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Petrov, Julia. "Window Shopping: Commercial Inspiration for Fashion in the Museum." Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. 31–62. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350049024.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 00:32 UTC. Copyright © Julia Petrov 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 WINDOW SHOPPING: COMMERCIAL INSPIRATION FOR FASHION IN THE MUSEUM In his work on the “exhibitionary complex,” Tony Bennett (1996) showed how nineteenth-century museums and galleries were intimately connected in their design and conception to the expanding commercial architecture of the same period. The technical possibilities and visual experiences of industrial exhibitions and shopping arcades found analogous applications in museum spaces. As Mackie noted, “Both the retail shop and the public repository are designed for the display of information that is predominantly visual: looking is a means for possession as well as knowledge” (1996: 325). This blurring of commercial and intellectual cultures within the museum continues to create unease and controversy, particularly in the case of fashion exhibitions (Anaya 2013; Gamerman 2014). This chapter investigates how the introduction of fashion—an increasingly important economic and social product in the industrial period—into museums created new connections and tensions between these two worlds. It was because of its position between the disciplines of economy and history that historical fashion entered and was interpreted in museums. Museum objects are often said to have “historical value,” connoting their perceived importance in documenting or calling to mind some external event popularly held to be of cultural importance. Historical fashion in museums has worked with and against more worldly notions of value with contradictory outcomes. In this chapter, case study material will inform a review of the early connections between museums and commercial contexts for fashion, the key ontological differences between fashion in commercial and museal spheres (in particular, its move from the “now” to the “then”), the partnerships and echoes between museums and the fashion industry, and the promotion of fashion consumerism in museum exhibitions, 32 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS either through valorizing the wardrobes of fashion mavens, highlighting designers and brands, or by imitating fashion consumption environments in exhibit design. Commerce and culture in the 1840s–1850s Bennett (1995, 1996) has convincingly demonstrated that museums, galleries, and other public collections arose at the same time as what McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb (1982) and McCracken (1988) have called the “consumer revolution,” which predated and indeed may have caused the Industrial Revolution. Consequently, they utilized a similar visual vocabulary; however, it must be noted that, at least initially, the objects on display at museums and at shopping centers were different: the British Museum, for example, was largely a museum of ancient archaeological artifacts and not of the material culture of the everyday. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, contemporary periodical sources bear out a slippage of terminology and approach between the two. For example, in Albert Smith’s 1842 Punch series on “The Physiology of the London Idler,” the Pantheon Bazaar was described as combining “the attractions of the Zoological Gardens and National Gallery, together with a condensed essence of all the most entertaining shop-windows,” and in particular, “the al fresco and gratuitous exhibition of wax-work at the door of the tailor’s opposite” was highlighted as an attraction of note (1842: n.p.). The following year, Punch ran a series of articles on “The Gratuitous Exhibitions of London,” which was a thematic compendium of amusing metropolitan sights for the flâneur-about-town. The term “exhibition” was used loosely: the suggestions included some public displays, but the majority was comprised of entertaining street scenes. Shopping arcades were thought to be particularly filled with opportunities for diversion, and at least one installment was devoted solely to one of these: the Lowther Arcade. Here, the writing style approached that of the growing genre of travel guidebooks (Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, first published in 1836, for example) and the metaphor of the wax museum was obvious: The stranger will not fail to be struck by the representation of two headless gentlemen in a hunting-coat and dressing-gown at an adjacent tailor’s. They are placed behind a brass barrier, and have something very awful in their appearance. The legend attached to them is unknown; but they possibly represent the guillotined victims of some revolution—probably the same in which fell the decapitated ladies at the staymaker’s in Berners’-street, whose heads are supposed to have migrated to the hair-dresser’s in the covered passage of Burlington, which is somewhat similar in its features to that of Lowther—arcades ambo. (“Gratuitous Exhibitions” 1843: 235) WINDOW SHOPPING: COMMERCIAL INSPIRATION 33 Even at this early date, the author and the reader clearly shared in a mutual literacy of the waxwork exhibition: the deployment of a physical barrier to produce an effect of awe, the macabre combination of prosthetic bodies with the apparent relics of those they represent, and the expectation that the viewer responds to the sight by recalling a historical event and emotionally responding to it (see also Sandberg 2003). Here, and in the previous quotation, clothing displayed for commercial purposes was marked out as a key item of interest. The conventions of display1 from the commercial sphere were, even at this early stage, connected to those within museums and “heritage” attractions; a continuity of visual strategies common to both spheres is evident across the primary source material. It was not only male urban wanderers who were seen as natural audiences for fashion exhibitions. In 1847, Punch suggested that the British Museum might be of more interest to women2 if it included fashion within its remit: Fashion and dress always present points of interest to the sex we are desirous of enticing within the walls of the British Museum; and we propose, therefore, to invest the great national depository with attractions for the female visitor, by commencing a collection of the newest patterns in caps, shawls, bonnets, visites, and other articles of attire, which come home to us all—in bandboxes, with tolerably long bills tacked on to them. (“Hints to the British Museum”: 59) Although the British Museum’s commissioners did not act on Punch’s suggestion of institutionalizing fashion in its galleries,3 Victorian Londoners, male and female, could nevertheless continue to enjoy the spectacle in commercial venues. Their informal skills of observation and maneuvring in public spaces would have been equally valuable in a gallery of costume. The museal mind-set was applied to fashion in other contexts. As an 1874 report from Paris mused, “What are the long lines of the boulevard windows and those of the Rue de la Paix but an exhibition of clothes? From hat to shoe, from innermost flannel to outermost velvet, every style and article of human costume is exhibited” (Hooper 1874: 624). Indeed, the materiality of the museum was not limited to the interiors of public collections, as women’s fashionable magazines used the word “museum” to mean a collection or compendium even in a literary sense (e.g., The Lady’s Monthly Museum; Or, Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, an English monthly women’s magazine published between 1798 and 1832, or the Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance published between 1832 and 1870, its title a clear derivation of the notion of a cabinet of curiosities). It could, as contemporary journalism demonstrates, also be found along the high street (Figure 2.1): 34 FASHION, HISTORY, MUSEUMS In the magnificent linen drapery establishments of Oxford and Regent Streets, the vast shop-fronts, museums of fashion in plate-glass cases, offer a series of animated tableaux of poses plastiques in the shape of young ladies in morning costume, and young gentlemen in whiskers and white neckcloths, faultlessly complete as to costume, with the exception that they are yet in their shirt sleeves, who are accomplishing the difficult and mysterious feat known as “dressing” the shop window. By their nimble and practised hands the rich piled velvet mantles are displayed, the moire and glacé silks arranged in artful folds, the laces and gauzes, the innumerable whim-whams and fribble-frabble of fashion, elaborately shown, and to their best advantage. (Sala 1859: 77) According to this extract from journalist George Sala, then, a museum of fashion was not necessarily associated with the irrelevant past. The active construction and consumption of acceptable aesthetics were documented in window displays and could equally be documented in a museum. Furthermore, this extract demonstrates the currency of museum display conventions outside the heritage context in the commercial world. However, displaying dress in a museum is a fundamentally different prospect than staging it to appeal to a buyer in a store. This is not just down to the Figure 2.1 William McConnell, “Eight O’Clock A.M.: Opening Shop,” from page 87 of Twice Round the Clock; or, The Hours of the Day and Night in London (Sala 1859). WINDOW SHOPPING: COMMERCIAL INSPIRATION 35 conservational considerations necessary but also has to do with the way in which the museum context fundamentally changes the nature of fashion once it enters its collections and exhibit spaces. An ontological discussion is necessary at this juncture to explain the distinction between fashionable clothing and fashion as museum artifact; this is a crucial difference that enables the museum to stand apart from the store while evoking that environment through display and didactic text.

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