Ch. 5: Discounting Dreams: Depravity, Consumption, and Fashion in the Nineteenth Century Department Store in France
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Description
This chapter appears in the book, In Fashion: Culture, Commerce, Craft, and Identity. Edited by Jacque Lynn Foltyn and Laura Petican.
Chapter abstract: In the mid-nineteenth century, as industrial production transformed the French economy during the Second Empire, a new retail model in the form of the department store emerged which revolutionised the ways by which clothes were designed, produced, and consumed. This chapter proposes to examine the early history of the world’s first department store, Paris’ Au Bon Marché, as it relates to the evolution of the modern fashion system during this period. My consideration will begin by detailing the primary precursor to the department store in France, the magasin de nouveautés (roughly translated as a dry goods store) which had begun to offer for sale multiple types and large amounts of merchandise in the same location, thus leading to a modern notion of shopping as well as the encouragement of aberrant consumer activity like shoplifting. Next, my chapter will consider the founding and early history of Aristide Boucicaut’s Au Bon Marché, from its establishment in 1852 through its greatest successes in the 1870s. With Au Bon Marché, which directly catered to a middle-class clientele in a newly reconstructed and modernized Paris, Boucicaut developed a new business model that revolutionized the experience of shopping. I will analyze some of the new and innovative business practices that developed in this department store like the free access of the shopper to merchandise, original advertising strategies targeting multiple demographics, the progressive introduction of ready-to-wear clothes, the rapid, often seasonal turnover of stock, and special promotional events (for example, the store’s famous white sales in the 1870s). In these examples, my chapter will demonstrate how this new approach to retailing, in turn, shaped the structure of the production and consumption of modern fashion, instituting a new aesthetics of display that facilitated its mass consumption.
ISBN
978-90-04-44658-8
Publication Date
2022
Publisher
Brill
City
Boston
Keywords
France, Department stores, Au Bon Marché, Fashion, Nineteenth Century
Disciplines
European History | Social History | Sociology of Culture
Recommended Citation
Koos, Leonard R., "Ch. 5: Discounting Dreams: Depravity, Consumption, and Fashion in the Nineteenth Century Department Store in France" (2022). Modern Languages & Literatures Books. 5.
https://scholar.umw.edu/modernlanguages_books/5