The Modern Interior

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spectacle to entice customers inside them and to stimulate desire and
pleasure so that consuming, for the middle-class women who were their
first customers, was perceived as a leisure activity rather than work. In the
French department stores, Galeries Lafayettes and Bon Marché among
them, consumers were given a sense of being practically exposed to the
sky but nonetheless enclosed with a fantasy world. 12 This engraving of an
interior in the Bon Marché store in Paris reveals an open, multi-storey,
iron and steel structure. The cold, industrial nature of those materials was
visually offset, however, by the presence of a variety of goods – items of
clothing, lengths of fabrics and rugs among them – which were suspended
from the balconies of the different floors and on lines hung between the
building’s structural columns. One writer has described some of the ways
in which that sense of being in a fantasy world was achieved visually.
‘Display managers learned the new color theory and exploited color, often
in the most adroit ways’, he has written. ‘They decorated with puffed archways
of colored silk; they hung garlands of flowers, draperies of colored
plush, cages of colored birds. The biggest stores designed rooms . . .
around a single color scheme. Green in all its tints and shades prevailed
from basement to roof at William Filene’s Sons Company in Boston in
1901.’ 13 By that time furniture sets and room settings were beginning to be
used both inside American stores and in their windows to achieve an exotic,
luxurious look. 14 ‘To obtain the desired effect of “Parisianism”, store
managers imitated French salons . . . and even copied the complete inter -
ior of a “real Parisian boulevard appartement”’, one writer has explained,
demonstrating, in anticipation of the hotels and shopping malls of Las
Vegas several decades later, just how effective evocations of the interior
could be in stimulating the imaginations and fantasies of consumers. 15 The
evocation of the private sphere in the public context satisfied the requirements
of familiarity, voyeurism, curiosity and wish-fulfilment. However
the ‘spectacularization’ of the department store applied equally to restaur -
ants, hotels, theatres and dry goods stores. 16
By the end of the 1920s the furniture sections of American department
stores had fully embraced the modern interior design style, known
as Art Deco, that had become popular in Europe following the 1925
Exposition Internationales des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, and
they had begun to display complete modern room sets, sometimes in
partnership with museums. A mixture of modern French and American
designs in room settings were shown at both John Wanamaker and
Macy’s in New York in 1927. Macy’s cleared its floor of traditional pieces