Is it for this dazzling splendor that has been their prerogative for so long that the mythology of department stores remains so strong today? For the place these shining buildings occupy in art, in literature, in cinema? For the memories it evokes of those whose grandparents took them to see the Christmas window display every year?
Originally designed for the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, even the popular ones, these temples of goods invented in the mid-19th centurye century to satisfy the smallest desire of its customers are today celebrated by museums, while their aura has been absorbed by the luxury industry. After the exhibition “The Birth of Department Stores” dedicated to them by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris (MAD), the City of Architecture and Heritage takes on the “Saga of Department Stores”.
This new exhibition differs from the previous one in the point of view it adopts and the scope it gives to its subject. The driving force behind a chronological story that spans almost two hundred years, travels between continents, embraces almost all aspects of social life, architecture dialogues here with fashion, painting, applied arts, cinema, advertising… The scenography is beautiful, and very rich corpus. We could immerse ourselves in it for the sole pleasure of wonder, or nostalgia, if it did not also serve as the basis for a beautiful lesson in architecture.
From Paris to Mexico
Objects as diverse as Emile Zola’s preparatory notebooks for To the happiness of the ladies (1883), the double door, with its art nouveau stained glass, of the fitting room of the Vaxelaire department store, by Nancy (1901), a caricature of Georges Dufayel (1855-1916), the feared boss of the Parisian department stores in Paris. of the same name, by Jules Grandjouan (1908), a model bellboy recruitment questionnaire filled out by a 14-year-old boy, news stories reporting working conditions in various establishments, a hilarious montage of retro advertising is placed alongside numerous drawings, photographs and architectural models. Illuminated from the inside, the one by Henri Sauvage (1873-1932) for the Decré stores (1931), in Nantes, is one of the jewels of the exhibition.
The curators, Isabelle Marquette and Elvira Férault, show how the typology of the department store has evolved over time, how it has responded to changes in lifestyles, changes in the economy and the shape of cities, and to what extent their transformations have been able to reflect those of the discipline – how they reflected, in particular, the double rupture that will be constituted by the emergence of the modern movement and its questioning.
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