TY - JOUR
AU - Lasc, Anca I
AB - Abstract This article argues that American window designers at the turn of the twentieth century not only helped shops advertise their wares but also created flexible, unstable and mobile environments which acted upon people’s perceptions of the material world around them. As shoppers’ eyes turned from sturdy façades to themed displays of mass-produced goods, the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the modern city were replaced with alternative times and spaces that added new ‘realities’ to the urban grid. The article further examines the emergence of window dressing as a profession and the windows’ relationship with the street as trimmers helped create a mobile modern metropolis. In May of 1873, the New York Times announced a plan that would secure rapid transit through the city: ‘The inventor proposes to construct two sidewalks in Broadway, one of which shall perpetually move up and the other perpetually move down the street at the rate of nineteen miles per hour. The public has only to step on one of these sidewalks to be rapidly carried to any desired point’.1 A useful device for young lads admiring passing ladies, street vendors in search of buyers, and busy men trying to avoid constant bores, the ‘Travelling Sidewalk’ was nevertheless an inconvenience for those who sought to admire the city’s shop windows. The author explained: ‘the lady who should catch a glimpse of a love of a bonnet, would be the next moment carried abreast of a baker’s shop, or . . . a slop-shop devoted to the sale of strictly masculine garments’.2 Yet the idea of a city on the move so impressed the anonymous New York Times contributor that he concluded by suggesting that the invention be applied to the buildings rather than the people on Broadway. His solution was to place all structures on a platform in ‘perpetual motion’ while the public waited below for the desired house or shop to ‘come around’.3 Although neither of these two proposals materialized, the story of the moveable street is indicative of the notion that people were moving too fast and the city had to catch up with them. The New York Times demonstrates a late nineteenth-century fascination with mobility which proved problematic for a town’s stores. Relying on their show windows to stop passers-by, make them look, and convince them to buy, commercial emporia faced the challenge of enticing a population in motion for whom the urban flow itself was an attraction. Rather than being fixed and static spaces, turn-of-the-century store windows thus became flexible, unstable and mobile environments that sought to transform people’s perceptions of the material world around them. If to be modern meant, as Karl Marx observed, to be part of a universe in which ‘all that is solid melts into air’,4 a universe whose ‘other half’ was ‘the eternal and the immutable’,5 window trimmers responded to the fleeting and ephemeral nature of modern life by purposely seeking to place the fabric of the city in movement through their designs.6 As shoppers’ eyes turned from sturdy façades to theatrical displays of mass-produced goods, the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the modern city were replaced with alternative times and spaces that added new ‘realities’ to the urban grid. The repetitive exhibits of small-scale merchandise arranged in rows, characteristic of earlier, ‘stocky’ window displays that intended to impress through sheer numbers, were replaced by artistic arrangements that created three-dimensional ‘landscapes’ of stage-like fictive worlds along busy passageways.7 Distinctions between indoor and outdoor, private and public, real and imaginary space, as well as architectural shell and interior décor were completely blurred once window trimmers actively employed visual effects to create the impression of other places within their windows for strollers’ viewing pleasure. Building on the work of scholars such as Jonathan Crary, Anne Friedberg, Ben Highmore, Lauren Rabinovitz and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who have already studied some of the effects that the newly developing culture of mobility had on human psyche, this article examines the relationship between window decoration and the city in turn-of-the-century America as imagined and defined by professional window designers.8 Together, designers defined the ideal commercial window as a fluid space, where the ephemeral architecture and landscape shaped by fake gates, fictive fences, imaginary walls, make-believe mountains, valleys, waves and sand, as well as both real and artificial plants, increased the mobility of urban life and redefined the spaces of the modern metropolis.9 The article will first offer a brief history of the nineteenth-century shop window and its interpretation in recent academic scholarship. It will explain how turn-of-the-century professional journals and window dressing manuals defined the retail window as both urban decoration and art object for an entire generation of American window designers. Secondly, through an examination of window designs inspired by these publications and created during the period, the article will show how window dressers purposely engaged the public space of the street through their displays, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, urban fabric and high art. Window design in the public sphere: the new look of retail display City-dwellers passing by Brooklyn’s Wechsler Bros. & Co. in the summer of 1894 could spot a new scene in one of the store’s windows: a drop-down curtain representing a mountain view; a grass-covered cliff and lake with sheep and lambs grazing nearby; a Scotch collie watching its flock through half-open eyes; and a shepherd boy resting on his crook—the centrepiece of the design.10 The Dry Goods Economist trade journal, describing the window, did not include an image alongside this information. The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, an 1894 treatise on ‘the art and science of show window and store interior construction, economy, and decoration’ published under the aegis of the same journal, did illustrate the display in question [1].11 The scene depicted, designed by Frank L. Carr, Jr., author of The Wide-Awake Window Dresser and manager of Wechsler Bros. & Co.’s decorating department, was suggestive of a different time, space, and climate, and was used to sell blankets, heavy winter goods that needed to look attractive on a sizzling, summer day.12 A tag prominently displayed in the window read ‘From the Ranch to the Consumer’, while labels marked the raw material arranged in baskets throughout the window as ‘Australian wool’. The main point of the arrangement, as the Dry Goods Economist explained, was to ‘show the various stages the wool goes through before arriving at completion in the handsome blankets displayed’.13 In addition to an overtly didactic role, a window thus arranged would have secured shoppers’ attention and rested their eyes by reminding them of the cool and peaceful vistas of the countryside. As late as 1908, for example, the illustrated trade journal Merchants Record and Show Window advised retailers to ‘try and make your windows look cool, airy and inviting’ in the summer, and to ‘make them suggest warmth’ in the winter.14 Carr employed trompe-l’oeil effects, linear perspective, stuffed animals and a human-size mannequin in his Wechsler Bros. & Co. window to achieve a similar result. He drew the viewer into the space of representation by counting on the appeal of a cool, mountainous landscape retreat in the middle of a ‘scorching hot day’15 to create an impression. Shoppers at the Brooklyn store and passers-by alike could virtually leap into a different space that seemed to open up right in the midst of the boiling metropolis. Psychologically removed from the city, their minds turned towards vacation, consumers could take the next step by entering into the store and purchasing one of the wool blankets offered at an advantageous price in the middle of the summer. Fig 1. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘From Ranch to the Consumer’, window executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Fig 1. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘From Ranch to the Consumer’, window executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Traditional scholarship on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American show windows has largely defined displays as static, stand-alone entities, separated by large windowpanes from the space of the sidewalk and the modern city. More recent studies, however, have shown that window designers used a variety of devices to place in motion the various props on display. Glass reflections ‘alerted women shoppers and those watching the shoppers alike to a relationship between motion and immobility and to the interchangeability between persons and things’ while motorized components like rotating stands created a kinetic environment for otherwise static objects, enabling them to twist and turn and thus display the merchandise from all sides.16 Robert Faries’ ‘Revolving Cloak or Dress Form’, illustrated in his 1883 Catalogue of Revolving and Stationary Display Fixtures, could accommodate ‘any form or bust’ while giving ‘the appearance of life to the window’ and ‘distinguishing between the store which has these and those which have not’.17 Such devices ‘never failed to attract attention,’ as their inventor proudly asserted; part of their fascination came from allowing the viewer to uncover the secret of what made the displays move. ‘Almost daily . . . some one comes into my store and asks me what makes it move’, a client from Wellsboro, PA had confessed to Faries.18 Glass reflections and rotating props, however, were only a part of these windows’ attraction. Contemporary shoppers were equally impressed by the virtual mobility enabled by displays such as Frank L. Carr’s ‘Blanket Window’ and, by extension, their activation of the city’s streets. As such, techniques of commercial display might have had a direct and profound influence on psychological conceptions of space within the modern city. For a window to attract the attention of passers-by and successfully engage with them and engulf them in the represented space, the trimmer had to conceive of it as a complete display and themed environment, a total work of art in its own right. Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented rise in the production, circulation, and consumption of goods. After the Industrial Revolution, at the end of the eighteenth century, technological changes lowered the cost of existing commodities while allowing the invention of entirely new ones. Cheaper items produced with new machines under the new factory system proved irresistible to a society increasingly defined by the middle rather than the upper classes. When Au Bon Marché, arguably the first department store, opened in Paris in 1852, it was a direct response to the new consumption patterns characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century.19 Inspired by universal exhibitions, and uniting under one roof what production had initially divided, department stores relied on mass production, rapid turnover of merchandise, and commercialization of large quantities of low-priced goods to make their profits. They attempted to sell everything that one required for personal adornment and home improvement in one place.20 A plethora of advertising strategies were created to promote buying from these large-scale institutions rather than from the traditional, specialized retail stores.21 If advertising had been limited before the 1850s, when even newspapers and magazines printed small-scale, visually unappealing images, with words jammed together in small type, scholars have noted that the latter decades of the nineteenth century in America saw the emergence of an unprecedented visual culture of advertising, where colour lithographed posters, electricity, as well as the all-popular plate glass were drawn into the service of retail, display and marketing.22 Artists thus gravitated to the commercial sector and joined ‘visual merchandising’ teams. ‘Visual merchandising’, including window and store displays, the design of store environments, and the design of the imagery circulated via mass-produced catalogues and promotion cards, offered them not only larger salaries but also a chance to experiment with new media.23 ‘Architectural wizardry’, defined by historian William Leach as the application of colour, glass, and light to otherwise functional spaces, spread rapidly throughout the domain of popular entertainment and consumption and began to characterize not only opera houses and dance halls, restaurants and hotels, world’s fairs, museums and amusement parks but also the new ‘cathedrals of consumption’ that were the department stores and their windows.24 American artists thus began to blend advertising and street theatre into what scholars have called ‘a very public form of installation art’, namely the art of window dressing.25 Existing scholarship has examined nineteenth-century commercial window design in relation to advertising and the desire to stimulate consumption. Emily Klug, for example, has argued that display windows functioned as spaces of fantasy, ‘a bridge between illusion and reality designed to elicit consumer desire and ultimately result in sales’.26 Vanessa Osborne and Ken W. Parker have similarly suggested that shop windows operated through viewers’ identification with the attributes of the objects displayed, a process whose outcome was the formation of consumer desire.27 These ‘sign associations’ that visual merchandising bred—‘luxury, exoticism, and excess’—were imputed to the objects themselves through display and, by extension, to the consumer, even though neither the objects nor the people coveting them possessed such qualities.28 While entirely pertinent to a discussion of show windows, whose main purpose has always been to create consumer desire in order to sell goods, these scholars associate windows with commerce over and above anything else.29 Social historians have moved beyond ideas of desire and consumption and have instead began to question the role that show windows might have played in the development of the feminist movement early in the twentieth century.30 Film historians, on the other hand, have appropriated windows as significant agents in the development of the movie industry, itself in an incipient phase at the turn of the twentieth century. Anne Friedberg, for example, has described the shop window as a symbol of modern, mobile, urban spectatorship, which, through its framed commodity displays and the development of the flâneuse, prefigured the cinematic apparatus.31 The material realities, physical properties and aesthetic potential of the show windows themselves, however, became in most of these accounts merely tangential to the act of selling.32 Ben Highmore’s work represents an exception. For him, nineteenth-century window displays engendered new rhythms, spatial constructs and social spaces in the modern city. The volition of the various designers involved in their creation, however, remains obscure, while the interests of retailers assume pride of place. The love/hate relationship between art and commerce is not new. Art historian Michele Bogart had already demonstrated the intricate relationships between art and advertising in 1995, explaining why those artists involved in the commercial sector have historically been marginalized and, during the second half of the twentieth century, considered to be at the ‘borders of art’.33 Architectural historian Louisa Iarocci has more recently noted the peculiarity of the fact that ‘the image of selling’ has received so little attention in the field of visual studies given the critical role the appearance of goods and the sales environment still play in our contemporary society.34 Art and architectural historians have indeed proved resilient to the shrinking of boundaries between art and visual merchandising, the former of which they still ascribe to museums and the latter to selling. When shop windows have been discussed in art historical scholarship, they have proved noteworthy only when examined in relation to the work of already well-established artists of the mid-twentieth century such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.35 Window dressing as a professional and especially artistic activity has rarely been deemed worthy of study on its own.36 If art historians have been interested in window dressing as an art form only when it has intersected with the careers of American icons like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, museum professionals responded by focusing on the careers of such well-known industrial designers as Norman Bel Geddes and their personal role in merchandise display.37 Shop window design, however, illustrates how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century designers responded to as well as informed the fabric of the cities surrounding them. By focusing on the appearance of their show windows and conceiving them as complete, themed environments and total works of art, window trimmers gifted the modern metropolis with some of its most essential artistic products and means of escape from the ordinary. In America, window dressers promoted their designs as a form of art since the end of the nineteenth century. While crowded windows showcasing rows of repetitive items had been the rage in early department stores, by the 1890s American stores had adopted an aesthetic of ‘complete’ design for their window arrangements, often incorporating a central object which all the other display components matched and around which they all revolved. As Frank L. Carr, Jr., one of the most popular window designers in America, explained in The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, ‘the advancement of the dry goods trade has greatly contributed to bring about an architectural Renaissance’.38 Similarly, an article published in the trade journal The Window Trimmer and Retail Merchant’s Advertiser in 1904 suggested that store decorating ‘may be fairly reckoned among the fine arts’.39 The reader was advised to step from a picture gallery ‘to the interior or front of some metropolitan dry goods store’ to find ‘the same artistic blending of colours and sympathetic appeal to the artistic’.40 Beginning in the early 1900s the emerging career of window dressing was supported by a variety of institutions. A designer had to be both inventive and playful to do his job well. ‘The man who has but one idea’, a critic argued in 1897, ‘will never achieve very much as a window-dresser’.41 And because window displays in large metropolitan department stores were often changed two to three times a week,42 the successful dresser had to also be rather quick-thinking. Professional programmes for window design, window trimming or window dressing, as the occupation was also called, opened in Chicago and New York City institutions. The Cooper Union, the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (later known as Parsons School of Design), and Pratt Institute taught commercial skills soon after 1900,43 while New York City’s Mac Faddin School of Window Trimming (established by George E. Mac Faddin in 1901), the New York Window Dressing Institute, and Chicago’s Koester School of Window Dressing taught the art of decorating show windows.44 While such programmes provided artists-designers with the basic lessons for success, a more traditional, hands-on apprenticeship with a window trimmer also helped reveal the secrets of the trade. Department stores ‘began to take control of the education of their display personnel, providing in-house training in window trimming alongside salesmanship and accounting’.45 Display directors such as Marshall Fields’ Arthur Fraser in Chicago coordinated large teams of trimmers, carpenters and electricians, and gained notoriety for their work. Fraser and his team are credited with having launched the so-called ‘Red Epidemic’, a ‘frenzied vogue’ for red items imported from Paris, to which Fields devoted six entire windows in 1897.46 Schools and apprenticeships helped set the standards for the emerging profession but so did professional window dressing associations that offered further support for the trade. In 1898, L. Frank Baum helped assemble the first National Association of Window Trimmers of America (N.A.W.T of A.),47 soon renamed the International Association of Display Men (IADM).48 Among the association’s aims was ‘to improve, and benefit individual minds and skill, to exchange thoughts and ideas at our annual conventions, or through the official organ, to the promotion of fellowships, and to assist distressed and unemployed deserving members’.49 As a report in the May 1908 issue of Merchants’ Record and Show Window further asserted: ‘We have graduated in the art of window trimming or mercantile decorating; our early positions have been our academy and the conventions our art club [. . .]. It is our aim to unite our efforts towards elevating our profession’. Further, as ‘merchants everywhere’ had begun to realize that window trimmers were indispensable in selling merchandise, the Association offered the benefits of an ‘Employment Bureau’ that matched trimmers with employers at a moment’s notice.50 But it was the published output provided by renowned designers and trade journals that offered an invaluable update on the latest trims, supplied further sources of inspiration for window dressers, and defined the goals of the profession, bolstering its success. As architectural historian Louisa Iarocci explains, ‘instructional literature on store displays begins to appear in earnest around the 1880s when existing journals for the dry goods and textiles industries like Dry Goods Chronicle and Fancy Review and the Dry Goods Economist began including regular features devoted to the design of “store attractions”‘.51 Handbooks and journals set guidelines for the emerging field of window trimming ‘as it evolved from an expedient method of heaping goods to a systemized practice based on business and artistic principles’.52 The earliest known trade journal dedicated to store display in the United States, according to Iarocci, was Harman’s Journal of Window Dressing of 1893, followed by its more famous successor, L. Frank Baum’s 1897 The Show Window: A Monthly Journal of Practical Window Trimming.53 Baum’s Show Window became in 1903 The Merchants Record and Show Window, sponsoring prizes in trimming excellence as well as the annual national convention of the N.A.W.T of A. in Chicago.54 Baum’s The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (1900), traditionally considered as the first treatise on window dressing,55 had been preceded by J.H. Wilson Marriott’s Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows (1889), George Cole’s Dictionary of Dry Goods (1892) and Frank L. Carr, Jr.’s The Wide Awake Window Dresser (1894).56 Carr’s Wide-Awake Window Dresser, for example, had the avowed aim of arousing ‘new interest and ambition and to raise the artistic standard of store adornment’, for which reasons the author has ‘availed himself of all the knowledge of technical and artistic decoration acquired by him during long years of active and painstaking practice of his profession’.57The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, which had shown lavish illustrations like Wechsler Bros. & Co.’s ‘Blanket Window’ mentioned earlier, was itself published with the support of New York City’s Dry Goods Economist, a weekly magazine founded in 1858 to which Carr frequently contributed.58The Wide-Awake Window Dresser traced the development of the shop window from its initial role as an open store-illuminator to an enclosed space situated at the threshold between the space of the street and the locked-in space of the store. Providing readers with photographs of window arrangements, it showed windows decorating the streets in the same way that paintings embellished private interiors. Two-dimensional designs were now rendered in three dimensions, a quality which allowed viewers to mentally transpose themselves into the space of representation. Thus adorned, the modern city would have encouraged travel through eyesight. The Dry Goods Economist also sponsored international contests for the best window designs from at least 1894, contributing further to the popularization and professionalization of the window dressing field as an art form.59 Frank L. Carr, Jr. had won the silver medal that year, a fact which he celebrated by creating for Wechsler Brothers a window ‘complimentary to the Dry Goods Economist great international window-dressing contest’ [2]. As well as replicating the offices of the Dry Goods Economist with a mannequin representing C. G. Phillips, the manager of the Economist’s window dressing department, Carr’s window contained an easel holding a large frame that illustrated the six prize windows. At the bottom were ‘the letters received from President Cleveland and other prominent people throughout the United States’ congratulating Carr on his success. A letter from President Cleveland’s private secretary dated 30 March, 1894 and acknowledging the president’s familiarity with Carr’s work was published on the same page of The Wide-Awake Window Dresser as the illustration of Carr’s design.60 By the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, a new art form, with its own artists, associations, schools, and prize categories had been established and recognized in America. Window dressing was experiencing a golden era. Fig 2. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘The Economist Window’, window possibly executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Fig 2. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘The Economist Window’, window possibly executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) The show window as facilitator of fictive, urban mobility Catherine Gudis has defined the advertising billboards and electrical signs of the 1920s and 1930s as part of an ‘architecture of mobility’ that removed commercial enticements from the enclosed space of the shop or the window to the streets of the city.61 As billboards became ‘the showrooms of the new driving city,’, advertisers continued to act upon the urban environment by transforming the more traditional two-dimensional format of the poster and the billboard into three-dimensional architectural spaces.62 For instance, the interior furnishing firm of Lachman Brothers created realistic three-dimensional displays of model bedrooms in shadow boxes with cut-outs of human figures that enhanced the illusion. A ‘woman seated at a dressing table’ became part of the display, the reality effect augmented once passers-by slipped into her box to acknowledge her presence. A male viewer reportedly sat on the bed, then tiptoed to the lady and tweaked her ear, putting his arm around her waist and carrying on a conversation.63 Engaging with the furniture display in this fashion, the passer-by leaped into the space of the representation both mentally and physically, leaving the space of the city behind. The ‘architecture of mobility’ that Gudis connects with the twentieth century, and especially with the advent of the automobile as the preferred means of transportation in the city, owed as much to the new locations dedicated to advertising as to the new retail techniques that incorporated the urban space and its denizens into the world of display. Viewers, however, could have inhabited modern spaces of representation such as department store windows by walking virtually into a different time and place from that of the street at least since the end of the nineteenth century. Frank L. Carr, Jr.’s Wide-Awake Window Dresser illustrated many American window designs that, before the beginning of the twentieth century, had attempted to imaginarily transpose their viewers to new locations. For example, a window designed by Wm. H. Morris for Staley, Morton & Co.—the former Lockhart, Staley, and Willard—in Columbus, Ohio featured a serene landscape that isolated it from the space of the store.64 As a spatial entity of its own, the window functioned like a three-dimensional diorama where made-up props facilitated the transition between the real spaces of the city and the spaces of the imagination and desire that stimulated consumption. As such, the window functioned like an enclosed box that offered a tantalizing peek into a world different from that of the street or the store yet which, through the employment of one-point, linear perspective, functioned like an extension of the street into the belly of the store [3]. The arrangement, showcasing a bicycle costume, was labelled an ‘effective design’ by the Dry Goods Economist, undoubtedly due not only to the audacious reference to the ‘new woman’ but also for the way it incorporated the viewer into the display.65 Fig 3. View largeDownload slide Wm. H. Morris, ‘An Effective Design’, window executed for Staley, Morton & Co., Columbus, Ohio, reproduced in the Dry Goods Economist (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 28 July 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Fig 3. View largeDownload slide Wm. H. Morris, ‘An Effective Design’, window executed for Staley, Morton & Co., Columbus, Ohio, reproduced in the Dry Goods Economist (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 28 July 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Wm. H. Morris, the dresser responsible for the design, described the window as a country road with a lady bicyclist. Two small trees occupied the background, set against a painted landscape that represented a distant lake surrounded by mountains. The navy-coloured serge fabric displays on each side stood for fences, with four white silk cords running along them meant to enhance the illusion. The roadbed was composed of grey cambric while real sand and gravel were thrown upon it to create the desired ‘reality’ effect. Dried moss was placed along the sides of the ‘fences,’ and ‘mile posts’ signalled the distance to the closest ‘town’.66 The most important contribution to the window was made, however, by the female dummy, which was dressed up in a cycling costume and sported a full-sized bicycle held up by a bicycle stand. She could be seen approaching the viewer as she got closer to her final destination, her spatial advance marked by the mile posts on the right. Quite appropriately, the viewer would soon realize, he or she had also already arrived at the place coveted by the lady bicyclist. The two would meet at ground zero, their shared destination, namely the store of Lockhart, Staley, and Willard itself. Together, the viewer and the window thus formed a complete design, a three-dimensional total work of art worthy of its designer’s name, ‘Wm. H. Morris’—perhaps a pun on the main spokesman for Britain’s Arts and Crafts movement—who had ‘signed’ the display in the lower left-hand corner. Painted backdrops of made-up scenery and improvised props created the fantasy that the scene beheld continued beyond the enclosed space of the window. While offering a tantalizing peek into a world away from the nineteenth-century city, such vistas were still a part of it. Wm. H. Morris had imagined a world that seemed open to and reachable by the shopper, who could imaginatively enter the space of display. Like a mirror, the transparent glass pane marked the threshold between the space of the imagination and the real spaces of the city, but, like Alice’s looking-glass, it also allowed movement between these spaces to go both ways. To recreate the resemblance of a three-dimensional landscape, the designer imitated nature creatively, through both artificial plants and painted backgrounds. Indeed, resources to express bountiful, lush flora through artificial plants were not lacking at the time. ‘Beaven’s Fadeless Moss’, for example, was deemed to create marvels in show windows regardless of the temperature or amount of light it was forced to withhold.67 Manufacturers of artificial flowers competed against each other in the quality and design of the products they offered. Some took pride in their accurate reproduction of various flower contests’ winning specimens while others insisted on hiring the ‘finest European designer of flowers’, whose inventions guaranteed one’s windows to be ‘better than any in town’.68 Morris’ window could thus have been easily recreated by any store that sought to increase its sales, and was proposed as such in Carr’s The Wide-Awake Window Dresser. The objects it advertised, bicycle costume and fabric as well as other ‘dress goods bargains’, appear only tangentially relevant to the display as the individual objects seem to have been less valuable to Morris than the design as a whole. The latter’s real value, rather, lay in its capability to bring together reality and imagination, acting on and altering the look and feel of the modern city. It was during the holidays, however, that the city’s windows were decorated in their most appealing fashion. As an 1889 New York Times article about the city’s holiday displays argued, ‘the windows are as crowded with sights as the streets are with sightseers. If New York merchants do not reap a harvest each Christmas time it is not for lack of artistic and lavish displays’.69 Indeed, as the nineteenth century came to an end, window dressers were paying even more attention to separating the space of the window from that of the store, realizing that its greatest potential came from an integration with the spaces of the city and the store’s exterior architecture. In 1889, for example, the Dry Goods Economist listed among the designs deserving special mention a ‘Fur Window’ displayed by the Wechsler & Abraham store in Brooklyn [4]. A fake masonry wall was positioned between the window and the store, parallelling the space of the street. This wall took the shape of a home’s façade, which a carpenter had built, finished in sand, and painted to resemble brick and brown stone.70 A woman and a child could be seen behind a set of curtains in the parlour, while a boy had just come out to greet the visitors arriving in a horse-drawn carriage. A winter display advertising fur garments and winter coats, the window’s floor was covered with salt-based ‘snow’, while a fake white horse completed the illusion.71 Furthermore, to make the display as realistic as possible, several windows were combined into one, thus permitting the inclusion of life-size mannequins and a life-size carriage. The trompe-l’oeil effect invited passers-by to regard the window as an extension of the city into store architecture, with the display itself becoming part of their daily lives. They, too, could seemingly knock at the door and access the imaginary private space situated beyond it. Window dressers and trade specialists pointed out that such colourful holiday décors reaped sales, making the value of merchandise sold towards the end of the year equal to that sold in all other months combined.72 Fig 4. View largeDownload slide [Frank L. Carr, Jr.], ‘A Fur Window’, window executed for Wechsler and Abraham, Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in the Dry Goods Economist (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 19 October 1889). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Fig 4. View largeDownload slide [Frank L. Carr, Jr.], ‘A Fur Window’, window executed for Wechsler and Abraham, Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in the Dry Goods Economist (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 19 October 1889). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Imaginative displays sold goods as the ephemeral vistas created by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century store windows filled the urban sidewalks with architectural elements that opened the walls of the city to reveal imaginary worlds. The developments in visual advertising that historian Catherine Gudis singles out in post-war American retail were not new to the post-war era.73 Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century show windows had equally been predicated on the idea of visual mobility, allowing the stroller-turned-spectator to virtually inhabit the fictive spaces concocted by the stores’ displaymen. A series of designs reproduced in trade journals and window dressing manuals at the time vividly illustrated this trend. These ideas were further reinforced by popular journals. In 1883, for example, the New York Times wrote about a corner dry goods window display on Broadway that featured a miniature drawing-room ‘with tapestry walls and Persian rugs for a carpet’. Three beautiful ladies reportedly held ‘daily and evening receptions in this mimic room, which are extremely popular with their sidewalk callers’.74 While viewers were undoubtedly aware that the ladies in question were made out of wax and that their room was a mock-up display, the text suggests that passers-by were willing to cross the threshold between reality and imagination and virtually step into the space of the display as guests, or ‘callers,’ to the private reception. The New York Times offered no illustration to accompany the text in question. However, Carr’s The Wide-Awake Window Dresser offered an example of just how such a window might have looked like [5]. In a display titled ‘For High-Class Costumes’, three waxen ladies enjoy an evening together in a well-appointed interior. The feel of a contemporary, nineteenth-century private home is provided by the plethora of objects in the room—piano, painting, bibelots, lamp and chandelier included—all undoubtedly available for sale inside the store. None of the mannequins face the viewers, enthralled as they are with the piano, at which one of them plays a musical score. Their arrangement, however, in a semi-circle open towards the space of the store rather than the space of the street, made it easy for their audience to ‘join’ the reception and imagine that they, too, were invited to hear the concert and take part in the evening’s events. Fig 5. View largeDownload slide Designer unknown, ‘For High-class Costumes: Designs for Cloak and Suit Displays’, for unknown store, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Fig 5. View largeDownload slide Designer unknown, ‘For High-class Costumes: Designs for Cloak and Suit Displays’, for unknown store, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Inclusive participation was, indeed, of the essence to such displays, especially when the actual viewers and potential consumers were not used to the virtual environments created. As Arthur Fraser pointed out, ‘the purpose of window displays . . . was to make people think’.75 When period fashions were shown, the backdrops had to maintain ‘complete accuracy of detail’.76 Thus, people could test their knowledge of a certain time period while also probing the window dresser’s familiarity with the historical time on display. However, not everyone was familiar with the themes or environments displayed and the dresser had to make sure that his windows and the objects found therein were virtually accessible to all. To display a set of silverware, Marshall Field’s ‘would spend hundreds of dollars to duplicate the paneled walls of a millionaire’s dining room and install furnishings worth thousands to insure the proper atmosphere’.77 Thus, the window dresser took on the additional role of educating the viewers into understanding what a proper dining room for such a set looked like. Similar display techniques had already proven popular at wax museums, world’s fairs, and natural history museums, just a few of the favorite nineteenth-century entertainment venues.78 Scholars have identified the painted panoramas and dioramas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which had the capability of transporting their audience to a different time and different place through an immersive, mobilized and virtual gaze, as the originators of such displays.79 The world’s first permanent panorama building, opened by Robert Barker in Leicester Square in 1793, featured ‘an enormous painting of a single location . . . stretched horizontally along the inner wall of a cylindrical building, so that its ends merged seamlessly. By hiding the upper and lower margins, and controlling the light falling on the painting, it was turned from a representation into an illusory environment’.80 Featuring themed displays that often included additional props and mannequins to enhance the reality-effect, wax and natural history museums as well period interiors at world’s fairs equally strove to deepen the impression of a complete environment, surpassing the original limitations of the painted panorama in doing so and inviting the viewer to become part of the display.81 They also were, in a sense, direct competitors with what we would today consider the ‘high class world’ of the art museum. In the nineteenth century, however, as Lawrence Levine explains in Highbrow/Lowbrow, his ground-breaking study of American popular culture, ‘Americans shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience’.82 Words such as ‘serious’ and ‘popular’, ‘high’ and ‘low’ did not confer value upon the quality of a display and ‘because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit’.83 For a commercial window to be judged as an art form, therefore, was not unusual at the turn of the twentieth century; and the same public that frequented institutions of art and culture such as the art or the natural history museum, the theatre, or the opera would have also visited world’s fair exhibits, wax museums, and commercial window displays. The creation of complete, themed environments that created the illusion of a different time and a different space were thus crucial to the success of any department store display, which had to compete against other contemporary entertainment venues for the public’s attention. Foreign or exotic, rural or urban, fantastic or familiar, all-encompassing three-dimensional tableaux that encouraged an immersive experience, like the windows discussed earlier, were popular at the turn of the twentieth century. While they ‘sold’ art, nature and entertainment to both the middle and the upper classes, they also sold goods. Window dressers responded to the challenge by competing against each other in the number and quality of displays they could invent. A threshold space between the exterior of the street and the inside of the store, a successful window played with viewers’ perceptions. It twisted their minds, turning their expectations upside down. What could have been more intriguing, destabilizing, and potentially purse-opening for urban dwellers than to realize that the interior display space towards which they were directing their gaze opened onto an outdoor scene that was seemingly an extension of the space of the street into the belly of the store, as seen in Wechsler & Abraham’s ‘Fur Window’ of 1889? Perhaps the impression intended was that the window interior was not an interior at all but a framed view opening onto the same space, yet a different time. This is what the designer of a Valentine’s Day window [6] possibly had in mind when creating the appearance of a winter scene on a Brooklyn street -‘Fulton St.’ is written on the lamp post-, with houses, night sky, and a US Mail letterbox for Valentine’s Day postcards included. ‘The postman is here’, announces Carr.84 Expectant figures open the door to peek ‘outside’: has he brought any letters for them? The illusion is so complete that even the posts of the store architecture seem integrated into the window design, matching the upward thrust of the other props. Moreover, the Fulton Street location is an apt choice for the imaginary space on view. As a creation by Frank L. Carr, Jr., the design would undoubtedly have been on display in the windows of the Wechsler Bros. & Co. store in Brooklyn, for which Carr worked, and itself located on Fulton Street. Opened by Samuel and Herman Wechsler in the mid-1870s in a small location at 293–295 Fulton Street, the store moved to the Offerman Building at 505 Fulton Street, which became their new flagship locale, on 1 May 1891. It was during its operation at this new location that the store changed its name to Wechsler Bros. & Co. when Charles Henry Offerman joined the partnership.85 Carr’s Valentine’s Day window likely mirrored the space of the street on which it was situated, capturing what might have been a fleeting moment and turning it into a permanent display. A capsule frozen in time, the window thus offered Brooklyn’s dwellers the opportunity to bring a scene from the past (or the future) into their present. The postman might have looked a little different from the one they had all habitually seen and the Brooklyn buildings on display might have been somewhat more ornate than their counterparts on the real Fulton Street but the care that the window dresser gave to the construction of the display, evident in the amount of detail incorporated—including additional architecture and accompanying ‘windows’ as part of the background wall—attested to the ‘reality effect’ desired. Fig 6. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘A Valentine’s Day Display’, window executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Fig 6. View largeDownload slide Frank L. Carr, Jr., ‘A Valentine’s Day Display’, window executed for Wechsler Bros. & Co., Brooklyn, New York, reproduced in Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894). Photogravure (Columbia University Libraries) Further, the reference to a different time over a different space, while seeming peculiar to readers today, was rather pointed at the end of the nineteenth century, when the issue of standard time was a hotly debated topic. With rail travel requiring different companies to coordinate their departure and arrival times, Britain was the first to introduce Greenwich Time, maintained at the Royal Observatory as standard time on all lines, but it wouldn’t be until 1880 that railroad time became standard time all over the country.86 In the United States, while four time zones were recognized and applied to rail travel in 1889, often also serving as regional standard times, they were not given legal recognition until 1918.87 Train travel, therefore, brought not only the impression that time and space had dissolved their boundaries as locations grew closer than ever, but also, as observed by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the confusion and horror of different times existing simultaneously as people tried to make their way from one location to another. One can only imagine what an effect viewing an imitation of Fulton Street at a different time of day, month, or even year would have had on people’s psyches! Themed window displays became so successful that, in less than fifteen years, the art and science of ‘masonry effects’ in department store window design began to receive special attention in window dressing manuals. Charles Tracy, for example, in the third edition of The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors; A Complete Manual of Window Trimming dedicated an entire section to the creation of fake brick walls that could serve as backdrops to a variety of window displays.88 These included entire walls with fake gates, posts, arches, or porticoes with door or window effects [7]. A rough frame, covered in cheap muslin painted in a brick colour striped with white to resemble mortar, provided in one example the background, while painted or artificial plants, including flowers and foliage, completed the effect.89 Here, Tracy showed how a window displaying children and their games played with viewers’ perceptions of real versus fictive space. Are the children in a secluded courtyard and looking towards the viewer as a parent or nanny -situated amongst the members of the street audience- has just summoned their presence or denied them access to the space beyond the fence, outside? Or are they ready to return home and about to open the gate leading back, through a familiar path, towards their abode? Are they inside, on a private patio, or outside, on the open space of the street? Are we looking in? Or are we, as viewers, looking out? Is this a view from a window of their house, or a street view that does not allow us to fully glimpse their home (undoubtedly a mansion) in its entirety? The painted backdrop with distant fir trees, undulating path, and serene sky does not supply the answer. But it is this very uncertainty that allows the viewers’ mental transposition into the space depicted to become even stronger. Rather than isolating the window interior from the street, the ‘masonry wall’, therefore, enhanced the connections between these two spaces. The window virtually drew the viewer in, extending the spaces of the city with the fictive architecture of the store’s display and props. Fig 7. View largeDownload slide Charles Tracy, ‘A Scenic Background in Masonry Effect’, reproduced in Charles Tracy, The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors (Chicago: The Merchants Record Company, 1906). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Fig 7. View largeDownload slide Charles Tracy, ‘A Scenic Background in Masonry Effect’, reproduced in Charles Tracy, The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors (Chicago: The Merchants Record Company, 1906). Photogravure (New York Public Library) A 1908 Boys’ Clothing Display, designed by Roy Confare for a store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, seems to have provided a direct response to what one might perceive as the viewers’ desire to immerse themselves in a space of imagination [8]. Beyond the crowded foreground filled with suit displays and clothing items, Confare included two mannequins in action, which demonstrated the message written all over the window: ‘Let the Boy Climb—His Clothes will stand it‘.90 A Lehman suit was designed to last and overcome any ‘hard usage a boy could give it’, including such activities as climbing, bending, and stretching, which would put an inevitable strain on the clothes. The window dresser, therefore, humorously referenced such activities by including two child mannequins at play, engaged in climbing a fence and a ladder, respectively. Confare’s window replicated the indoor-outdoor theme of the garden that we saw earlier, with a fake masonry wall and fake apple tree standing between the space of the window and the space of the store just as pane glass stood between the space of the street and the space of the window. Yet Confare’s design also acknowledged the existence of a virtual space beyond that of the window, yet still part of it, which the two lads—their backs to the viewer—appeared to effortlessly conquer. Their attention focused on the attainment of the fruit, they did not seem in the least concerned with the view that opened up solely in front of their eyes. The audience, compelled to identify with them, could but desire to enter the forbidden place of the window in order to also view what the children saw. Such strategies connected the space of the window with that of the street, allowing onlookers to mentally enter the places constructed for their viewing pleasure.91 Fig 8. View largeDownload slide Roy Confare, ‘A Boys’ Clothing Display’, window executed for Ben Lehman, Fort. Wayne, Indiana, reproduced in the Merchants Record and Show Window vol. XXII, no. 4 (April 1908). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Fig 8. View largeDownload slide Roy Confare, ‘A Boys’ Clothing Display’, window executed for Ben Lehman, Fort. Wayne, Indiana, reproduced in the Merchants Record and Show Window vol. XXII, no. 4 (April 1908). Photogravure (New York Public Library) The desire to escape the modern city and to embark on a mental -if not physical- journey was even stronger during summer, when vacation time neared. The Dry Goods Economist pointed out the advantage of displaying goods suitable for travelling at a time when everyone in the city was eager to do it.92 Travel could be represented through an exotic locale or a familiar but vague landscape that signified the idea of ‘at the seaside’ or ‘in the mountains’ for onlookers. An example comes from Texas, where around 1908 Joe Weiss created a window for a bathing suit display [9]. The audience might not have known exactly what seashore met their eyes. Was it that of the Atlantic or the Pacific? Ultimately, it did not matter, since the window was meant to advertise objects that could be used on any beach. For our purposes here, it is interesting to note the effort expended on inviting the audience in and making them feel comfortable—even if imaginarily—in the space of representation. Weiss used real sand for the floor, while a variety of shells, toys and small accessories carried out the idea of the beach further.93 He placed a changing cabin in the foreground of the window, creating the impression that someone might come out any time to join the other ladies. Finally, a set of towels and bathing costumes hung on a rope to dry extended almost into the viewer’s space, connecting the window with the street. The ‘landscape’ was meant to draw one in, while at the same time to reach out and ‘spill over’ onto the streets of the modern metropolis. The architecture of display had met urban design. Fig 9. View largeDownload slide Joe Weiss, ‘A Bathing Suit Display’, window executed for Wolff & Mark Co., San Antonio, Texas, reproduced in the Merchants Record and Show Window vol. XXII, no. 5 (May 1908). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Fig 9. View largeDownload slide Joe Weiss, ‘A Bathing Suit Display’, window executed for Wolff & Mark Co., San Antonio, Texas, reproduced in the Merchants Record and Show Window vol. XXII, no. 5 (May 1908). Photogravure (New York Public Library) But the representation of a final destination was not even needed in order to instil the idea of travel through window design in someone’s mind. In Charles Tracy’s Display for Travelers’ Requisites, life-size mannequins inhabited a waiting-room, the floor filled with travel cases waiting to be carried out by the baggage man rolling a trunk in the back [10]. A locomotive loomed large behind, about to hit the brakes and stop in the make-believe train station to pick everyone up. Brakes screeching, horn honking, engine smoke blowing—one could almost hear the window come to life in front of one’s eyes. The viewer could thus easily feel transposed into the rush and bustling activity of a crowded station through the visual representation of sound. At night, the train was lit up by electric lamps from behind, and ventilators were put in motion to animate the scene further.94 As the mechanical beast appeared to furiously advance towards the space of the street, the waiting-room became one’s place of refuge. The viewer was invited in, incorporated into the display, and allowed to momentarily leave the boulevard to enter the space of imagination. Fake architecture morphed into real space. Fig 10. View largeDownload slide Charles Tracy, ‘Display of Travelers’ Requisites’, reproduced in Charles Tracy, The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors (Chicago: The Merchants Record Company, 1906). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Fig 10. View largeDownload slide Charles Tracy, ‘Display of Travelers’ Requisites’, reproduced in Charles Tracy, The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors (Chicago: The Merchants Record Company, 1906). Photogravure (New York Public Library) Conclusion As pictures in three dimensions, turn-of-the-century window designs became spaces that allowed an imaginary transposition into a world away from, yet within, the busy streets of commerce, entertainment and everyday life. They attracted viewers’ attention and stimulated desire for consumption by depicting foreign, exotic or local destinations. They transcended the status of commercial advertisements and mere street decoration by allowing the audience to virtually inhabit the spaces depicted alongside the mannequins displayed. As fluid environments, the windows’ locale or final destination was not easily grasped. Often referencing familiar places—a neighbour’s back yard, a local playground, a street around the corner—they suggested other spaces within and beyond the space of representation, inviting passers-by to imagine whole new worlds opening in the middle of their city. A constant permutation of views was thus at play on the streets of modern American metropolises at the turn of the twentieth century. With every store display change, permanent, stable vistas became transient and ephemeral as one became aware that a wall had been moved or a fence had changed place. The thick masonry walls of a city’s architecture opened up on the busiest retail thoroughfares to make room for made-up walls that made an equal claim to the spaces of the modern metropolis. Window designers engendered spaces-within-spaces, which the inhabitants of the modern city could imaginatively inhabit as they passed by, thus creating a mobile architecture that could change at a moment’s notice. The boundaries between indoor and outdoor, real and imaginary were completely blurred; and stage-like, fictive worlds became part of the urban landscape. The commercial architecture and design shaped by fake gates, fictive fences, imaginary walls, make-believe mountains, valleys, waves, and sand, as well as by real or artificial plants, added to the cheer of a gloomy walk, increased the fluidity of urban life, and redefined the spaces of modern cities. Dr Anca I. Lasc is Assistant Professor of Art and Design History at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She studies the invention and commercialization of the modern French interior and the development of the professions of interior designer and commercial window dresser. She has published in Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, the Journal of the History of Collections, and the Journal of Design History. Her book, Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, co-edited with Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015 (paperback forthcoming 2017). A recent volume, Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse, was released by Routledge in May 2016. Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, co-edited with Patricia Lara-Betancourt and Margaret Maile Petty is forthcoming from Routledge in 2017, while her monograph, Interior Decorating in Nineteenth-Century France: The Visual Culture of a New Profession, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2018, as part of its Studies in Design and Material Culture Series. If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org and access this article. There is a facility on the site for sending e-mail responses to the editorial board and other readers. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Keith Eggener of the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Oregon, David Jaffee and Catherine Whalen at the Bard Graduate Center, and Lauren Marchisotto at Macy’s Archives for their invaluable intellectual support and amiable conversations. Notes 1 Anonymous, ‘The Traveling Sidewalk’, The New York Times, 21 May, 1873: 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. While the 1873 proposal never materialized, the 1900 Paris exposition universelle did include a moving sidewalk as part of its attractions. 4 Marx cited in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York and Toronto: Penguin Books, 1988), 15. 5 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, reprinted in The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (London and New York: Routledge, 2004 [1863]), 40. 6 George S. Cole, A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods (Chicago: W.B. Conkey & Co., [1892]). Professional journals and trade books often referred to designers of window displays as ‘window trimmers’ or ‘window dressers’ in the nineteenth century. I use these terms interchangeably with ‘window decorators’ and ‘window designers’ throughout this essay. 7 For an account of early American window displays, see Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 145–179. For an examination of ‘stocky’ windows in England and Canada and the reasons behind them, see Susan Lomax, ‘The View from the Shop: Window Display, the Shopper and the Formulation of Theory’, in Cultures of Selling: Perspectives on Consumption and Society since 1700, ed. John Benson and Laura Ugolini (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 265–292 and Keith Walden, ‘Speaking Modern: Language, Culture, and Hegemony in Grocery Window Displays, 1887–1920’, The Canadian Historical Review LXX, no. 3 (1989): 285–310. 8 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992); Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994); Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 9 F.F. Purdy, ‘Notes from New York’, Merchants Record and Show Window XXII, no. 3 (March 1908): 50. 10 Anonymous, ‘A Blanket Window’, Dry Goods Economist (11 August 1894), n.p. 11 Frank L. Carr, Jr., The Wide-Awake Window Dresser: A Treatise on The Art and Science of Show Window and Store Interior Construction, Economy and Decoration, Containing a Complete Exposition of the Laws of Color Harmony, Full Instruction in Fabric Draperies and Many Practical Ideas Concerning Proper Display Forms, Fixtures and Accessories (New York: The Dry Goods Economist, 1894), 206. 12 For more information about the relationship between Carr and Wechsler Bros. & Co., see ‘Window Dressing’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (16 May 1894): 5. 13 ‘A Blanket Window’. 14 E.D. Pierce, ‘Simple Window Dressing: Some Practical Suggestions as to What to Do and What not to Do in Dressing a Window—Don’t Crowd and Some other Dont’s for the Beginner’, Merchants Record and Show Window XXII, no. 2 (February 1908), 30–31. 15 ‘A Blanket Window’. 16 Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, 79, and Emily M. Orr, ‘“The Age of Show Windows” in the American Department Store’, in Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail, ed. Anca I. Lasc, Patricia Lara-Betancourt, and Margaret Maile Petty (New York and London: Routledge, forthcoming). Ben Highmore also sees a ‘continual rhythmic interruption’ performed by nineteenth-century department stores, which ‘combined fast-paced movement and halting contemplation’ through the display of bargain goods and enticing attractions in one place. Stopping women of all social ranks on their tracks, this ‘continual stopping and starting, the uneven rhythm of consumer movements’, Highmore argues, was not commensurate with ‘social propriety’ that required respectable women to move through the city at a constant pace. See Highmore, Cityscapes. 17 Robert Faries, Catalogue of Revolving and Stationary Window Display Fixtures. Manufactured by Robert Faries (Decatur, Illinois: Robert Faries, 1893). 18 Ibid. 19 Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981). 20 For a history of early departments stores, see Geofrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds, Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1995); R. Laermans, ‘Learning to Consume: Early Department Stores and the Shaping of the Modern Consumer Culture (1860–1914)’, in Theory, Culture and Society 10, no. 4 (1993): 79–102; Jan Whitaker, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (St. Martin’s Press, 2006); Jan Whitaker, Une Histoire des Grands Magasins (Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2011). 21 Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 22 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 42–50. 23 William Leach, ‘Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire’, in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: Norton, 1989), 105. For a definition of ‘visual merchandising’, see Louisa Iarocci, ‘Introduction: The Image of Visual Merchandising’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 1. 24 Leach, ‘Strategists of Display’, 104. The term ‘cathedrals of consumption’ was used by Crossick and Jaumain in Cathedrals of Consumption. For more information about the development of the retail industry in America, also see Christoph Grunenberg, ‘Wonderland: Spectacles of Display from the Bon Marché to Prada’, in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), 17–37; Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 25 Shonquis Moreono, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, in Shonquis Moreno, et al., Forefront: The Culture of Shop Window Design (Amsterdam, Basel, Boston, Berlin: Frame Publishers and Birkhäuser—Publishers for Architecture, 2005), 18. Europe’s modern cities, including Paris, were more conservative when it came to window dressing. Fewer stores supported the kinds of displays praised in America in the nineteenth century. They preferred more conservative marketing strategies which did not involve display mannequins in human form. Partially undressed limbs were considered risqué and the displays were deemed too realistic or low-brow to be suitable for the upper-class audience they were still trying to attract. American cities were both more open and more democratic when it came to window dressing. Eugène Atget’s photographs are among the few records that we have of Paris windows at the time, alongside Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des dames (1883). No publications parallel to the American window dressing trade literature existed in France at the turn of the century. British and Canadian drapers too opted for comprehensive showing of stock over thematically-arranged windows. See Lomax, ‘The View from the Shop’. 26 Emily Klug, ‘Allure of Silent Beauties: Mannequins and Display in America, 1935–70’, in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, ed. John Potvin (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 202. 27 Vanessa Osborne, ‘The Logic of the Mannequin: Shop Windows and the Realist Novel’, in Potvin, The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 186. 28 Ken W. Parker, ‘Sign Consumption in the 19th-Century Department Store: An Examination of Visual Merchandising in the Grand Emporiums (1846–1900)’, Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (2003): 358–360. 29 Leach, Land of Desire; Leonard S. Marcus, The American Store Window (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978); T.J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (Basic Books, 1995); and Johnny Tucker, Retail Desire: Design, Display and Visual Merchandising (East Sussex: Rotovision, 2003). 30 Jill Fields, ‘Architectures of Seduction: Intimate Apparel Trade Shows and Retail Department Design, 1920–1940’, in Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877–1960, ed. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis and Marina Moskowitz (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 229–249; Jessica Sewell, ‘Sidewalks and Store Windows as Political Landscapes’, in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 9 (2003): 85–98; Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 31 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 32. Also see Rabinovitz, 79. 32 William Leach, for example, whose 1993 Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture is still the most thorough study of merchandising and retailing in the United States, has written the story of show windows without any images that can vouch for their appearance. 33 Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 34 Iarocci, ‘Introduction: The Image of Visual Merchandising’, Visual Merchandising, 1. 35 Leonard Marcus explains how Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol worked for Bonwit Teller during the Fifties, while ‘some of the first major public exhibitions of Pop Art were staged not in a gallery or museum, but in Bonwit Teller’s windows as part of the week’s displays’. See Marcus, The American Store Window, 74. Also see Cécile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1997). For more information on Warhol’s commercial art, see Richard Meyer, ‘Most Wanted Men’, in Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 95–156. 36 Notable exceptions are Louisa Iarocci, ‘“The Art of Draping”: Window Dressing’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 137–153 and Orr, ‘The Age of Show Windows’’. 37 See the catalogue of the recent exhibition on Norman Bel Geddes’ work at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin and the Museum of the City of New York. Donald Albrecht, ed., Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (New York: Abrams, 2012). 38 Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, 5. William L. Jr. Bird, Holidays on Display (Washington D.C. and New York: Smithsonian Institution in association with Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 7. 39 Anonymous, ‘Progress in Window Trimming,’ in The Window Trimmer and Retail Merchant’s Advertiser 2, no. 5 (January 1904): 173. 40 Ibid. 41 A. Graye Steen (Decorator for Simpson-Crawford Company), ‘Successful Decoration’, in The Window Trimmer and Retail Merchant’s Advertiser 3, no. 4 (June 1904): 122. Indeed, women were not easily accepted into the profession at this time. According to one report, they were seen as ‘hardly qualified to do the squirrel act of climbing tall step ladders and crawling about and on the ledgers’. Moreover, they were deemed to not have ‘the strength to stand the strain of several weeks of great physical and mental work before the Holidays and kindred special events that some of the trimmers are subject to’. The article concluded that window dressing was ‘hardly a field that the women will be apt to get much of a foot hold in, and thus, there is not the danger of their cheapening the labor and crowding out the men as they have done in many professions’. See Geo J. Cowan, ‘Women as Window Trimmers’, The Window Trimmer: A Magazine for the Merchant, Window Trimmer, Advertising Man and Buyer 1, no. 6 (August 1903): 330. 42 ‘Window and Interior Store Decoration’, Dry Goods Economist (9 June 1894): 47. According to the article’s author, ‘the average woman will pass by the store from two to four times a week’. 43 Leach, ‘Strategists of Display’, 102. 44 Merchants Record and Show Window XXII, no. 1 (January 1908): 45, 47, 49. 45 Iarocci, ‘Introduction: The Image of Visual Merchandising’, Visual Merchandising, 4–5. 46 Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants! The Story of Marshall Field & Company (Chicago, New York, San Francisco: Rand McNally & Company, 1952), 225. 47 Leach, ‘Strategists of Display’, 109. 48 Marcus, The American Store Window, 19. The first international congress of window dressers, however, would not happen until 1928, in Leipzig, Germany. See Highmore, Cityscapes, 56. 49 T. Kenneth Harveson, ‘What the Association Stands For’, Merchants Record and Show Window (May 1908), 60. 50 Ibid. 51 Iarocci, ‘Introduction: The Image of Visual Merchandising’, Visual Merchandising, 3. 52 L. Iarocci, ‘Dressing Rooms: Women, Fashion, and the Department Store’, in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, ed. John Potvin, (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 175. 53 Iarocci, ‘Introduction: The Image of Visual Merchandising’, Visual Merchandising, 3. 54 Marcus, The American Store Window, 16. 55 L. Frank Baum, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (Chicago: Show Window Pub. Co., 1900). An example is provided by Leach, ‘Strategists of Display’, 107. 56 Cole, A Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods; J. H. Wilson Marriott, Nearly Three Hundred Ways to Dress Show Windows: Also Suggestions and Ideas for Store Decoration (Baltimore: Show Window Publishing, 1889). 57 Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, 6. To his own skills, Carr added that of all other respectable window dressers in America, who had sent photographs and descriptions of their window decorating accomplishments to the Dry Goods Economist’s offices. Photographs meeting the highest standards in window decorating were published in the journal and reprinted in Carr’s book. 58 Leach, ‘Strategists of Display’, 106–107. The Dry Goods Economist shifted its emphasis from finance to retailing in 1889. 59 ‘Window-Dressing Progress’, Dry Goods Economist (21 April 1894): 25. 60 ‘Window and Interior Store Decoration’, Dry Goods Economist (19 May 1894): 51. 61 Catherine Gudis, ‘Advertising and the Architecture of Mobility’, in Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877–1960, ed. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis, and Marina Moskowitz (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 253. 62 Ibid., 253, 259. 63 Herb Caen for the San Francisco Chronicle, cited in Gudis, ‘Advertising and the Architecture of Mobility’, 256. 64 Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, 96. 65 Anonymous, ‘An Effective Design’, Dry Goods Economist (28 July 1894). 66 Ibid. 67 Merchants Record and Show Window (March 1908): 65. 68 Chicago-based Schack Artificial Flower Co., Inc ad from the Merchants Record and Show Window (November 1908), and Carl Netschert ad for the ‘Giant Hydrangea’ in the Merchants Record and Show Window (March 1908). 69 ‘Christmas Displays’, The New York Times (15 December 1889): 13. 70 ‘A Fur Window’, Dry Goods Economist (19 October 1889). 71 ‘The Retailer: More Windows—Two Windows that Deserve Especial Mention’, Dry Goods Economist (12 October 1889), 17. 72 Bird, Holidays on Display, 7. 73 Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Cultural Landscape (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). 74 ‘The Sidewalk Shoppers: Grotesque and Gorgeous Displays for Them’, The New York Times (20 November 1883): 8. 75 Wendt and Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants!, 304. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Oliver Herwig, Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment (Munich and New York: Prestel, 2006); Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton University Press, 2003); Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2014). 79 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 20–29. 80 Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013), 3. 81 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 84. 82 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). 83 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. 84 Carr, The Wide-Awake Window Dresser, 235. 85 Matthew A. Postal, ‘Offerman Building, 503–13 Fulton Street and 234–48 Duffield Street, Brooklyn. Peter J. Lauritzen, architect, 189093’, accessed 6 August 2015, http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/reports/offerman.pdf. 86 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 43. 87 Ibid., 44. 88 Charles Tracy, The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors; A Complete Manual of Window Trimming, 3rd edition (Chicago: The Merchants Record Company, 1906), 57. 89 Ibid. Each brick had to be of a different shade to mimic reality. 90 Merchants Record and Show Window XXII, no. 4 (April 1908): 25. 91 Such techniques of display would culminate in the 1930s with windows that staged replicas of street scenes showcasing consumers’ desire. In 1932, for example, a Berlin department store window showed ‘the backs of female mannequins dressed in street clothes (coats, hats and so on) clambering over each other in an attempt to get to the goods’, See Highmore, Cityscapes, 57. 92 Dry Goods Economist (23 June1894), 47. 93 Merchants Record and Show Window XXII, no. 5 (May 1908): 16. 94 Tracy, The Art of Decorating, 332. For more information on how electricity would be applied to store windows, see Matthew Luckiesh, ‘The Show-Window’, in Light and Color in Advertising and Merchandising (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1923): 151–175. © The Author(s) [2016]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.
TI - The Traveling Sidewalk: The Mobile Architecture of American Shop Windows at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
JF - Journal of Design History
DO - 10.1093/jdh/epw040
DA - 2018-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-traveling-sidewalk-the-mobile-architecture-of-american-shop-HoJZvJCdBe
SP - 24
EP - 45
VL - 31
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -