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Death of the Department Store
The department store is dying. It’s not the only building type to find itself marooned by social and economic change,...
The story unfolds through gallery spaces where the historic arguments are illustrated with carefully lit displays of consumer goods, snippets of newsreel footage and the immense posters and glamorous advertising that promoted the grand magasin as the embodiment of taste and lifestyle for the aspirational bourgeoisie. In fact he did, inserting Jourdain in the novel as the young architect ‘par hasard intelligent’, who is enraptured by the latest building techniques and throws up a cast iron and glass structure over the ground floor of the store, where customers promenade through spacious galleries such as were not to be seen in the shops of the Second Empire. After the First World War, which the exhibition passes over with characteristic nonchalance, the grands magasins offered new ranges – the pullover, the tennis dress, the bathing costume, all designed for a female figure that had changed from the corseted customer for whom Mme Boucicaut catered into an androgynous creature with shingled hair.
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