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‘stage’ their respective objects. To enhance the sensual appeal of commodities,
nineteenth-century commodity display evoked the privileged space of aesthetic
contemplation. The department stores which first opened in the 1850s took
inspiration from the museum in their interior décor. Museums were amongst
the few places in which the majority of people could experience luxurious
surroundings. The early stores wanted to create an impression of luxury, and
the use of museum-like interiors helped them turn mass-produced goods into
luxury items. Like museums, and like stately homes, they used mahogany,
carpeting and chandeliers, heavy drapery, deep skirting boards and dramatic
sweeping staircases. In this way they addressed women consumers, not just in
recognition of middle-class women’s increased purchasing power and of their
role in styling the home, but also because of the feminization of luxury. While
men’s dress and demeanour had become less and less ostentatious through the
nineteenth century, women’s dress and the interior décor of the home had
become central means by which signifiers of class were communicated (espe-
cially, though not exclusively, through the use of luxury fabrics). In its early
days, the main lure of the department stores was related to women’s recognition
that social class was a matter not simply of wealth or heredity but of successfully
styling oneself and one’s home through consumption. The luxurious home was
an object of fantasy for many women, associated with class aspiration, and the
luxurious setting of the department store seemed to rub off on the things it
offered for sale (Harris 1978: 150).
In art museums, especially, the luxurious setting was conceived of as providing
the right setting for an aesthetic experience. But in the stores it was to give the
impression that when one purchased a commodity from this luxurious setting,
some of the luxury would come with it. If this was a one-way borrowing of
display by stores from museums, it might be easier to argue that the two were
still distinct, that the commodity simply dressed itself in the trappings of art.
But the traffic in display design was two-way, and it involved not just art
museums, but museums of all kinds. That is to say, not just museums concerned
with aesthetic value, but those concerned with historical and scientific value as
well. There is an argument that museums aestheticize all objects, turning them
into objects of primarily ‘visual interest’ (Alpers 1991). This argument has been
contested on the basis that there are many objects in museums that are not
visually interesting at all, but that are made interesting by the contextual infor-
mation given (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 17). The argument that museums
aestheticize may suggest, however, something of the effect of shared display
techniques.
There are countless ways in which museums and department stores used
one another’s techniques or played on their similarities. The Magasin du
Louvre, which opened in 1855 in Paris, took its name from the great museum.