 37 Messmore and Damon, Inc. 135 Metropolitan Museum of Art 164 “The Model Department Store” 1 retail format 3 model room 151–6 Morford, Wallace 89 Mosser’s Button Exhibitor 110 Mumford, Lewis 36 Murray, John 44 museums British Museum 39 Natural History Museum, London 123 Newark Museum 119 Victoria & Albert Museum 38, 66 Zoological Museum at Tring 124

192

192

index

National Association of Window Trimmers 8, 61, 63 National Cash Register Company 60 National Commercial Fixtures Manufacturers Association 12 Natural History Museum, London 123 Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows 115 Nelson, George 18 Nelson, William 9 Newark Museum 119 New York Tribune 81, 149 Norwich Nickel and Brass Works 73 open window dressing 68 Osthaus, Karl Ernst 38, 94 Oxford Street, London 8, 10, 23–4, 48 pamphlets 6, 14–15, 123, 156 patented innovations 70, 81, 87 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 119–120, 145 Philadelphia Storage Battery Company 164 Piccadilly Circus 7, 43, 89–90 “picture-building” mode 85 plate glass windows 6, 37, 39–42 Ponting’s 103 postcard 6, 14–16, 29, 48–9, 52, 54, 92, 112, 127, 132, 145–6, 152 Premier School of Window Dressing 66 professional development 13, 63, 67, 157 interiors 157–61 ready-to-wear garments 79 promotional training 164 publicity departments 103 public transportation 7, 43 purpose-built retail architecture 29, 50 Putnam, S. A. Brock 125 ready-to-wear garments 79 retail architecture architectural display as competition 43–9 changeable design of storefront 30–43 construction and renovation 23–30

development 11 retail format 3 technical scope 49–55 Retail Dry Goods Association 8, 166 retaillier 114 retail strategists 131 Revolving Show Stand 87 Romance of Commerce 43, 66 Rooney, George 9 rotating fixtures 6, 87, 160 Rothschild’s 342, 124 rug-flipping fixture 117 Sage, Frederick 123–4 sales-floor decoration 31, 108, 133–6, 138–41 salesperson 21, 62, 99, 110–112, 117, 130 Santa Maria della Salute, Venice 5 Schlesinger and Mayer 7, 24–5, 37, 50 seasonality 133–8 self-fashioning 79 Selfridge, Harry Gordon 44, 49, 66 Selfridge’s 7, 11, 23, 44, 46, 59, 68, 128 postcard 49 Selling Service with the Goods 10, 96 Sesquicentennial Exposition 11 Sheldon, John 122 shopfitters 21, 22, 98–9, 102, 110 shopfittings 8, 19, 21, 97–9, 103, 106, 107 from density to openness 124–30 and exhibition culture 119–24 science of shopkeeping 108–19 silent salesmanship 99–108 stylistic cohesion 106 shopkeeping, science of 108–19 shopping 3, 7–10, 42–3, 79, 125, 137 as leisure activity 3, 92–3 Shorter, R. W. 93 The Show Window 8–11, 26, 39, 42, 52, 54, 57, 59, 61, 67 Show Window Construction Patent 70 Siegel, Henry 141 Siegel Cooper & Co. 42, 50–2, 63, 97, 133, 141–4 coin purse 143 interior of 144 silent salesmanship 99–109

193

index

Simmel, Georg 19 Smith, Charles Manby 108 St. Louis Exposition 129–30 stands attenuated metal stands 108 brass stands 122 rotating stands 6 State Street 8 statuary 79, 139, 141–3 stocky window 20, 75 Strawbridge and Clothier 11, 50 subways 7, 43 Sullivan, Louis 24, 36–7, 50, 125 Swan and Edgar 7, 43, 89, 90, 91, 166 window displays 89–91 tailoring 114, 149 Taylorist scientific management 63, 108–10 A Textbook on Mercantile Decoration 78, 132, 133 textile display 60–1, 74, 77–9, 81–4, 115, 117, 132, 136 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 12, 23, 138 Tiller Girls 76 Timmons, G. L. 151 trading card 58 unit principle 93–6 urban modernity 3, 27 utilities 52, 161 V. O. Hammon Publishing Company 53, 127, 146 variability of fashion 5, 42, 78–9, 81, 106 Victoria & Albert Museum 38, 66 virtual travel via display 141–51 visual merchandising 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 23, 150 W. B. McLean Manufacturing Co. 114, 119 Waagen, G. F. 146–7 Wanamaker, John 11, 35, 42, 50, 66, 108, 136, 149, 156, 159 Burlington Arcade 149, 150 Wanamaker, Rodman 156

193

Waxman, Frances 29, 125 Welch-Wilmarth Company 101 Westbourne Grove 8, 47 Whiteley’s 7, 11–12, 46–8, 70, 125–6, 157 White Sale 136–7 Whitely, William 46–8 “wide-awake” to trends 5, 72, 94, 169 Wide-Awake Window Dresser 72–3, 84, 114 window displays 8–10, 20, 30, 39–40, 42, 57–9, 138–9, 164 see also displays consumer attention to 9–10, 18, 58, 67–8, 88, 91, 94, 96 designs 10, 20, 40, 57, 77, 91, 96, 125 draping techniques and the female gaze 77–80 machineries 87–93 making 67–75 professional development 58–67 sculptural style 81–7 stocky style 75–7 unit principle 93–6 window dressers 5–6, 19, 50, 57–9, 61–2, 65, 67, 70, 74, 77, 81, 84–5, 94, 114 window dressing 32, 44, 54, 57, 59–68, 81, 85, 96 Window Dressing and General Trade Review (WDGTR) 64 window gazers 58 Window Motor Co. 89 window trimming 9, 15, 61, 65, 68, 99, 131–2, 167 Wire Working Shops 79–80, 99 World’s Columbian Exposition 11, 16, 25, 86–7, 120, 123, 136, 141 world’s fair Crystal Palace 37, 41, 143–4 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 119, 145 St. Louis World’s Fair 141 World’s Columbian Exposition 11, 16, 25, 86, 87, 120 123, 139, 141 Yukon-Pacific Exposition 60 Zoological Museum at Tring 124

194

195

196

Plate 1  Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (exterior), ca. 1894.

1

Plate 2  Abraham & Straus, The Model Department Store (interior, flattened), ca. 1894. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.

2

3

Plate 3  Suhling & Koehn Co., Postcard, “Greetings from Chicago,” postmarked June 8, 1907. Courtesy Cardcow.com.

4



Plate 4  Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Marshall Field & Co.’s Store,” postmarked May 1, 1906.

5



Plate 5  William Whiteley, Limited, Westbourne Grove Premises, view ca. 1873 in William Whiteley Limited Illustrated Furnishing Catalogue, 1900, endpaper. Records of William Whiteley Department Store, 726/57. Courtesy City of Westminster Archives Centre.

6



Plate 6  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Substructure of Marshall Field & Co.’s Retail Store, Chicago,” ca. 1910. Courtesy of Newberry Library, Chicago, VO1468.

7



Plate 7  “Window Decorated with Napkins, Doylies, or Handkerchiefs. By Mr. E. Katz,” The Show Window, December 1899, supplement, 87. Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

8



Plate 8  Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, State St. Looking South, Chicago,” ca. 1915. Author’s collection.

9



Plate 9  J. H. Wilson Marriott, Advertisement, in J. H. Wilson Marriott, Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows (Baltimore, MD: Show Window Publishing Company, 1889), n.p. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

10



Plate 10  Centennial Premium Case in Claes & Lehnbeuter Manufacturing Co., New Illustrated Catalogue (St. Louis, MO: Claes & Lehnbeuter, 1887), 22. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington DC.

11



Plate 11  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “Marshall Field & Company, Retail Store, State Street Aisle, One Block Long,” ca. 1908. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, G82.

12



Plate 12  Cheap Counter and Counter Case List in Harris & Sheldon, Illustrated Price List (Birmingham: Harris & Sheldon, 1890), 82. Courtesy Harris & Sheldon, Ltd.

13



Plate 13­  Cover, Marshall Field & Co., An Interpretation of the Feast of the Seasons, 1907, 03052 (28), Federated Department Stores’ Records of Marshall Field & Company. Courtesy Chicago History Museum, ICHi-79030.

14



Plate 14  Siegel Cooper & Co., Coin Purse, 1896–1917, leather, paper, metal, celluloid, 2 1/2 × 2 5/8 × 1/2 in. Gift of Bella C. Landauer, 2002.1.4813. New York Historical Society.

15



Plate 15  V. O. Hammon Publishing Company, Postcard, “A Portion of the Rug Department, Marshall Field & Co., Retail, Chicago,” ca. 1910. Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago, VO1997.

16



Plate 16  Louis XV Drawing Room, House Palatial, New Wanamaker Building, New York, in John Wanamaker, Joseph H. Appel, and Leigh Mitchell Hodges, Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores (Philadelphia, PA: John Wanamaker, 1911), 283. Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library.