By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins

America’s nearly two-century love affair with the department store has cooled dramatically in recent decades. E-commerce is the much-blamed culprit, but there have been other factors at play. As cities regained allure following the financial crisis of 2008, particularly for young professionals and well-heeled foreigners, suburban shopping malls anchored by department stores withered. Once the leading incubators of luxury brands and purveyors of their merchandise, department stores were forced to compete for shoppers with those very brands’ own freestanding boutiques as well as with lower-priced outlet stores. The department store’s dwindling market share of retail sales lowered expectations of profitability. Today, new developments make the department store’s future seem even bleaker. As COVID-19 has shuttered stores across the nation, consumer spending has collapsed, and the financial status of department stores has gone into free fall. On May 7, Neiman Marcus, one of the nation’s most famous high-end retailers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy; a week later, the popularly priced J.C. Penney did the same.

This dire situation offers an opportunity to look back at the department store’s heyday, during which no city was more instrumental than New York, a hub of marketing and retail innovation, and no decade more eventful than the 1920s.[1] During the interwar period, department stores provided many Americans with their first exposure to modernist trends in fashion, design, and home decoration, Lord & Taylor, Wanamaker’s, and Macy’s employed cutting-edge artists and designers to create arresting window displays. Even more surprising, New York-based merchants mounted exhibitions of modern interior furnishings, powerfully shaping consumer taste by adopting a museological approach, with its imprimatur of curatorial knowledge and authority. At the same time, savvy department store executives and marketing directors looked to the contemporaneous world of theater for inspiration, understanding that elevating the quotidian realities of shopping to the level of high drama would drive sales. They often followed the lead of such top New York theater designers as Norman Bel Geddes, and Robert Edmond Jones, who were busy adapting the principles of the European-originated New Stagecraft movement. Its designers aimed to free the theater from the strictures of traditional narrative conventions and to create abstract settings for a new generation of pioneering American playwrights. In borrowing stage design techniques, department stores spurred new levels of consumer demand and desire, as the rise of corporate America in the 1920s produced unprecedented amounts of both disposable income and the leisure time in which to spend it.

Department Store Windows

The experience of “window shopping” had been a staple of modern urban life since the 19th century, but it was not until the 1920s that the displays themselves took on a modern look. Designers increasingly rejected the reigning idiom of pictorialism with its emphasis on decorative flourishes; instead they manipulated form and light, stripping away décor to focus attention on the goods being sold. For example, after Macy’s hired Raymond Loewy as its display director in 1919, one of the French émigré’s radically simple and distinctively lit designs featured a lone mannequin in a black dress and fur, with a few accessories on the floor. “I left the window in semidarkness,” Loewy recalled. “The only illumination came from three powerful spotlights focused on the figure. The result was a contrast of violent shadows. It was dramatic, simple, and potent. It sang.”[2] The result turned out to be too avant-garde for Macy’s, but before they could fire Loewy, he quit.

Although Macy’s deemed Loewy’s attempt to launch modernist display a commercial liability, his work set the template for an explosion of department store windows that were, in effect, miniature museums of avant-garde visual culture. By the mid-1920s, Lord & Taylor, Bonwit Teller, B. Altman, and Saks Fifth Avenue all climbed on the modernist bandwagon; even Macy’s was eventually won over by theater designer Lee Simonson, who served as its display consultant in the 1920s.

Fine artists also participated in these efforts. Altman’s displayed a group of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe based on new designs by the Cheney silk company. “Even to the person least interested in art,” Edwin Avery Park noted in his 1927 book, New Backgrounds for a New Age, “it must have become apparent that something has hit the shop windows. A wave of brilliant color is spreading, and one sees the most incomprehensible designs in silk scarves, dress goods, and cretonnes. They look like the covers of Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, frivolous, gay…”[3]

At about the same time, Louis Lozowick, a noted artist and theater designer — his sets for an avant-garde Chicago theater production called Gas are considered the first Constructivist-inspired stage designs in the United States — served as a design consultant for Lord & Taylor. For the store’s centennial exhibition in 1926, Lozowick had designed window displays as well as textiles. Similarly, polymath John Vassos, who produced theater sets, movie-theater murals, advertisements, books, and consumer products, created windows for Macy’s and Saks, where his wife, Ruth, worked as a fashion advisor.

Franklin Simon window display by Norman Bel Geddes, c. 1927. Photographer: Vandamm Studio/New York Public Library. Courtesy: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas.

In 1927 the designer Norman Bel Geddes, a major figure in the realm of New York theater, advocated for window display as a form of urban street theater when designing for the Franklin Simon department store on Fifth Avenue. “The window is the stage,” Geddes noted, “and the merchandise the players.”[4] So startling was the effect that the windows, complete with Bel Geddes’s custom-designed mannequins, were reported to have stopped Manhattan traffic. “Shoppers besieged the window,” American Magazine noted, “The crowds swelled to such proportions that police reserves needed to be called out to clear the way!”[5]

While American designers were often inspired by European sources, the influence of European trends was most forcibly embodied in the work of Vienna-born Frederick Kiesler. A renowned creator of daring modernist buildings, theater sets, and exhibitions in Europe, Kiesler immigrated to New York in 1926 and quickly gained his American credentials in numerous fields, virtually at the same time. In 1926 he exhibited his Endless House at the Theater Guild, and, two years later, Saks commissioned him to design window displays. A single coat and pair of gloves draped over a chair, or a hat sitting alone on a stand, all set against abstract, often asymmetrical backgrounds, defined Kiesler’s look. Encapsulating his own aesthetic manifesto in his Contemporary Art Applied to the Store, Kiesler spoke for an entire generation of avant-garde window display designers when he succinctly declared, “Merchandise first, decoration afterwards.”[6]

Department Store Exhibitions

Leading New York department stores not only featured modernism in the shallow spaces of their store windows, but also brought modernism inside, resulting in unexpected environments that merged the art museum and the marketplace.[7] These initiatives were intended to introduce the design ideas emanating from Europe, and particularly from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, to a broad public, extending far beyond the architects and design professionals reached through professional journals, lectures, and symposia. Macy’s hired Simonson to create a display of American-made reproductions of modern French furniture and American fabrics, produced by Stehli and Cheney, among others. Simonson incorporated a cork floor and display panels set on the diagonal, echoing the strong diagonal emphasis of some of the cubist-inspired fabrics being shown.

It was Wanamaker’s, however, that had the greatest impact, not only displaying furniture that Martine, the interior decorator and daughter of the couturier Paul Poiret, had designed for a houseboat, but also mounting the seminal Titan City exhibition. Rather than seeking to use the exhibition to sell particular wares, Wanamaker’s wanted to bring people into the store by capitalizing on the public’s burgeoning interest in modern design. The exhibition brilliantly married modern French aesthetics to the quintessential lithic symbol of New York: the skyscraper. Orchestrated and executed primarily by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, the architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss, and the muralist Willy Pogany, the exhibition, which ostensibly celebrated the city’s tricentenary, offered a glimpse of a heroic future defined by dizzyingly tall skyscrapers, separate levels for different types of traffic, and zeppelin-filled skies. Seventy-foot-high banners decorated the store’s principal interior space, while architectural models formed a “Grand Canyon of the Future” along its main aisles.

Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art at Lord & Taylor, 1928. Photograph: Sigurd Fischer. Courtesy: Museum of the City of New York. X2011.35.103

In 1927 the editors of Good Furniture concluded that, “Altogether the department stores have thrown down the gate to decorators and designers in a way which must call forth an answering challenge.”[8] The following year, Lord & Taylor mounted the important Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art which would forever change American department store merchandising. The furniture and objects on display, none of which was for sale, were shown next to paintings by André Derain, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice Utrillo. Working under the direction of Lord & Taylor President Samuel Rayburn, the innovative department store executive Dorothy Shaver curated the exhibition, which was also overseen by Paul Claudel, a poet and the French Ambassador to the United States. The architect Ely Jacques Kahn designed the exhibition, which featured the work of Pierre Chareau, Jean Dunand, Francois Jourdain, and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and was accompanied by a catalogue written by the art critic and gallerist Helen Appleton Read. Read contended that the work reflected “a questioning of the validity of inherited traditions, merely because they are inherited, a discarding of the superfluous and a revaluation of life in terms of existing conditions.”[9]

The “Court of Honor” at Macy’s Exposition of Art in Industry by Lee Simonson, 1928. Photographer: Sigurd Fischer. Courtesy: Library of Congress. LC-F513-267-N17 [P&P]

At virtually the same time that Lord & Taylor launched its game-changing exhibition, Macy’s mounted its Exposition of Art in Industry, the name of which nodded to the previous curatorial work of Richard Franz Bach, who organized the department store exhibition and who, in 1917, had begun to document the relationship of art and industry in a series of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once again working with Simonson, Macy’s presented eccentrically shaped galleries, with cork-paneled walls outlined in California redwood, containing furniture by Austro-Hungarian designer Josef Hoffman; German designer Bruno Paul; and American designers William Lescaze, Eugene Schoen, and Kem Weber. Underscoring the exhibition’s perceived significance, Robert W. DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presented remarks at the opening reception. Approximately 100,000 attended the show in its first week alone.

Murdoch Pemberton, art critic for the New Yorker, stated that the store “is to exhibit the practical application of art as it affects industry and will be in the charge of the one man who has managed to escape from the antiquity of the Egyptian Room, Richard Bach.” Ensuring that his readership fully comprehended not only the powerful connection between department store design exhibitions and modern taste, but also the connection between commerce and modernism itself, Pemberton boldly asserted, “We know what Mr. Bach has done and we want to go on record that he has affected American life second only to Henry Ford.”[10] That a curator of such influence was working not only in a museum, but also at Macy’s, clearly reflected the profound and expansive reach of department stores as shapers of modern culture. While hitting its apogee in the 1920s, this New York-based phenomenon, which exerted national influence, has diminished in recent decades. It will sadly run its course should department stores disappear.

Donald Albrecht is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions for the Getty Center, Library of Congress, Museum of the City of New York, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others.

Thomas Mellins is an independent curator and architectural historian. In addition to organizing exhibitions at museums and libraries nationwide, he is the co-author of New York 1880, New York 1930 and New York 1960.

[1]This blog post has been adapted from an essay, “ ‘New Backgrounds for a New Age’: Modern Design for Theatres and Stores,” written by the authors, which appeared in Kristen M. Jensen, ed., Charles Sheeler: Fashion, Photography, and Sculptural Form (Doylestown, PA.: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2017), 121-31.

[2] Raymond Loewy, as quoted in William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 307.

[3] Edwin Avery Park, New Backgrounds for a New Age, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 160.

[4] Norman Bel Geddes, as quoted in “Advertiser & Artist: A Portrait of Bel Geddes,” Fortune (July 1930): 51. For a fuller discussion of Bel Geddes and his work, see Donald Albrecht, ed., Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (New York: Abrams in association with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the Museum of the City of New York, 2012.)

[5] M. K. Wisehart, “Are YOU Afraid of the Unexpected?” American Magazine (July 1931): 72.

[6] Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), 101.

[7] For an extensive discussion of architecture and design exhibitions held in New York museums and department stores during the interwar period, see Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism between the Two World Wars (New York: Rizzoli, 1987): 328-55.

[8] “Decorated Interiors in Retail Stores,” Good Furniture 28 (June 1927): 325.

[9] Helen Appleton Read, An Exposition of Modern French Decorative Art (New York, 1928).

[10] Murdoch Pemberton, “The Galleries,” New Yorker 5 (May 7, 1927): 78.

Merchandising Modernism: New York City Department Stores in the 1920s