Looking back Department stores
AS JANUARY SALES HIT FULL SWING, WE CELEBRATE THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE DEPARTMENT STORE, WHICH CHANGED THE WAY WE SHOPPED AND SOCIALISED FOR GOOD
“In their heyday, stores delivered wonder, as well as goods”
Once the proud focus of the high street, department stores are having a hard time of things, with each week seemingly bringing new woe for the likes of House of Fraser and Debenhams. It’s especially sad when you remember their heyday, when they were considered shops, yes, but also places of entertainment, delivering wonder and delights as well as goods.
But what was the first department store? “There’s a lot of debate”, says Jon Stobart, professor of history at Manchester Metropolitan University. “Bon Marché in Paris was the most famous but both Kendal Milne & Faulkner of Manchester and Bainbridge of Newcastle can claim to be established earlier. A lot depends on precisely how you define department stores. It wasn’t a term that English shops often used to describe themselves before the 1930s.” The likes of Harding, Howell & Co’s Grand Fashionable Magazine, opened in London in 1796, with four ‘departments’: furs and fans, haberdashery, jewellery and clocks, and millinery. The popularity of such stores exploded in the second half of the 19th century, growing along with the increasing purses of the expanding middle class.
THE NEW SHOPPERS
For women, these stores were liberating. Previously mostly restricted to the home, those who could afford it could shop and socialise in them safely. Increased public transportation, such as the opening of the London Underground in 1863, meant greater mobility. This didn’t go uncriticised: the female customers were satirised as insatiable shoppers, bringing their husbands to ruin. This new breed of store was also unpopular with other shopkeepers who accused them of putting them out of business. You can understand why, given what was now being sold under one roof. In 1870, Debenham & Freebody’s boasted 27 departments, including parasols, India outfits, ribbons, trimmings and fancy goods – just one of the new stores that sprang up in London over that period, along with Whiteley’s, Liberty and Harrods.
LUXURY FOR ALL
It became apparent that British ‘pile ’em high’ techniques could use some of Le Bon Marché’s French flair. By the end of the 19th century, stores were being purpose built, with large windows for displays, rich wooden shop fittings, luscious carpets and innovations, such as Britain’s first known lift, installed in Glasgow’s Wylie & Lochhead store in 1855. When Harrods introduced the first escalator in 1898, an assistant doled out smelling salts and cognac to shaken customers. The stores introduced selling innovations, too, such as clearly visible price tags and the open display of goods. And Stobart describes how Fenwick in Newcastle pioneered what they called ‘the silent assistant’ – shop assistants who only spoke to customers when asked questions, rather than ‘pushing’ goods »
“Visible price tags and open displays helped to democratise luxury”
onto them. “It might be said that department stores helped to democratise luxury,” he argues.
Women’s clubs developed during the same period, as somewhere respectable women could go for rest, refreshment and to meet their friends in town. Canny department stores mimicked their amenities. In 1909, Harrods extolled the virtues of its “elegant and restful waiting and retiring rooms for both sexes, writing rooms with dainty stationery, club room, fitting rooms, smoking rooms, a post office, theatre ticket office, railway and steamer ticket and tourist office, appointment board where one can leave notes for friends, a circulating library and music room”. They also offered entertainment with in-store fashion shows, string quartets and lavish window displays.
A DAY AT SELFRIDGES
In 1909, Selfridges opened bringing US selling slick to the UK. Its founder, Harry Gordon Selfridge, understood the value of both novelty and publicity and pitched visiting his store as a pastime. From delights such as an ice-cream soda fountain to the promise of a “rest cure” in the ‘Silence Room’, every visitor need was anticipated. “I want them to enjoy the warmth and the light, the colours and styles, the feel of fine fabrics,” Selfridge stated. “That is the basis of this business.” His philosophy was underpinned by solid selling, the first in the UK to site cosmetics by the entrance and to open a bargain basement. By the 1920s, Selfridges had expanded into 19 stores.
Other stores were doing the same. By the 1930s, there were more than 600 department stores in towns and cities across Britain. According to the Mass Observation survey, women preferred them to independent clothes shops because of the lack of aggressive, commission-driven assistants. More household gadgets, meant that the housewife’s leisure time increased, too, and department stores catered to that need. Teresa Collenette, co-curator of the Fashion and Textile Museum’s ‘Night and Day: 1930s Fashion and Photographs’ exhibition explains: “A housewife could happily spend her day shopping in town before her children
returned from school.” It offered escapism too. “For the 1930s woman beset by anxieties including increasingly restricted finances and changing social status, department stores offered a form of entertainment akin to dancing or going to the movies,” says Collenette. The 1936 novel The New House by Lettice Cooper captures the thrill of shopping in such a department store, where “the small doings of your everyday life, smoking a cigarette or powdering your face, were surrounded with luxury and grace.”
WHAT FUTURE IS IN STORE?
New stores captured the modern spirit: Peter Jones (now John Lewis) in London’s Sloane Square, built in the first half of the 1930s, is a good example. They continued to adapt post-war, too, to cater to the increased spending power of the working class, and department stores’ share of retail sales probably peaked in the 1950s, at about 15% of total sales. Debenhams introduced self-service to replace the possibly intimidating counters. And, come the youthquake of the 60s, they attempted to lure younger consumers: Bentall’s of Kingston innovated in introducing departments selling clothes for teens, while the first Miss Selfridge shop was opened by Selfridges in 1966. In more recent times, however, it has perhaps felt that they’ve lost their magic and – given their role as high-street hubs – their closures leave large holes to fill. There are exceptions, however: like the thoroughly contemporary Selfridges building in Birmingham, designed by renowned architects Future Systems and completed in 2003. The best department stores, according to Cate Trotter, head of trends at future retail consultants Insider Trends (insider-trends.com), are those who can blend on and offline experiences. Nordstrom, in the States, for example, had great success opening local stores, 2% the space of its main stores, where goods can be ordered into and sampled before being taken home, and offering services such as personal shopping. “There’s no reason that there can’t be one of this kind of shop on every high street,” Trotter believes. Then the big stores can focus instead on providing a “slow, rich experience that makes them a real hub”. Places to go and marvel, wonder, meet friends and be entertained. And maybe pick up a nice new frock while you’re at it.