Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge Read online

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  • • •

  BRITISH PRAISE FOR

  SHOPPING, SEDUCTION & MR. SELFRIDGE

  “Gripping and excellently researched.”

  —Literary Review

  “Lindy Woodhead paints a colourful picture of the American who turned Edwardian England on to shopping, and who transformed shopping into a democratic sport, entertainment for the masses and a truly capitalist endeavour.”

  —Women’s Wear Daily

  “In this lively and compelling biography, Lindy Woodhead follows the glory years of a charismatic big spender, whose ill-advised expansion would eventually be his downfall. Her pacy narrative takes in his glamorous women, his social set, the sexing up of shopping, and seismic shifts in society.”

  —Director

  “Far more than just a profile of one of the world’s great shopkeepers, Lindy Woodhead’s biography of Harry Gordon Selfridge provides a rich social history in a time of great change.”

  —Spectator

  “Perhaps the first English shop owner to identify shopping as thrilling, sexy entertainment … Lindy Woodhead tells not only the story of the rise and dramatic fall of Selfridge, the man, but also provides an enthralling description of fashion, politics, music and dance, the arts, the sciences, advertising and the use of the media.”

  —Evening Standard

  2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2012 by Lindy Woodhead

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in 2007 and 2008 in the United Kingdom as Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge in hardcover and paperback respectively, and in a revised edition in 2012 by Profile Books, Ltd, London.

  Photo credits are located on this page.

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-8505-4

  www.atrandom.com

  Title-page photo of Selfridge’s department store from English Heritage

  Cover design: Beverly Leung

  Cover photograph: © ITV 2012; photographer: John Rogers

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  “Woman was what the shops were fighting over when they competed, it was woman whom they ensnared with the constant trap of their bargains, after stunning her with their displays.

  They had aroused new desires in her flesh, they were a huge temptation to which she must fatally succumb, first of all by giving in to the purchases of a good housewife, then seduced by vanity and finally consumed.”

  —EMILE ZOLA,

  Au Bonheur des Dames (1881)

  “When I die I want it said of me that I dignified and ennobled commerce.”

  —HARRY GORDON SELFRIDGE

  (1856–1947)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Illustrations

  Introduction: CONSUMING PASSIONS

  1. THE FORTUNES OF WAR

  2. GIVING THE LADIES WHAT THEY WANT

  3. THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT

  4. FULL SPEED AHEAD

  5. GOING IT ALONE

  6. BUILDING THE DREAM

  7. TAKEOFF

  8. LIGHTING UP THE NIGHT

  9. WAR WORK, WAR PLAY

  10. CASTLES IN THE AIR

  11. VICES AND VIRTUES

  12. MAKING WAVES

  13. TOUT VA

  14. FLIGHTS OF FANCY

  15. OVER AND OUT

  Photo Inserts

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Harry Gordon Selfridge and Rosalie Selfridge on their honeymoon in Newport, Rhode Island, November 1890

  2. Lois Selfridge, Harry’s mother, in 1906 at the age of seventy-one

  3. Harry Selfridge, ca. 1910

  4. Oxford Street at the corner of Duke Street, ca. 1907, before the construction of Selfridge’s

  5. One of the many exploratory proposals for extensions to Selfridge’s drawn by Sir John Burnet and Frank Atkinson

  6. One of the series of advertisements commissioned to launch Selfridge’s in 1909

  7. A horse-drawn bus advertising Selfridge’s

  8. One of Selfridge’s advertisements created for popular women’s magazines

  9. An afternoon fashion show on the Selfridge’s roof terrace, ca. 1925

  10. Harry Selfridge, Harley Granville-Barker and Arnold Bennett, 1911

  11. An interior of Selfridge’s, ca. 1910

  12. A Selfridge’s window display, ca. 1925

  13. Harry and his daughter Rosalie Selfridge at Chicago’s Grand Passenger Station, 1911

  14. A Selfridge’s delivery van with women drivers in WWI

  15. The French chanteuse Gaby Deslys

  16. A fashion show of leather flying suits on the store’s rooftop Observation Tower, 1919

  17. A striking tennis-themed window display

  18. Highcliffe Castle, Christchurch

  19. Harry Selfridge and his daughter Violette de Sibour, 1928

  20. The Conqueror moored in Southampton Water

  21. Harry Selfridge playing poker with friends aboard the Conqueror, 1930

  22. The Dolly Sisters with Harry and his daughter Beatrice in 1926

  23. Otis escalators were installed at Selfridge’s in 1926

  24. A surrealist window display promoting bath towels, complete with bathing lady

  25. Selfridge’s cosmetics buyer, Nellie Elt, by the Elizabeth Arden counter, ca. 1925

  26. The film director Frank Capra signing the autograph window at Selfridge’s in 1938

  27. Harry Selfridge’s last mistress, the actress Marcelle Rogez

  28. Selfridge’s exterior decoration for the coronation of King George VI in May 1937

  INTRODUCTION

  CONSUMING PASSIONS

  THE RISE OF THE DEPARTMENT STORE—OR WHAT IN PARIS were more gracefully called les grands magasins—in the second half of the nineteenth century was a phenomenon that encompassed fashion, advertising, entertainment, emergent new technology, architecture, and, above all, seduction. These forces evolved to merge into businesses that Emile Zola astutely called “the great cathedrals of shopping,” and vast fortunes were made by the men who owned them as they tapped into the female passion for shopping. But arguably no one man grasped the concept of consumption as sensual entertainment better than the maverick American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened his eponymous store on London’s Oxford Street in 1909.

  In building the West End’s first fully fledged department store, he quite literally changed everything about the way Londoners shopped. His visionary, larger-than-life Edwardian building perfectly reflected the character of its founder—the only modest thing about him being his height. It was Harry Gordon Selfridge who positioned the perfume and cosmetics department immediately inside the main entrance, a move that changed the layout—and turnover—of the sales floor forevermore. Selfridge created window dressing as an art form, pioneered in-store promotions and fashion shows, and offered customer service and facilities previously unheard of in Britain. Above all, he gave his customers fun. At a time when there was no radio or television, when cinema was in its infancy, Selfridge’s in Oxford Street offered custom
ers entertainment as fascinating as that at a science museum, with as much glamour as on any music-hall stage. In giving his customers a unique “day out,” Harry Selfridge proudly boasted that after Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, his store was “the third biggest tourist attraction in town.” The public could buy much of what they needed at Selfridge’s, and much that they never knew they wanted until they were seduced by the tantalizing displays.

  Harry Selfridge perfected the art of publicity, spending more money on advertising than any retailer of his era. A consummate showman, he himself became a celebrity at a time when there were few identifiable, exciting personalities that the public could see at close quarters. When he arrived at work, there was invariably a cluster of customers waiting to meet and greet the “famous Mr. Selfridge.” His ritualistic “morning tour” of the store, where his staff of thousands lined up anxiously by their counters in eager anticipation of a personal nod of approval from their boss, was the curtain-raiser to the daily show at Selfridge’s—the only difference being that for his audience, entrance was free.

  There was no shortage of shops or stores in London and many other wealthy provincial cities in Britain when—after twenty-five years working at the celebrated store Marshall Field & Company in Chicago—Selfridge masterminded his grand plan to open in the imperial capital. The industrial transformation that had occurred in Britain had created a new spending population that was proud to show off its wealth by acquiring consumer goods, and retailers scrambled to cope with an almost insatiable demand. The new rich had large houses to equip, a prodigious number of children—not to mention an army of servants—to dress, and their own position in society to promote. Happily for retailers, conspicuous consumption, always so crucial in defining wealth and status, had found itself a much larger market.

  That fashion became big business was because of big dresses. In the 1850s, when both the young Queen Victoria and the French style icon, the Empress Eugénie, both enthusiastically embraced the new caged crinoline, clothes billowed to unprecedented proportions. Women of substance were dressed from head to toe in as much as forty yards of fabric. As well as a muslin shift and cotton or silk underwear—not to mention the ubiquitous corset—the ensemble had hoops underneath, and at least three if not four petticoats, in layers varying from flannel through muslin to white, starched cotton. Add to this a lace fichu, bead-trimmed cape, fur or embroidered muff, hat, gloves, parasol, stockings, button boots and reticule—and consider that the entire paraphernalia was usually changed once a day and often again in the evening—and one can begin to comprehend the costs, not to mention profits, in supplying it all. As if this bonanza wasn’t enough for retailers who stocked all of the above and ran vast workrooms making the finished gowns, there was the ritual of mourning the dead. This meant the whole thing all over again—but this time in black. Many a Victorian linen-draper’s fortune was made merely by operating a successful “mourning department,” and one of the first diversifications into “added-value customer services” was to offer funeral facilities—right down to supplying dyed black ostrich feathers for the horses that pulled the hearse.

  As dress reformers railed against “the tyranny of women’s fashion,” the redoubtable feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton used dress as a topic of debate: “Men say we are frail. But I’d like to see a man who can bear what we do, laced up in steel-ribbed corsets, with hoops, heavy skirts, trains, panniers, chignons, and dozens of hairpins sticking in our scalps—cooped up in the house year after year. How would men like that?”

  The answer is that the men—or at least those who owned stores and factories—liked it very much. Fortunes were made in the textile trade—in cotton, wool, linen and silk, growing it, weaving it, dyeing it, and selling it. Associated businesses making all manner of goods from dye, needles and pins, ribbons and sewing thread to bleach and starch boomed. And as distribution systems improved, merchandise could be moved farther and farther from its point of production to its point of sale, meaning stores could offer a wider selection of goods than ever before.

  The nineteenth-century passion for fashion wasn’t the only factor in the rise of the great department stores. Just as the growth of credit had led to an explosion of shops in the seventeenth century, so the ability to buy in bulk—also on credit—benefited the new breed of retailers. The prosperous middle classes may have wanted quality, but above all, their Victorian ethics demanded value for money. Economies of buying in bulk enabled larger retailers to reduce their prices far below those of smaller, specialist shops. These independent shopkeepers—who had for decades catered to the upper echelons of society—were restricted by their credit systems. The richer the customer, the longer he or she took to pay. It wasn’t unusual for accounts to be settled annually, and many specialty shops went bankrupt as a result. The emergent stores, however, were mainly cash businesses, with perhaps a monthly charge account offered to more select personal customers. Such stores developed awesome buying power—particularly as many of them operated a wholesale division servicing sales outposts in the Empire or throughout rural America—and they didn’t hesitate to use it as a weapon against their suppliers, who were obliged not just to provide goods against a ninety-day payment policy, but often also to store merchandise for phased delivery.

  The great stores acted as a catalyst for change in women’s lives. For the first time women were able to “cross the line,” venturing out in public to buy goods for themselves, to experience shopping and be observed doing it without in any way jeopardizing their reputations. Not all stores were the size of cathedrals, but certainly fashionable women in London, Manchester, and Newcastle, and farther afield in Paris, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, were spending a lot more time shopping than going to church. Small wonder when the stores were light, bright, warm, and enticing. Neither did these stores cater exclusively to the carriage trade. The department store was the anchor in a rapidly expanding egalitarian, urban society, drawing its customer base from a mix of old and new money, and able to offer not just fixed prices but also sale bargains. For many people these stores were infinitely more glamorous and comfortable than their own homes. In 1880s Chicago, Harry Selfridge had pioneered the policy of browsing, making Marshall Field’s an ideal location for those who were “just looking,” and opened a “bargain basement” for those on a budget. He had also introduced a restaurant, a reading room, a crèche and a ladies’ restroom complete with nurse, and so could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women: “I came along just at the time when women wanted to step out on their own. They came to the store and realized some of their dreams.”

  He made his own dreams come true in turn-of-the-century London where, at the time he arrived, compared to the giant American department stores and grands magasins of Paris, many of London’s “stores” were just rather large shops. In the days before lifts and escalators, and in part due to onerous building restrictions, retail space was restricted to the ground, first, and possibly second floors, with stockrooms below and workrooms above. Stores like Swan & Edgar, Dickens & Jones, and Debenham & Freebody had in-house catering for their staff, who ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner on-site. More often than not, staff lived in a store-tied hostel or in a grim and cold dormitory tucked away on the upper floor. Young people who had eschewed residential domestic service for jobs in retailing soon realized they had merely swapped the servants’ hall for the staff canteen. Working hours were grueling. When West End shopkeepers gave evidence before the Parliamentary Select Committee on Shop Hours in 1886, it transpired that average working hours were from 8:15 A.M. to 7:30 P.M. six days a week, with half an hour off for lunch and fifteen minutes for tea. If romance flourished on the shop floor, it was because workers had little time or opportunity to meet elsewhere.

  Most leading drapery stores had, for the main part, evolved from a background in haberdashery, often expanding their floor space by buying sites to the left and right, knocking them through into a rabbit warren of levels rather
than rebuilding from scratch. From the main street entrance, customers entered a showroom space literally stuffed full with everything from garter elastic and dress pins to embroidery silks and bootlaces. The amount of time spent by a sales assistant in selling a shilling’s worth of such goods—haberdashery being the training ground for all apprentices—was totally disproportionate to the return. The mind-set of the day, however, was that ladies who bought their buttons would move farther on in—or up to the first floor—to buy silks, satins, laces, and lingerie.

  Selfridge himself had already seen London’s retailers and those of Manchester, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris when he first toured Europe in 1888. Though admiring the William Morris fabrics in Liberty’s and impressed by Whiteley’s in Bayswater, in general he found the rest of the city’s shops and stores disappointing. He particularly disliked floorwalkers. “Is Sir intending to buy something?” asked one supercilious man. “No, I’m just looking,” replied Selfridge, at which the floorwalker dropped his pseudo-smart voice and snarled, “Then ’op it mate!” Selfridge never forgot the incident and refused to hire “walkers” when he opened in Oxford Street two decades later. Instead he employed knowledgeable, well-informed sales assistants who loved where they worked and who idolized their boss, whom they called “the Chief.”

  The time Selfridge spent studying Au Bon Marché in Paris was crucial to his development as a retailing revolutionary. When he first saw the store in 1888, the final phase of rebuilding and expansion, orchestrated by the architect Louis-Charles Boileau and the brilliant engineer Gustave Eiffel, had been completed. What had started as a minor magasin de nouveautés opened by the Videau brothers on the fashionable rue de Bac in 1825 had grown to a massive enterprise under the direction of their ex-employee Aristide Boucicaut. Au Bon Marché was a masterpiece, and it set the standard for fine shopping throughout Europe. Monsieur Boucicaut was a great innovator, imposing fixed pricing, annual sales, an “exchange” or “money back” guarantee and entrée libre (no obligation to buy) as well as running the first French retailing establishment to sell a huge variety of merchandise ranging from homewares, toys, and perfume to sports equipment and children’s clothes. Indeed, the bourgeois, taciturn Aristide Boucicaut, ably assisted by his thrifty wife, Marguerite, took the Paris emporium to such majestic heights that it became the inspiration for Emile Zola’s seminal novel Au Bonheur des Dames, a book so popular with business historians that it has tended to give the impression that innovation in retailing was the exclusive preserve of the French.