John Galliano: Modernity and Spectaclethey paraded through the rooms, striking attitudes and poses, staging tableaux
vivants as they went.
Dream Worlds: 1852–1900From the opening of the Bon Marché in Paris in 1852, the Louvre in 1855,
Au Printemps in 1865, and La Samaritaine in 1869, department stores, with
their radical new techniques of retail and display, rapidly became theatres of
consumption. Shop windows became astounding sources of display, as did
the goods inside the store, where everyday objects were rearranged by
repetition into sculptural forms of flowers, castles and boats. Displays
included out-of-season flowers, caged live birds and, later in the century,
splashing electric fountains. Electric lighting further galvanized some of these
displays into fairytale scenes. In addition, department stores often drew on
the conventions of theatre and exhibitions to produce orientalist scenes,
including living tableaux of Turkish harems, Cairo markets or Hindu temples,
with live dancers, music and oriental products.^8
InDream Worlds Rosalind Williams describes how, in nineteenth-century
department stores and world fares, the real commercial nature of the
transaction was disguised by the creation of seductive ‘dream worlds’ in which
the consumer lost him or herself in fantasy and reverie. In these displays, the
department stores’ orientalist scenarios promiscuously mingled goods from
different cultures and communities in a fantasy bazaar.^9 Throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century department stores also mobilized the
newest scientific techniques from optics and photography to create ‘cinéoramas,
maréoramas and dioramas to create the illusion not only of travel in exotic
places but also by balloon, above the sea, and to the surface of the moon’.^10
In the same period, Paris hosted a number of International Exhibitions, in
1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900. As in department store display, these
world fairs created the illusion of exotic locations. At the 1900 exhibition in
- Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France, Berkeley, Los Angeles & Oxford, England: University of California Press, 1982. For a
review of the literature on the nineteenth-century French department store see Mica Nava,
‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ in Pasi Falk & Colin
Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications,
London, 1997, pp. 56-91. - Williams, ibid., pp. 66-72.
- Nava, Mica, ‘Modernity’s Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store’ in
Pasi Falk & Colin Campbell (eds), The Shopping Experience, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi:
Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 67.