Retail street theatre was all the rage in the 1920s. ‘Audiences’ would throng the pavement outside Selfridge’s store in London just to gawp at the display beyond acres of plate glass. As a show, it made any production of Chekhov seem action-packed by comparison. Yet Gordon Selfridge, who came to these shores from the US and opened on Oxford Street exactly 100 years ago, was at the cutting edge of what Dr Rebecca Scragg from the history of art department at Warwick University calls ‘a mini-revolution’ in the art of window dressing.
“As Britain struggled to regain economic stability after the war, the importance of the new mass commerce to the country’s recovery was recognised,” says Rebecca. “Finally understood was the need to use the display windows to full advantage as an advertising medium to attract trade. The new style of window dressing that came into its own after the armistice took inspiration from the theatre and the fine and decorative arts. It involved flamboyant design and drew huge crowds.”
In the course of her research, Scragg spent some time in the British Library studying the growing number of trade journals that sprang up between 1921 and 1924 to meet the market made up from this new breed of professional. “I saw a picture in one of them of the Annual General Meeting of the British Association of Display Men,” she says, “and there were only two women there”. The 1920s saw a big growth in major department stores in the main cities and they would all have had a budget for window dressing.
An elegant mannequin is positioned at the centre of a huge garland, sporting an off-the-shoulder number and an enormous headdress that might have been worn by an empress in ancient Egypt. At her feet are swathes of ruffled material and positioned around her any number of adornments.
Over eighty years on, and the economy is once again in recession. Retailers complain about falling sales. But are they doing enough to seduce the passing customer? Scragg thinks not. “There are many high street chains and independent shops whose windows are, by the standards of the 1920s, unimaginative,” she maintains. “They’re passed over for more profitable but often less aesthetically pleasing forms of advertising, such as the Internet.”
“I’m not making any claims that this is great or fine art” Scragg says. “My interest is in Britain finding new ways of creating visual expression.” Scragg is about to submit a paper on her research into the aesthetics of window dressing to one of the leading journals in her field.
So, although retail theatre may have been in its infancy, retail as leisure or therapy for a mass market was still a long way in the future.