The image of furniture: department stores and the trade in interior decoration designs

2018 ◽  
pp. 152-190
Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Scale Model ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Art Form

Chapter 4 examines department store retail in the second half of the nineteenth century to understand how the interior decorating schemes proposed on paper by the various professions discussed above could materialize in the homes of middle-class consumers. In doing so, the chapter argues that department stores were eager to align themselves with the thriving market in artistic interior decoration designs, contributing to the further popularization of this new art form. Through their full-scale model rooms inside the store as much as through their widely distributed and highly illustrated furniture catalogs, the Grands Magasins du Louvre, Au Bon Marché, Le Printemps, Au Petit St.-Thomas, and the Grands Magasins Dufayel brought the image of the most modern furniture and matching interiors to life, right in front of customers’ eyes. By selling the same furniture combinations and decorative schemes in a variety of materials, these stores catered to several social groups at once. Further, by offering personalized interior decorating services to those customers who wished to obtain an exclusive décor, French department stores in the second half of the nineteenth century became themselves early forerunners of the twentieth-century profession of interior designer.

Modern Dating and Respectability on Trial

2019 ◽  
pp. 146-170
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
German Society ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
The Face ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Legal Strategy ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Tobias Harper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Up

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Global and Local: Retail Transformation and the Department Store in Britain and Japan, 1900–1940

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rika Fujioka ◽  
Jon Stobart
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Incremental Development ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Global And Local

Department stores are often seen as transformative of both retail and wider social practices. This article offers a comparative analysis of department stores in early twentieth-century Britain and Japan to assess the extent to which there were universal qualities defining the operation, practices, and experience of department stores and to explore the ways in which they might be seen as transforming retailing in the two countries. Despite similarities in their origin, organization, and service to customers, we highlight the greater diversity of British department stores and their incremental development. Japanese stores were a far more powerful force for change because they formed part of a concerted and conscious program of modernization.

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Department Store ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Opera, aesthetics of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Original Function ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Greek Myths ◽  
Dramatic Action

Opera, which may be defined as a dramatic action set in large part to music, is an inherently unstable art form, more so than any other. It has been characteristic of its practitioners and critics to call it periodically to order, in idioms which vary but carry much the same message: the music exists to further the drama. This has often been taken to be a matter of settling the priority of two elements: music and text. But in fact three are involved: music, text and plot (or action). Opera began very abruptly in Northern Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, partly as the result of discussions about its possibility. To begin with, familiar Greek myths were employed, set in the vernacular, with simple accompaniments so that every word could be heard. This led to pre-eminence for the singers and for spectacle. After each wave of excess – vocal prowess, dance interludes, stilted plots and texts, then once again, in the nineteenth century, empty display, and later gargantuan orchestras – there was a movement of revolt. Philosophers rarely took part in these aesthetic disputes, most of them being uninterested in music, and possibly more relevantly, being uninterested in any subject which can only be studied in historical terms. But it is fruitless to think about opera apart from its manifestations; every great operatic composer makes his own treaty between the potentially warring elements, Wagner being the most passionate propagandist for his own conception. In the twentieth century the aesthetics of opera have become pluralistic, as has, to an unprecedented degree, the form itself. The perpetual danger is that opera should degenerate into entertainment, and it is always the same message that recalls it to its original function – one which most spectators and listeners are happy to ignore: opera is a form of drama.

scholarly journals Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jean-Michel Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Space Compression

The Introduction presents the historiographical context and main themes of the book. It situates the book within discussions surrounding the process of scientific innovation and industrialization during the Sattelzeit, the process of ‘time-space’ compression associated with the communications revolution, the role of networks of transport and communication in the creation of regional and national identities, and the emergence of a new, connected middle class during the nineteenth century. Bringing together these narratives, the Introduction introduces the book’s principal argument—that, once shorn of its normative connotations, modernization remains a useful concept to illuminate the process through which state and society were transformed during the nineteenth century, and that networks played a crucial role in producing the profoundly ambivalent experience of modernity most often associated with the turn of the twentieth century. It ends with a description of the structure of the book as a whole.

Epilogue: The presentness of historicism: the Musée centennal du mobilier et de la décoration and the legacy of proto-interior designers

2018 ◽  
pp. 227-234
Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Art Deco ◽  
Napoleon Iii ◽  
Interior Designers

The Epilogue charts the career of Georges Rémon, artistic grandchild of Pierre-Luc Cicéri. Rémon was an inventor of interior designs that took the historicist, themed aesthetic to a new level. Equally well-versed in revivalist and Art Nouveau interiors, Rémon also invented interior decorating schemes that paid lip service to the more recent political regimes of the nineteenth century (Second Republic style, Louis-Philippe style, Napoléon III style) as well as decorative settings in what would later become the Art Deco style. His workshop designed not only period rooms for the 1900 universal exhibition but also interiors of several ocean liners that brought the French aesthetic to America. His career is thus a perfect example of how the artistic output of upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, illustrators, collectors and department store managers, directed towards the private interior, invented a “system,” which saw that unity and harmony, as expressed through one main theme and coordinated by the same person, would guide the design of each interior. Without the invention of this “system,” the twentieth-century profession of the interior designer might never have been born.

Buying for the Baby

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-136
Author(s):  
Lara Freidenfelds
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
First Trimester ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mail Order ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Due Date ◽  
Early Twenty

During the nineteenth century Americans increasingly bought rather than made their material possessions, and in the early twentieth century a robust market for baby and children’s goods emerged, via department stores and mail order catalogs such as the Sears catalog. In the mid-twentieth century marketers grew increasingly sophisticated and increasingly regarded expectant parents as a lucrative market, heeding the advice of market researchers such as Ernest Dichter. By the early twenty-first-century marketers could purchase first-trimester marketing lists reaped from online due date predictors, and a great deal of advertising was aimed at pregnant women at an early stage of pregnancy, when miscarriage is likely.

“An Appetite to Be Pretty”

Working Girls ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 127-155
Author(s):  
Patricia Tilburg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Defining Moment ◽  
Lunch Break ◽  
Garment Worker ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Consumption ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

This chapter considers a defining moment of the working Parisienne’s day to which early twentieth-century French observers returned again and again: midi. The noon lunch break afforded Parisian artists, writers, and tourists alike a daily glimpse of the “fairies” of the city’s luxury garment workshops as they took to the boulevards and parks for an hour in the sun—an hour imagined to consist of flirtation, window-shopping, laughter, and, I will establish, conspicuous under-eating. Indeed, crucial to the picturesque allure of the lunchtime seductions that filled popular midinette literature was the notion of the female garment worker as a frivolous under-eater cheerfully forfeiting food for fashion and pleasure. No longer the tragically starving workingwoman of nineteenth-century fiction and art, nor her virtuous, anorectic middle-class sister, whose physical wasting increased their moral fortitude, the under-eating midinette of the early twentieth century was envisioned doing so as a means of engaging more fully in the capitalist marketplace, making her body a more appealing advertisement for and object of urban consumption. This cultural fantasy of the midinette’s lunch hour, which fetishized the supposed moral precariousness of her lifestyle as well as the sparseness of her diet, was echoed by social reformers, who, in this same period, sought to carve out spaces for workingwomen’s lunches that kept them from the cafés and parks where they were believed to flirt much and eat little.

Letter Writing Among Poets

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Letter Writing ◽  
Art Form

This is the first book to look at poets’ letters as an art form. Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last 200 years. Poets discussed include Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley in the nineteenth century and Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.

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