The Department Store as Theater

While expositions provided periodic spectacles, department stores offered daily performances of consumption. Au Bon Marché, Printemps, and Galeries Lafayette transformed shopping into entertainment. Their vast halls, crowned with glass domes flooding goods with natural light, created retail cathedrals.

These stores pioneered techniques still used today. Fixed prices replaced haggling. Seasonal sales created shopping seasons. Display windows became theaters where mannequins enacted domestic dramas. "Shopping" became a leisure activity distinct from purchasing necessities. Women could spend entire days browsing, lunching in store restaurants, attending fashion shows.

The stores provided unprecedented freedom for bourgeois women. Here they could move unescorted, handle money, make decisions. The shopgirl became both servant and model, demonstrating how goods should be worn or used. "At Printemps," wrote one satisfied customer, "I am treated as if I matter, regardless of what I spend." This democratic courtesy, revolutionary in hierarchical France, built customer loyalty.

But department stores also created new anxieties. Kleptomania emerged as a specifically bourgeois female crime. Respectable women stuffed lace and gloves into muffs and handbags, claiming irresistible compulsion. Émile Zola explored this phenomenon in "Au Bonheur des Dames" (The Ladies' Paradise), showing how consumer capitalism colonized desire itself.

Store owners understood they sold dreams more than goods. Paul Poiret's fashion shows at his boutique featured models lounging in staged domestic settings, teaching customers how to inhabit the lifestyle his clothes promised. The Oriental rooms displayed not just imported goods but entire fantasies of exotic life. One could purchase a Turkish corner complete with carpets, cushions, and brass tables—instant bohemia for the bourgeoisie.