Mitsukoshi Department Store

This is a 1930 pocket-size visitor guide to the Mitsukoshi department store. The Japanese were slow to develop the idea of the department store but when they did they proved to be innovative and ambitious. In these pages, designed for the western visitor, they promoted a series of refinements not often seen elsewhere. These included a roof garden, a courtesy bus service and an automatic store directory. The business can trace its origin back to 1673 and continues to trade extensively in Japan though its international presence has declined in the last few decades. The colour postcard shows the great atrium at the flagship Tokyo store at Nihonbashi.

W H Smith Decorative Tiles

Newsagents and booksellers for more than 200 years, W H Smith has more than 600 stores on British high streets plus another 700 at airports, train stations and motorway services. In most of these locations it is unchallenged by any competition. Despite its longevity and ubiquity it seems to command little affection on the part of its customers. The shops are fitted out to a rigid and universal formula and the range of products is severely restricted to items that can be reliably sold in large quantities. Harsh lighting, artificial fibre floor coverings and a persistent smell of cleaning products makes for an uncomfortable browsing experience. It’s common to find only a single staffed checkout with a long, slow moving queue from which shoppers can contemplate the generous provision of frequently malfunctioning self-service checkouts. Any staff savings are cancelled out by the need for attendants to sort out all the customer problems. It wasn’t always so – in the inter-war years the business had a reputation for its ornate oak shop fronts (a few of which survive) and decorative pictorial tile panels designed and manufactured by Carter & Co. of Poole. An exhaustive survey of these panels was published in the 2015 Journal of the Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society by Ian M Betts who listed 60 stores where examples can still be seen. The four examples shown here come from the branch in Mostyn Street, Llandudno – the postcard shows a W H Smith store in the right foreground. The present store where these photographs were taken is some half a mile further up Mostyn Street – presumably the tiled panels migrated with the shop to its new location.

Burton – the Tailor of Taste

I can scarcely claim to have ever scaled the heights of fashion but as a typically pretentious adolescent I shared some of the dubious preferences of my contemporaries. A cornerstone of these preferences was a sneering contempt for Burton’s stores and their offer of unearned respectability in the form of made-to-measure suiting to be worn with white nylon shirts and skinny ties. These sartorial opinions were fraught with unconscious snobbery and anxiety about social class boundaries – especially the grey zone that existed where the aspirant working class overlapped with the lower middle class. One of the responsibilities of an art student in the 1960s was the obligation to display a transgressive fashion sense in defiance of middle class conformity. Only a minority with a flair for being ahead of the game fully discharged this duty and most of us took the easy way out by avoiding haircuts, wearing Levi jeans and smoking a lot of hand-rolled cigarettes. No Levi denim rested on Burton shelves, then a Burton customer would probably have been quite satisfied with Lee Coopers, widely despised by denimistas as poor imitations lacking authenticity. 

The Sheffield postcard shows a classic Burton store from the inter-war period when their numbers climbed to a peak of 2,000. A light touch Art Deco flavour lent distinction to a Burton high street box, clearly designed to emulate a flagship cinema in scale and presence. Most of these stores were built for visibility with retail activities confined to the lower floors – the upper floors were let out either as office space or snooker halls, the latter ensuring a steady flow of potential customers past the shop windows. There was an Architect’s Department to implement the house-style and an emphasis on verticality by means of glazing and pilasters on Neo-Georgian or Neo-Classical façades. Portland stone, faience and black granite frontages decorated with elephant-head capitals were topped with ornamental parapets in a subdued Egyptian style. These photographs come from Abergavenny, Weston-Super-Mare and Hull, the last of which is the most extravagant with its black and gold colour scheme. 

Burton is still present on the high street with over 400 stores having painfully adapted to the era of fashion tribalism and designer-labelled casual wear but the best efforts to position itself at the cutting-edge are persistently undermined by the long shadow of Alan Partridge. The original business model of freehold acquisitions has probably supplied the cushion that protected the name from extinction. 

Window Shopping in Brussels

Every city reveals its character in its shop window displays. In Brussels, gluttonous mountains of chocolate and multiple replicas of an incontinent manneken pis keep the tourism economy afloat and the unwary visitor can amass an unrivalled collection of kitsch in return for their hard earned euros. The national obsession with Tintin translates into a range of models of every vehicle to appear in a Tintin story, offered at a price most of us would find easy to resist. It may just be conceivable that a hat could be a holiday souvenir but the price range here (57–410€) makes it unlikely. A comprehensive selection of sharpened blades for every occasion would be a specialist purchase. Which would equally apply to the tempting range of female leisure-wear designed with the latex-fetishist in mind. An unusual gift for that special person in your life.

Au Bon Marché – building the store

Construction of the Bon Marché department store began in 1869 and continued in various stages of expansion until completion in 1887 by which time it occupied 52,800 square metres. The principle architect was Louis-Auguste Boileau (1812-96) with the assistance of structural engineer, Gustave Eiffel. Eiffel was responsible for the internal framework of cast iron and the glazing calculated to provide maximum illumination for the goods on display. An interlinked series of central courts and enormous skylights supported on slender columns projected daylight all the way to the ground floor from which a series of elaborately decorated staircases climbed to the upper galleries providing the customer with an ever mounting sense of theatrical expectation. Boileau designed the outer shell, façades and floor plans. Between them they made an architectural statement that placed the store at the forefront of building technology and symbolised the ambitions of Aristide Boucicaut, the founder. As well as selling floors, provision was made for back office functions, the reception of stock and the packing and dispatch of customer orders. This was the most ambitious master plan for a modern department store anywhere and the concentration on management efficiency, staff supervision and publicity would ensure that Bon Marché would quickly leave its competitors far behind. It would be a store for the emerging age of mass production and the consumer culture that grew up in step with it.



Louis-Auguste Boileau was the founder of an architectural dynasty comprising his son, Louis-Charles Boileau (1837-1914) and grandson, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau (1878-1948) both of whom were involved in subsequent phases of the store’s development. Much confusion exists over which of the elder Boileaus worked alongside Eiffel in the 1870s and a definitive source is not easily found. There is agreement that the grandson, Louis-Hippolyte, was responsible for the second major building on rue de Sèvres in 1920-23 in what is often described as an Art Deco style. There is a hint of the ocean liner about the receding profile and extended curve of the façade but the retention of various Beaux-arts mannerisms dilutes the effect although it does have the merit of relating to the original next door.



The great glass and iron interior was lost when the original store was destroyed by fire in 1915. When rebuilt the exterior was a close relative of the original but the new interior was much more conventional and left nothing of the spectacular original to be seen. There remains a central atrium with smartly clad escalators connecting all the floors. The glossy trim seems in keeping with the corporate values of the present owners, luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH (Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton) with its massive portfolio of aspirational brands. Today’s store seems awkwardly poised between its mass market traditions and the instinctive exclusivity of the present owner. Seriously high-end products can’t be seen alongside price sensitive mass market goods without something being lost. Modern marketing practice has saturated consumers in the rhetoric of exclusivity to the point of nausea but the messages will never go away as long as feeble-minded customers with status anxiety are willing to pay premium prices to associate themselves with luxury labels and buy their way into the basement of dreams.

Au Bon Marché – selling the store

Despite being located far from the Grands Boulevards at the Sèvres-Babylone intersection on the Left Bank, Bon Marché was the pre-eminent Parisian department store for 50 years between 1870 and 1920. It wasn’t the first and it wasn’t necessarily the largest but in volume of business, marketing and innovation it outstripped all rivals. So grand was its reputation that in the English speaking world the name of Bon Marché was routinely co-opted by home-grown retailers to add a little Parisian sophistication to their operations. A further distinction was inspiring Emile Zola’s monumental novel, Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) in which the character of Aristide Boucicaut, founder of Bon Marché is the basis for Octave Mouret, hot-blooded proprietor of Zola’s fictional store. Zola’s turbo-charged descriptive prose ascended to new heights when it came to describing the vast profusion of luxury goods arranged in spectacular displays that tumbled down the full height of the store’s central atrium for the celebrated January sales event, the Blanc.


Management was organised on a military model of command and staff were subject to a rigidly enforced code of conduct that extended outside the store and into their private lives. Wages and salaries were modest but generous sales commissions were paid to those with a flair for selling. Transactions were exhaustively recorded and analysed to develop new product ranges and expand the volume of sales. The art of selling was planned in minute detail and new standards were set in terms of advertising and publicity. The services of the most fashionable poster artists were engaged with the aim of placing the name of the store in front of the public at every crossroad, every mainline train station and on the sides of trams and buses. Lavishly illustrated catalogues were regularly published and maps, guides, agendas and illustrated collectors picture cards in which Bon Marché was carefully positioned at the centre of the universe were freely distributed. Masters of Zola-style prose declaimed the wondrous extravagance and the monumental dimensions in a tidal wave of superlatives in full page newspaper advertisements.



The poster designs of René Vincent (1879-1936) helped define the Bon Marché image and his contribution is described in this extract from Commercial Art, September 1926. Vincent’s posters employ the clean lines and slender forms of 1920s Japonisme with few concessions to the novelty of Art Deco. He turned to poster design around 1920 after a career as a satirical illustrator in magazines such as la Vie Parisienne and l’Illustration. His most distinguished work was illustrating for l’Imprimerie Draeger, printers of Fine Press Books and master typographers. Despite the enduring popularity of his images with on-line poster retailers there is no published survey of his work.

References:
Henriette Touillier Feyrabend et al, Quand l’affiche faisait de la réclame, Paris, 1991
Michael B Miller, The Bon Marché, Princeton, 1981

Félix Potin

An assembly of carnivores, clad in winter coats is gathered in the Boulevard Sébastopol on a Saturday morning to attend the grand opening of a new butchery department in the Félix Potin store. The date is January 14th. and the best estimate is that the year is 1905 when January 14th. fell on a Saturday. Potin (1820-1871) was an innovative retailer who pioneered the concept of manufacturing a wide range of goods, branding them as his own and selling them in his own stores. This store, opened in 1860 was his flagship. The cavernous food hall with its grand arched ceiling and lavish decoration is piled high with carcasses awaiting the attention of the butcher’s knife. Look for the Adoration of the Golden Calf that adorns the back wall. These are timely images of over-consumption as the season of gluttony overwhelms us.

Cathedral of Shopping

This triumphal arch forms the entrance to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. It stands on the Piazza del Duomo thus uniting the God of Christendom with the God of Commerce. The interior is cruciform in plan with a central octagon. The internal facades are three storeys in height, above them soars an enormous glazed barrel vault complete with central dome. The floor area is entirely covered by a richly decorative scheme of mosaic work and provides an almost absurdly lavish and opulent space in which to shop. The modest shopping arcade as developed in Britain and France is here inflated to the proportions of a grand cathedral and symbolises the need for the newly united Italian nation state to see its sense of self-importance immortalised in architectural form.


Despite the air of exclusivity, the Galleria is open to all and there seems to be a mismatch between the leisure shirts, shorts and trainers worn by most visitors with the sort of clientele that would be likely to patronise the seriously up-market retailers. Apart from the presence of a McDonald’s, there is very little that would come within the spending power of the average shopper. The shop fronts are intimidatingly polished and perfect, repelling all but the most affluent customer.


A cultural footnote with which to conclude. The final scene in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novel, Cabal, climaxes with the villain of the piece crashing through the glass of the central dome and plummeting to the mosaic floor below. The corpse touches down on the Coat of Arms of the House of Savoy.