Preliminary Programme

How integrated in British commercial networks were nineteenth century British North American colonies? The image of colonists clad in fabric of their own making is an enduring image. However, Douglas McCalla, in a recent book on rural consumption in Upper Canada (present day southern Ontario) between 1808 and 1861 has challenged this belief in self-sufficient farmers. His study, based on country merchants’ account books uncovered evidence of significant purchases of a wide range of imported material, and of a desire to acquire new kinds of fabric coupled with a preference for medium priced ones. Historians of Lower Canada (present day southern Quebec) similarly challenge the stereotype of the homespun clad French Canadian “peasant”. Most households lacked the equipment necessary to produce their own fabric- although this shortage diminished in the 1830s. Newspaper advertisements and court records show that even country folks liked their imported finery. These studies however do not extend beyond the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
This paper will examine the purchases of fabric at four Lower Canadian general stores between 1830 and 1867- two in the mixed French-Canadian/British immigrant village of St Andrew east ( north West of Montreal), and two on the south shore of the St Lawrence, one between Montreal and Quebec city and the other below that city. The last two communities were solidly French Canadian. What kinds of fabric were sold in those stores? In what amount? Did the range of goods on offer change over time and in which way? The data suggests that French and English Canadians preferred different fabrics, that tastes changed over time but did not homogenize, that drop in prices did not necessarily lead to greater purchases, that new material appeared quickly in country store, but at the same time that material considered old fashioned in Britain continued being sold, and finally that country fabric was not a second best for those unable to purchase imported material, but served different purpose.
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Department stores have been given iconic status in the world of late nineteenth and early twentieth century retailing. This has been the case both in academic history and in popular representations on, for example, prime-time television. There was often an element of exhibitionism and myth-making associated with department stores as well as business acumen.

By the late nineteenth century Browns was on the way to becoming one of the leading department stores in north-west England. From its late eighteenth century origins as a millinery and haberdashery shop the main store, run by two of the Brown brothers, had grown into an upmarket shop selling a wide range of clothing, textiles, accessories and household furnishings. A separate but linked furniture store was run by another member of the Brown family. The businesses merged in the 1900s to create a large and prestigious department store. By the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century Browns were important employers, particularly of women and girls in their millinery and dressmaking workshop, but did not always comply with factory legislation. In the 1920s Browns reputation was such that it was both a place to be seen and to socialise, and a place to acquire the latest and most fashionable clothes. It was at the heart of Chester’s material culture, at least for its better off inhabitants.

Yet Browns was more than another, albeit high class, department store. It was increasingly a key part of how Chester positioned itself both as a historic town and a major shopping centre. Browns was located in the city’s Rows - covered passageways with shops at the rear running above the street level shops – and although much of the building was Victorian it was the medieval crypt that was often emphasised in descriptions of the shop. It was both quaint and modern. The Brown family had been important in Chester’s local government in the nineteenth century, but had also attracted much criticism in the local press because of their perceived abuse of power. In the mid-twentieth century there was a sense that Browns was more powerful than might have been expected of a large shop. When the social research organisation Mass Observation researched it in the 1940s it found that the people of Chester had mixed feelings about it: some ‘closed up like a clam and refused to talk about it’.

This paper explores the history of Browns in the period when it developed from being a large and prestigious silk mercer’s and draper’s store into ‘Browns of Chester’ with all that this implied for shop and city. It looks both at materiality – goods sold and the commercial space in which they were displayed - and at the role of perception and myth-making in the creation of a prestigious department store. (Show less)

In this paper, I discuss two well known but somewhat elusive components in the construction of bourgeois and middle class femininity during la belle époque in Sweden, 1870–1914: the corset and the mirror. Two popular genres of images are contrasted: images of women’s fashion in Swedish press advertisements, and fashion images in Swedish fashion magazines. While Swedish advertisements on dress and fashion in general copied or plagiarized images from fashion magazines, they chose a very different path in regard of the corset and the mirror. It is obvious that the two objects, albeit important parts of the period’s fashion, are made invisible in fashion magazines while clearly visualized in the advertisements. The purpose of Swedish fashion magazines was not only to present the latest fashion, but also to construct and transfer between generations of women a conception of timeless womanhood raised above all individuality and well integrated in the predominant ideology of domesticity. Vanity, gossip, and erotic desires were staple goods of traditional misogyny and were not possible to express in fashion magazines, as they aimed to represent ideal young women, wives and mothers. Advertising on the other hand could turn immediately to the female consumer as an individual and present her as a vain, sexual and emotional creature – without at the same time condemning her, probably for the first time in Swedish history. Thus, advertisements presented a new woman, although not a suffragette but a consumer, somewhat delivered from bourgeois domesticity and propriety. At the bottom of things, fashion advertisements emancipated, clearly not woman, but fashion itself, from the morals of domesticity. (Show less)

The history of marketing is to a large extent driven by a never-ending conflict about who determines the identity of a marketable product: Is it the supplier? The end-consumer? Or is it occasional go-betweens, the purchasers and gift-giver? A new periodization of marketing is proposed, based on which party in market exchange acts as the hegemonic identity-giver as opposed to the standard notion of a price-mover. The research draws from a variety of historical and secondary sources as well as the interpretation of consumer artefacts and works of art. The paper builds on Russell Belk’s concept of extended self and the related insight that possessions not only reflect but also contribute to consumers’ identities. It takes into account both the strategic interactions and the cultural struggles among market participants.
Early conflicts about identity arose in relation to objects marketed for conspicuous consumption of the ruling elites, e.g. silver plates. A number of surviving artefacts prominently display both the maker’s mark and the patron’s heralding devices. In contrast, in late twentieth-century clothing marketing, the fashion brand has almost completely eclipsed the wearer’s signs of identification, e.g. monograms or coat of arms. (Show less)