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Buying clothes has never been a simple pleasure. In recent times we’ve grown familiar with the concept of the ‘brand experience’ – but more than a century ago retailers understood that they had to make shopping an adventure. In his book Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise) Emile Zola presents a lightly fictionalized version of the Bon Marché department store in Paris, which he describes as ‘devoted to consumerism’. The store’s roguish manager, Octave Mouret, unhesitatingly equates shopping with lust. The sight of women scrabbling to get a look at the latest silks leaves him breathless: ‘[They] paled with desire and leaned over as if to see themselves, secretly fearing they would be captivated by such overwhelming luxury and unable to resist the urge to throw themselves in.’ In another scene, he catches one of his salesmen laying out swatches of silk in harmonious gradations of colour, blue next to grey. Mouret pounces on the man, exhorting him to ‘blind them!’ with red, green and yellow. Zola portrays his hero as the best étalagiste – display artist – in the whole of Paris. The year is 1888. Many of the earliest department stores are still open for business today. The Bon Marché, which opened in 1853, is generally accepted to have been the first. Its owner, Aristide Boucicaut – the model for Zola’s central character – was a retail pioneer and marketing visionary. At the beginning of the 19th century, French shopkeepers were still mired in a positively medieval system. Historically, access to trades and professions had been regulated by a system of unions. Traders were required to specialize in a single product or service and could not, legally, branch out into other markets. Firms were passed from father to son, and business was done with regular customers on a one-to-one basis, often by appointment. Clients rarely ventured beyond their local vendors. Prices were not displayed, and bargaining was expected. This meant there was little need for advertising, window displays, or any other form of visual merchandizing.
The system was scrapped in 1790, but for more than 30 years traders stuck tenaciously to the traditional structure. It was only in the 1820s that a new type of boutique, called a magasin des nouveautés, began to appear. Grouping textiles, parasols and other items under one roof, these small shops developed revolutionary techniques like tempting window displays, clearly marked prices and the division of merchandise into aisles. It was in one of these stores that Aristide Boucicaut started his career in 1830. Some 20 years later, he formed a partnership with one Paul Videau to run a more prestigious concern. Located at the corner of Rue de Sèvres and Rue du Bac, it was called Le Bon Marché, or ‘The Good Deal’. Thanks to Boucicaut’s innovations, notably discounting and the rapid rotation of stock, in a few years its profits rose from 450,000 French francs to more than 7 million. At that point, Boucicaut bought out his partner and embarked on an ambition expansion plan. Boucicaut’s idea was to create not merely a ‘shop of novelties’, but a shopping emporium. He brought in none other than Gustave Eiffel to help him build his dream. Eiffel was an expert in manipulating iron and glass, which meant he could construct the huge display windows and open shopping spaces that Boucicaut had in mind. The new, improved Bon Marché store opened in 1870. It was a veritable cathedral of commerce, with light pouring through lofty skylights and departments accessed by swirling staircases. The structure covered 52,800 square metres and eventually employed 3,000 people. The techniques that Boucicaut used to ensnare customers were astonishing in their modernity:
home delivery, reimbursement, seasonal sales, illustrated catalogues and commission for sales staff were just some of the advances he brought to the retail business.
Of course, Le Bon Marché was not alone. In the cities of Europe and America, economic growth driven by industrialization was creating an eager market of consumers, and giant stores were springing up to serve them. In 1862, AT Stewart opened New York’s first department store, straddling an entire city block at Ninth Street and Broadway. Macy’s –originally a smallish haberdashery – expanded in the 1900s to become the world’s largest department store. In 1851 William Whiteley opened a small shop in the unfashionable Bayswater quarter of London. As his business grew, he acquired the shops around it, becoming one of the city’s most successful entrepreneurs. Whiteley was murdered in 1907 by a man who claimed to be his illegitimate son. The department store that bore his name – today a shopping mall – opened in 1912. Six years earlier, an American entrepreneur called Harry Gordon Selfridge had opened his eponymous store in London. Just around the corner, in Regent Street, Liberty was closer in ambience and clientele to today’s Asprey; opened by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in 1875, it catered to a craze for fabric and objets d’art from the Orient. Like Whitely, Liberty gradually acquired neighbouring properties, and his emporium soon became London’s most fashionable shopping venue. For decades, the department store remained an appealing ‘destination’, reflecting Gordon Selfridge’s foresighted philosophy that shopping should be a form of entertainment. Unfortunately, though, the stream of innovations that had originally lured customers into the stores began to dry up, and eventually trickled into nothingness. A century after their creation, the giants began to seem more like dinosaurs. Certainly, they would have looked familiar to Boucicaut and Selfridge. While bright, spirited chain stores such as Topshop began taking cues from high fashion, department stores were bogged down with dull ownbrands and risk-averse buying.
Selfridges was one of the first to break out of the time bubble. It commenced a five-year overhaul in 1994, pulling in a host of cuttingedge brands and refiguring the store to target young, upmarket shoppers. Now it is described as ‘creating lifestyle trends and offering a rather fun and slightly bonkers experience to its consumers’. (‘The Cool Guide’, The Independent, 30 October 2004.) At the time of writing, Harrods –one of the dustiest of the lot – had just hired Susanne Tide-Frater, who previously helped to transform Selfridges, as its creative director, and engaged advertising agency M&C Saatchi to brush the cobwebs from its image. It was pipped at the post by the John Lewis Group, which recently unveiled a £100 million renovation of its flagship Peter Jones store in Sloane Square. On the other side of the Channel, the venerable Galeries Lafayette has opened a far-from-bargain basement space targeting 12-to-25-year-olds. Called Version Originale, it features graffiticovered walls, live DJ sessions, a nail bar, a vintage section and a café. The young, good-looking sales assistants present a sharp contrast to the stern femmes d’un certain age who still preside over the tills upstairs. One UK name that has been linked with fashion since the 1990s is Harvey Nichols, which as well as its Knightsbridge flagship has stores in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Edinburgh. Affectionately known as ‘Harvey Nicks’, championed by the shopping- and Champagne-addicted Edwina and Patsy in the cult sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, the store, notes The Independent, ‘doesn’t sell washing machines or have a self-service cafeteria; 80 per cent of its stock consists of the best fashion from the best designers the world has to offer’. It is also one of the few department stores to back up its positioning with a genuinely striking print advertising campaign, which in recent seasons has resembled a collision between a model’s tear-sheet and a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
Benjamin Harvey opened his linen shop in a terraced house on the corner of London’s Knightsbridge and Sloane Street in 1813. In 1820, the business passed into the hands of his daughter, who went into partnership with a certain Colonel Nichols to sell oriental carpets, silks and luxury goods. The existing Knightsbridge store was opened in the 1880s. Today, the group is owned by Hong Kong-based retail entrepreneur Dickson Poon (www.harveynichols.com).
With its award-winning window displays and tempting array of designer brands, Harvey Nichols is an ideal place to examine the interplay between a department store and its customers.

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