After the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Cité de l’architecture looks at department stores

"The department store speaks to the greatest number of people, everyone has a memory of a visit or purchase, whether it is good or bad," Isabelle Marquette, one of the curators of the exhibition on "The saga of department stores" explained to AFP on Tuesday on the eve of the opening of the exhibition. It will continue until April 6, 2025.

The department stores, whose history the exhibition traces back to 1850, were immortalized by Émile Zola in the book "Au Bonheur des Dames".

However, they are not only Parisian, and co-curator Elvira Férault even observes that it is "impossible to know exactly in which metropolis the department store appears" first, between Paris, London or New York.

The exhibition focuses on both the more bourgeois department stores, but also on more popular brands which "allowed a less well-off class, even working class, to access consumer products", including through the development of credit purchases, continues Ms Férault.

The International Association of Department Stores, the IADS, which brings together a dozen or so well-known department stores around the world (Galeries Lafayette in France, Bloomingdale's in the United States, Breuninger in Germany and El Corte Ingles in Spain), contributed to the exhibition, providing "rare documents and valuable links with international department stores".

“Department stores are more than just shopping destinations: they are architects of urban landscapes, catalysts of consumer culture and beacons of innovation around the world,” said Kamshim Lau, IADS chairwoman and CEO of Sogo Hong Kong, in an IADS statement in early November.

This is the third exhibition devoted to these "temples of consumption" in France this year, after one entitled "The Spectacle of Merchandise" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caen (Calvados), which ended in September, and "The Birth of Department Stores" at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, which closed in October.