RETAILING,
SHOPPING
AND THE
HOME 1500-2000
28 APRIL 2004
Programme Abstracts
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RETAILING,
SHOPPING
28 APRIL 2004
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| Programme
10.00-10.30 Registration and coffee (MA202) 10.30-11.00
MA202
11.00-11.30
MA202
11.30-12.00
Board Room, gound floor, MA building
12.00-12.30
MA202
12.30-13.00
MA202
13.00-14.00
Board Room, gound floor, MA building
14.00-14.30
MA202
14.30-15.00
MA202
15.00-15.30
Board Room, gound floor, MA building
15.30-16.00
MA202
16.00-16.30
MA202
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From Liberty to Lifestyle: How to buy the complete look in 1880s London E-mail: s.ashmore@lcf.linst.ac.uk By the 1880s, Liberty’s shop on Regent Street had become an idiosyncratic department store. Although following the typical pattern of other contemporary stores, Liberty eschewed functional goods in favour of specialised luxury merchandise, initially obtained almost entirely from non-European sources. It was an oriental bazaar in the heart of London’s evolving West End. Liberty employed contemporary marketing techniques: seductive window display, atmospheric interiors, advertising, product placement, and catalogues, to sell a range of goods that could eventually supply a complete, if westernised, ‘oriental’ look for the ‘artistic’ home. Starting with dress silk, Liberty progressed to a range of ‘eastern’ home furnishings, before developing dress for women and children, furniture and domestic accessories, often with the help of leading, though anonymous, professional designers. The shop’s founder remarked that he had become ‘a mere adjective’; his name had developed a marketable personality. A century later, in a period when London became a focus of world fashion, British designers such as Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki started small shops and individual design styles that also became ‘brands.’ In the present era of extreme branding, this paper examines a pioneering example of the genre. Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme, University of Antwerp, Belgium Consumer changes and commercial circuits: Consuming and retailing in early modern Antwerp E-mail: ilya.vandamme@ua.ac.be Bruno.blonde@ua.ac.be This paper focuses on the retailing and the consuming of durable consumables in early modern Antwerp. It tackles retail and consumer (r)evolutions simultaneously, thus seeing them as different sides of the same development Antwerp went through in the 17th and 18th centuries. The major goal of this paper is to demonstrate that we can only fully understand early modern retail changes (both from a qualitative and quantitative viewpoint) when simultaneously consumer changes are taken into account. For making this claim three distinct changes in the buying of home-goods will be analyzed, thus considering their impact on retailing: (1) The growing dependence on fashion – In the centuries investigated, the homes of Antwerp consumers became much more fashion-sensitive. (2) The growing diversity in goods – The eighteenth-century material culture was also marked by a growing diversity in goods. The number of options open to decorate the homes enlarged considerably. (3) The slackening durability of goods – A third structural shift in the pre-industrial material culture (partially overlapping and explaining the trends described above) is the general tendency towards a new consumer pattern in which less durable, but equally cheap commodities were increasingly preferred. Irene Cieraad, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands The milkman always rang twice .... The effects of changed provisioning on Dutch domestic architecture in the twentieth century E-mail: i.cieraad@chello.nl It is seldom realized that door-to-door delivery had a huge impact on not only Dutch domestic architecture but also on the internal structuring and ritual zoning of domestic space. When the supermarket superseded door-to-door delivery in the late sixties, it revolutionized the structuring of domestic space. Newly built family houses lacked the traditional hallway, which once was the housewife's `runway' between the kitchen in the back and the front door to answer the door to suppliers. On a massive scale houses built in the twenties and thirties were renovated by integrating the space of the former hallway into the newly created `open kitchen living'. In doing so they disconnected the kitchen from the front door. However, also the weekly visits to the supermarket by car had their impact on the structuring of domestic space and the indoor routing of the shoppings. Considering the limited storing facilities in newly built houses, the conservati-on of weekly quantities of fresh and frozen food became problematic. A problem which was hitherto unknown to urban or suburban house-holds. (My students have collected ample material in describing the shopping and storing protocols in their parental homes). Richard Coopey, University of Aberystwyth and Dil Porter University College Worcester, UK Agency mail order revisited: home shopping in the UK E-mail: rcc@aber.ac.uk d.porter@worc.ac.uk Recent developments, not least the Competition Commission’s decision (22/01/04) to approve the Barclay brothers £590m acquisition of the GUS home shopping division, have prompted us to revisit our work on agency mail order (AMO). In the last ten years the corporate landscape of the UK home shopping has changed dramatically; the ‘Big Five’ companies that dominated the sector since the 1930s having been reduced to four key players, with the new Littlewoods/ex-GUS combination controlling 70 per cent of the market. These changes are largely attributable to the decline of AMO, the retail form that has characterised home shopping in the UK for much of its history. AMO – where a spare-time agent buys for herself and other customers who order goods and make weekly payments through her – predominated in the UK to an extent unparalleled elsewhere. This reflected the success of UK mail order retailers in exploiting pre-existing neighbourhood networks, enabling them to compete effectively with High Street stores. They also offered credit facilities that were generally unavailable to their customers elsewhere. The intention is to revisit AMO as a retail form, focusing especially on those features that rendered it vulnerable in a climate of rapid economic, social and technological change at the end of the twentieth century. As deindustrialisation eroded working class communities, new forms of credit became available and internet shopping began to make an impact, the rationale for AMO was progressively undermined. Fiona Hackney, Falmouth College of Art, UK Magazine as Shop: Marketing the Modern in British Women’s Magazines 1919-1939 E-mail: fiona@hackney20.fsnet.co.uk The emergence of the self-consciously modern magazine that used the appeal of clean lines, white-space, quality photographic reproduction and colour to ‘sell the page,’ as one commentator put it, to a mass audience coincided with the promotion of the modern home and new ideals about a feminine, if distinctly suburban, modernity. Magazines such as the monthly Modern Woman and the new weekly Woman with their pages of illustrations and photographic reproductions displaying new interior ideas and the latest ‘labour-saving’ gadgets prioritised looking, positioning the reader in the role of flaneuse. Along with the cinema, this constituted a mode of engagement with the modern world that arguably paralleled the department store in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As with the department store, the magazine as shop (many offered a shopping service purchasing items for readers who could not get ‘up to town’) encouraged the dream of consumption. However, unlike the phantasmagoria of earlier years, the dream offered by the modern magazine was decidedly rational: a dream of cleanliness, self-improvement and a better quality of life that was for the first time becoming accessible to a majority rather than a minority of British citizens. Margaret Ponsonby, University of Wolverhampton, UK Provincial Homemaking as Consumption Practice E-mail: m.ponsonby@wlv.ac.uk Provincial taste is usually used as a pejorative term. Rather than viewing it as something worthy of consideration for its particular qualities and characteristics it is dismissed as merely the poor relation of London fashion. The exception has been regional or ‘vernacular’ styles that are treated as naive or quaint. The truth is that the majority of people lived in the provinces and their taste in home furnishings were neither slavishly fashionable or quaintly vernacular. Their homes displayed distinct taste that combined an interest in fashion with the practicalities of life in country villages and market towns, the availability of goods and the expectations of friends and family. To examine provincial taste this paper will focus on the period 1800-1850 by which time cabinetmakers were becoming established and supplying locally made goods that were clearly influenced by fashionable ideas, but before the market became homogenised due to the influx of centrally made furniture. Case studies will be used of consumers who were able to afford London-made goods but chose to patronise local cabinetmakers and upholsterers. Their consumption practises will be examined in order to address three questions. Were there reasons other than economic and practical for provincial homemakers to buy furnishings locally made? What aspects of locally produced goods were favoured? How was provincial taste distinct? Yasuko Suga, Tsuda College, Japan "Artistic and Commercial Japan": Japanese leather paper in British homes E-mail: chaconne@zb.cyberhome.ne.jp I focus on a trading company, Rottmann, Strome and Co., which had stores both in Britain and Japan in the late nineteenth century. They established an exclusive contract with a Japanese governmental paper-making factory when the government wanted to export leather paper as a new domestic material (for wallpaper, furniture and screens), to the European and American markets, in order to acquire foreign exchange. First, I examine how leather paper was invented after Japanese isolation policy ended and how British designers and merchants were attracted to it through international exhibitions and trips. Secondly, I discuss Rottmann, Strome and Co.'s advertising strategy from D. Cannadine's view on the importance of "domestic" similarities in British imperialism. Domestification of foreignness by design control, and emphasis on modernity represented by its washability and cleanliness, were sales points of Japanese leather. Thirdly, I analyse the supply and demand of the leather paper goods, using Holland and Son's Daybooks, contemporary perioricals, and Japanese primary sources, and explore the process of commercializing Japan and the pragmatic consumption of Japonisme.
Claire Walsh, University of Warwick, UK Why it was better to shop yourself – Shopping for the household in early-modern England and the problem of servants E-mail: walshclaire@btopenworld.com This paper would consider the particular nature of shopping for the household in England in the period 1660-1800, using evidence from letters, diaries, pocket books, guides to servants and shopping manuals. The conventional wisdom has been that mistresses of households with servants would have sent their servants to shop for food and basic supplies. This paper, however, argues that this was not the case, and that it was considered far better for the manager of the household to carry out such mundane shopping herself, despite the time and effort involved. The skills involved in shopping – haggling over price, testing the quality of unpreserved foodstuffs, establishing relationships with retailers, comparing and contrasting – required a level of application which mistresses were reluctant to trust to servants. In exploring the reasons for this lack of trust, light is thrown on the complexities and difficulties of the practical task of shopping in the period, and on the ways that household shopping in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries differed quite distinctly from shopping today. |
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Page author: Laura
Ugolini
Last updated: July 2004