There’s something about department stores that makes us feel terribly British, quaint and altogether rather pleased with ourselves. In a charming chocolate box sort of way that is.
It may be well be something to do with their names. Marks and Spencer, John Lewis, House of Fraser, Selfridges and Debenhams at a push. They all sound like an English gent you might meet nursing half a shandy down the local pub. Which is odd, really, when you consider that, despite the images their imaginary namesakes may or may not invoke, these shopping meccas are designed to appeal entirely exclusively to women.
They draw us poor unsuspecting buggers in, tottering on our wedges and dragging our overdrafts and our handbags behind us. And especially at this time of year.
Beyond the thousands of fairy lights and vaguely evergreen looking branches beckons the promise of quality, the sense of tradition and prestige. A glow. It’s the shine of new leather handbags under strong yet oddly unthreatening lighting, the sense of occasion, the smell of festive flavoured lattes, the sight of silk nighties peeping out from the various corners they’ve been tucked discreetly away into. It’s the designer looking candles, the whole floor devoted to your own particular vice, be it perfume, shoes or expensive bath salts, the hissing suggestion that this item is the only thing that really matters. You simply cannot go on without it. It says, you know you want this stuff, we know you want this stuff, so why not come and buy it in precisely the sort of safe, reliable environment your grandmother would have approved of?
We’re being slowly seduced, ladies. As we browse the endless party dresses and lingerie, as we meander through homeware gazing at a multi-coloured swap shop of cushions bearing this season’s in motif (seems to be swallows and peacocks this month), we are being conditioned, manipulated. Made to believe that this is the simply the best place for us to buy our fluffy bathmats and antiquated sweets. It would be stupid for us to go anywhere else.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the BBCs period drama du jour, The Paradise, based on Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames. For those of us without access to either a French A Level or Google translate, that means ‘The Ladies Delight’. Quite, Zola, quite. It tells the tale of Mouret, or Moray to the BBC, a powerful and successful department store owner, and Denise, a young shop girl who falls for him. There’s a reason she blushes every time he’s within eyesight, why Zola wrote such gnawing charisma into his character in the first place, why he’s played on screen with dashing twinkley eyes. It’s the same reason that his personal anthem, to my mind at least, would be a Glee style mash-up of I’m Sexy and I Know It, and Hey Big Spender.
And that reason is that he is just as seductively appealing as his store- Denise is just as enchanted by him as their customers are by their produce.
He fully understands his power to charm, but more than that, he understands said charm’s effect on sales. He’s a personification of our courtship with big, shiny shops. A living, breathing, all be it fictional explanation of why it is we choose to ignore the dark side of the high street titans. The guilty secret. We know, deep down, that they have long since put smaller independent stores out of business in order to get way they are. We know that they have worrying connotations with the 20th Century American need to display your worth though the number of high quality heavy based pans you have, or whether or not you have a car, a fridge. The world of Death of A Salesman, of commodity culture.
We know about the layout tricks, the way the escalators force you to peruse the floor before you can go up again. We know we’re being seduced, that the displays are sexily winking at us just as Moray might. We know it all. We’re not stupid.
But yet we keep going back, spending more money, making a bee-line for Selfridge’s displays every Christmas just to see what they’ve got.
Why? Why did I get inexplicably excited at the discovery of an independent department store in Wimbledon last week? Why do we continue to wander in like present seeking moths to a cash registering flame? Why?
Again, there’s a reason. And it’s: well, hell, who doesn’t want to be seduced?
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Me, Myself And The Others 