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La Samaritaine has just reopened its doors in Paris.\u00a0Founded in 1860, it is one of the city’s historic brands, along with the Bon March\u00e9 (1838), the oldest department store in the capital.\u00a0These commercial temples became, from the middle of the XIX\u00a0th<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0century, the freedom oasis for women, who have found a place where they could finally act independently.<\/p>\n Department stores are the direct result of the commercial and industrial revolution, which brought about profound social changes. With one goal, to sell, the target was clear: women.\u00a0Especially the richest and the most idle of them.\u00a0All the commercial strategies aimed at prolonging the presence of women in the places of purchase.\u00a0To achieve this, it was necessary to transgress, always within the limits of decency, bourgeois – or Victorian, customs in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n To have touched, smelled and even tasted an object made it irresistible, especially when its price was affordable.<\/p>\n Department store designers had already understood the need for what is now called \u201cstorytelling\u201d, presenting the department store as a safe, elegant and polished place.\u00a0Like a second home where all women’s dreams could come true – even if it was above all about creating fashions from scratch and creating new needs.<\/p>\n In the XIX\u00a0th<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0century, bourgeois women did not go out alone in the house.\u00a0If they did, it was only for courtesy visits, small purchases, to go to mass, to carry out works of charity – all activities subject to a rigid morality.<\/p>\n However, as shopping had become a hobby of industrial society, going alone to a department store was allowed.\u00a0Fixed and affordable prices, catalogs, good deals and the ability to return items attracted these affluent women.<\/p>\n Workers, prostitutes, artists, etc.\u00a0were also going there in large numbers.\u00a0All women therefore had access to the same choice of products, which created a form of ambivalence.\u00a0The\u00a0prostitute<\/a>\u00a0, and the\u00a0demi-mondaine<\/a>\u00a0could easily buy the same dress, the same umbrella and the same gloves as the respectable wife of a businessman or a politician.\u00a0This is the beginning of the democratization of fashion: it is no longer so easy to know who is who, just by the clothes.<\/p>\n It is now the department store that dictates a certain form of social prestige.<\/p>\n \u00c9mile Zola, in his novel\u00a0Au Bonheur des Dames<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1883), accurately recounts how the visual universe of the department store was designed down to the millimeter.\u00a0It was a palace of the senses, full of colorful fabrics, ribbons of all kinds, perfumes, dresses, hats, handbags, gloves, hats\u2026 And above all, women could finally touch the goods.<\/p>\n Until then, the experience of buying clothes was rather cold.\u00a0A seamstress came to the house, or it was done in a small shop but always with the filter of what the salesman or the seamstress decided to show.\u00a0There was little room for choice.<\/p>\n In a department store, on the contrary, customers walk around at ease, touch everything, try everything, and are always accompanied by a saleswoman who will help them get rid of any inhibitions\u2026 and convince them to buy.<\/p>\n The saleswomen represented this image of decency and cleanliness.\u00a0Dressed in a uniform, they had to be well groomed, discreet and polite.\u00a0They had learned the manners of the middle-class women in order to be able to associate with them, and to show a polite submission to their desires.\u00a0You shouldn’t be too flirtatious either, because the protagonist should always remain the customer, who should feel beautiful, special and the owner of her shopping experience.<\/p>\n For the saleswomen, it was hard work;\u00a0they could never sit down during long working days and had to be constantly on the move.\u00a0In return, in addition to their salary, they were housed and fed in the department store itself.<\/p>\n It therefore offered them security and a regular income.\u00a0In some cases, their savings allowed them to quit that job, return home and open their own stores, as the province was fond of this modern Parisian elegance.<\/p>\n The department stores were huge, bright, with wide aisles, glass ceilings to take advantage of the daylight, and elevators that made it easy to move between floors.\u00a0But there was an obstacle that limited the time spent shopping.<\/p>\n Women have always found it difficult to stay out of the house for long hours because they could not go to the toilet.\u00a0Back then, architects paid no attention to toilets in homes, and it was difficult to undress alone with so many petticoats, corsets, lace, bows, etc.\u00a0Le Bon March\u00e9 was aware of this obstacle and had elegant art deco style toilets built.<\/p>\n Another factor that reduced the time spent shopping: husbands, when they accompanied them.\u00a0It has been discovered that women shop more with friends than with their husbands.\u00a0This is why Le Bon March\u00e9 set up a reading room, with books and newspapers, where men could wait quietly, reading and smoking.<\/p>\n The daily life\u00a0of middle-class women in the mid-19th century<\/a>\u00a0could be stifling.\u00a0They were not considered adults and depended on men for everything.<\/p>\n Gustave Flaubert’s novel,\u00a0Madame Bovary<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1856), tells the story of the existential agony of a woman who lives tormented between an empty outer world and an inner world full of frustrated aspirations, and without any sex life.\u00a0An existence subjected to the anguish of living in a social cage, without the possibility of escape.<\/p>\n Many of these women were labeled as hysteria: a nervous illness that caused mood swings, hot flashes, anger and sadness.<\/p>\n This emotional and sexual life of women was theorized by physicians: Paul Briquet thus published\u00a0Le Traite Clinique et Therapatique de Hyst\u00e9rie<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(1859) in which he interpreted the disease as a “neurosis of the portion of the brain intended to receive impressions. affective and emotional \u201d.\u00a0The neurologist\u00a0Jean-Martin Charcot<\/a>\u00a0, he tries to cure them thanks to hypnosis.\u00a0He organizes demonstrations of hysteria attacks in his Tuesday lessons at the Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re Hospital in front of a select audience, as if it were a theatrical performance.\u00a0During this time, the women continued to suffer and depress.<\/p>\n This is why the department stores were filled with women eager to travel on their own to see, touch, desire and buy.\u00a0Their dreams seemed to come true, they could feel like they were escaping, and the sales strategies appeased their desire for freedom.\u00a0In the department store, everything revolved around satisfying their whims.\u00a0They were listened to, pampered and desired: finally, they felt they existed.<\/p>\n This release of emotions gave birth to kleptomania, considered at the time as a female pathology.<\/p>\n The study of Nacho Moreno Segarra\u00a0Ladronas Victorianas. Cleptoman\u00eda y g\u00e9nero en el origen de los grandes almacenes<\/em> , The <\/em><\/a>Thieves <\/em><\/a>of the Victorian Era. <\/em><\/a>Cleptomania and Gender in the Early Years of Department Stores<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(2017) discusses how department stores relied that each day there would be a specific number of thefts.\u00a0There were hundreds of shoplifters in Paris at the time.\u00a0Some doctors have wanted to attribute this phenomenon to menopause or menstruation – further pathologizing the body and female behaviors.\u00a0What seems certain is that for many of them, the pleasure of flying – and therefore breaking the rules – was greater than the pleasure of paying.<\/p>\n Kleptomaniacs – mostly bourgeois – were treated with great courtesy and discretion.\u00a0If husbands found out, they were amazed to find that their wives seemed unable to control her impulses and resist temptation.\u00a0This transgression of the rules of morality and decency, associated with the fear of what will be said, frightened them to the highest point.<\/p>\n They had no idea that this space, cluttered by the comings and goings of dresses from all social classes, would help awaken in them an ever greater desire for freedom.<\/p>\nDesire and sensuality as sales engines<\/strong><\/h4>\n
A place of promiscuity<\/strong><\/h4>\n
To be able to touch, smell, taste<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The saleswoman, from worker to businesswoman<\/strong><\/h4>\n
” Where are the bathrooms please ?\u00a0“<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Existential torments<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Kleptomania, a feminine illness?<\/strong><\/h4>\n