grew department by department, taking over neighbor-
ing properties to house the expanding businesses, until it
was necessary to provide a new building or reface the ex-
isting ones to provide coherence. Department store pio-
neer William Whiteley famously boasted that he sold
“everything from a pin to an elephant.” The system
worked on a basis of low margins and high turnover.
The stores were certainly a place for the sale of mass-
produced goods and have been associated with the rise
of ready-to-wear clothing. However, most stores contin-
ued to provide traditional tailoring and drapery well into
the twentieth century. The diversity of stock was matched
by an array of amenities and entertainments, including
banks, restaurants, travel agents, fashion shows and live
music, and services such as free delivery and alteration of
garments.
Store histories are entwined with those of their own-
ing dynasties, who usually gave their name to their stores,
for example, the Wertheims and Schockens in Germany
and the Lewises in England. Stores often merged with or
were taken over by other stores, for example, the evolv-
ing nature of Britain’s House of Fraser described by Moss
and Turton. The business was organized in a hierarchi-
cal, rational, and paternalistic manner. Strict control of
the workforce was balanced with benefits such as health-
care, pensions, and social clubs. Indeed during the early
days many of the employees lived in the upper stories of
the building. This practice faded out following several
high profile, devastating fires caused by gas lighting and
poor fire-proofing of buildings. The stores required vast
staffs; for example, Harrods of London had 4,000 em-
ployees in 1914. For nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-
tury social commentators and novelists, the figure of the
young female shop assistant symbolized the dubious re-
spectability, moral ambiguity, and blurring of class bound-
aries they found so disturbing about the department store.
However, until the interwar period, the majority of em-
ployees were actually male and lower middle class. Posi-
tions were sought after, although salaries were low.
Customers and a New Kind of Shopping
From the beginning, the department store was associated
with bourgeois consumers. As Miller has argued, “The
department store was . . . a bourgeois celebration, an ex-
pression of what its culture stood for and where it had
come over the past century” (Miller, p. 3). It was also ini-
tially seen as the exclusive province of women. The stores’
provision of basic amenities such as lavatories and re-
freshment rooms made a day trip to town newly accessi-
ble for suburban and provincial middle-class women,
enabling them to take advantage of improved public
transport networks. Early department store owners, such
as William Whiteley of Bayswater in London, were vo-
cal in their claims to make shopping in the city a safe and
respectable activity for unchaperoned women (Rappa-
port). However, they also attempted to exploit feminine
desires using new ideas about consumer psychology.
The distinctiveness of the department store model
lay as much in the presentation of shopping as a plea-
surable leisure activity as with the nature or number of
goods available. Previously, shopping models had
largely favored counter service and the acknowledgment
of an obligation to buy once the shop was entered. In
the new stores, the role of the retail staff was redefined
and a different kind of shopping was encouraged, char-
acterized by window shopping and browsing through
displays of goods with fixed and ticketed prices. These
practices drew on the cultures of the international ex-
hibitions that followed London’s Great Exhibition of
1851. All this, it was believed, would encourage impulse
buying.
During the early twentieth century, department
stores began to cater to men with dedicated departments.
In 1936 Simpson Piccadilly opened in London’s West
End, claiming to be the first department store entirely
for men. The lower ground floor alone was designed to
house a barber’s shop, soda fountain, gun shop, shoe
shop, chemists, florist, fishing shop, wine and spirit shop,
luggage shop, snack bar, dog shop, sports shop, cigar and
tobacconists, gift shop, saddlery shop, theater agent, and
travel agent. During the opening months the aviation de-
partment even exhibited full-sized airplanes. The open-
ing of the store coincided with new ideas about
masculinity, which allowed for the adoption of shopping
methods previously labeled feminine. The Lady (7 May
1936) commented on this, “It is amusing to find that the
man’s shop is designed and set out with all the allure of
one devoted to women’s luxuries. Shopkeepers, evidently,
do not share that masculine theory that a man always
knows just what he wants and so is immune from display
or advertisement.”
Design, Display, and Advertising
Zola called the department stores “cathedrals of com-
merce” and they were certainly associated with lavish,
striking, and fashionable architecture, acting as an adver-
tisement for the goods inside. Famous and innovative ar-
chitects were often employed: Victor Horta designed
Innovation in Brussels (1901), Louis Sullivan designed
Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago (1899–1904), and Erich
Mendelsohn designed the Schocken store in Stuttgart
(1926-1928). The Scotsman commented on the opening
of Simpson Piccadilly in London designed by the mod-
ernist architect Joseph Emberton, “the building is an ex-
pression in every way of the modern spirit” (4 May 1936).
But the buildings were not just fashionable shells. The
latest technological advances were used to assist the re-
tail process. Iron then steel frames created vast uninter-
rupted expanses of floor space and plate glass technology
facilitated story-high bands of display windows flanking
the shopping street. Inside, escalators and lifts were in-
stalled, helping to sustain a continuous flow of customers
between the street and the upper echelons of the build-
ing. Pneumatic tube systems were provided for commu-
DEPARTMENT STORE
362
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CLOTHING AND FASHION
69134-ECF-D_333-390.qxd 8/16/2004 2:36 PM Page 362