Architects of the Industry #1: Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche
The first piece in the Architects of the Industry series: how the world's first department store built the retail practices we now take entirely for granted.
By · Aysu K. Ergin
“You think this has nothing to do with you?”
In the “Architects of the Industry” series on IPSU-LEX, we look at the pioneers behind the practices that shaped today’s industry and have since become its ordinary building blocks — from luxury goods that offer singular experiences, to retail that fused commercial presentation with human nature, to craft refined over centuries into something exquisite.
Stepping away from the “law” channel of intellectual property law, we put under the lens the part that in fact created this field and is inseparable from it: the evolving ideas and working methods of all these authentic and distinctive professional artists and craftspeople.
The Monologue Behind the Series: The Devil Wears Prada
To begin, a word about the monologue that inspired this series and that will remain one of cinema’s most iconic scenes for a century: Miranda Priestley’s “cerulean blue” monologue in The Devil Wears Prada.
The scene takes place in Andrea Sachs’s first weeks on the job. Andrea has never read Runway in her life and is plainly remote from any fashion vision, but on the strength of her hard-working and curious manner Miranda Priestley sees something in her and picks her out of thousands of candidates. In this fitting scene Andrea is wearing a cerulean blue sweater. While Miranda and the whole team hesitate between two different belts, Andrea laughs derisively and says she does not understand all “this stuff” and is still trying to learn.
Although Andrea goes through the motions of being eager to “learn”, she is not inwardly convinced. From her point of view she is an idealistic would-be journalist who graduated with distinction, and all this hesitating over colours and the hours spent choosing a belt is sheer nonsense. At bottom, she thinks of herself as above everyone else and concerned with more serious matters.
Hearing the derisive laugh, Miranda begins — coolly — to recount the entire journey of the cerulean sweater on Andrea’s back, from its arrival on the market some ten years earlier to the very second it ended up on her. In telling it, she makes a point of Andrea’s quiet sense of superiority, opening with: “You think this has nothing to do with you?” The substance of the speech, in summary, is this:
“You may have put on the first blue sweater that came to hand in your wardrobe, to show the world how serious and unbothered you are, but in fact it began in 2002, when Oscar de la Renta put on a show of cerulean blue dresses, and Yves Saint Laurent followed with cerulean military jackets. Eight different designers then produced collections in cerulean. In time it came down from the runway to the street — it went through the ‘trickle down’. That inaccessible shade of blue, once belonging to luxury goods, was gradually filtered out and reached the street through accessible fast fashion, down to second-hand and boutique outlets.
This item you chose so carelessly has in fact supported countless jobs worth millions of dollars. The people you see in this room now had already selected that sweater for you, out of a heap of ‘stuff’, ten years ago.”
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First Stop: Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche
Our first focus in this series is Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche (“Le Bon Marché”).
The true architect of the system in which we wander through a shop without a thought and leave, take heart from beautiful window displays at the new year and walk on, and circle the items we like in a catalogue with a ballpoint pen and order them.
On the present-day extension of this experience: Customization and the Fight Against Counterfeiting.
1852: Fixed Prices and Shopping Under One Roof
1852: when Aristide Boucicaut and his wife Marguerite Boucicaut arrived in Paris in 1852 and saw how shallow the options on the market were, the department store culture was founded for the first time in history, with Le Bon Marché.
With Le Bon Marché’s founding, customers could for the first time find goods for every interest in a single location, walk through a shop simply to look around, examine the goods, leave without buying anything and — more importantly — encounter another innovation unseen in France at the time: a fixed-price policy.
As an innovation unheard of in French retail, every item carried a fixed price, and prices did not change from day to day according to the customer or the economy. No customer who came in was obliged to leave Le Bon Marché having made a purchase; it was possible simply to look around and go.
In the early days, to sustain this innovative circulation, the business operated on a low-budget margin, with a mission of selling more goods at lower prices.
1867: The Mail-Order Catalogue
1867: another great innovation by the Boucicauts, one that shaped the present day, was born in 1867 with the mail-order catalogue. Under this system, Le Bon Marché began posting catalogues to people who could not easily come to the centre, including those living in rural areas. People could then examine the whole range from home, without needing to come to a shop in person. This practice made access to the “best” in any sought-after category available to a far wider public.
1875–1905: The Importance Given to Architecture and Art
1875: one of Le Bon Marché’s most important and formative features was the importance it gave to art and to store architecture. The photography exhibition that opened in 1875 brought many artists and sculptors together with those interested in their work.
1887: by 1887, a total of 74 departments had been gathered under the Le Bon Marché roof.
1905: with the importance it gave to store architecture, the iconic Le Bon Marché worked with the architects Alexandre Laplanche and Louis-Charles Boileau in 1905 to build the Le Bon Marché stores as they are known today.
One of the most striking facts is that the interior architecture of the Le Bon Marché stores was built through a collaboration between Armand Moisant and Gustave Eiffel, the architect of the Eiffel Tower.
1909: France’s First Animated Shop Window
1909: the beginning of France’s first animated and illuminated shop window designs rests on Le Bon Marché’s innovative work.
In 1909 the explorer Robert Peary was being described as the first person to reach the North Pole. On that occasion, wishing to offer customers a singular experience, Le Bon Marché commissioned a Christmas window inspired by Peary’s North Pole expedition, on the proposal of the mechanical-doll craftsman Gaston Decamps.
That project was the first moving shop window in France.
Le Bon Marché, which still brings singular and widely varied brands across every sector from A to Z to its customers, is one of the finest and most intelligent demonstrations that “all this stuff” does have something to do with us. By staying open to innovative work that pushes at the limits of its age, it is the foremost living proof of a legacy that can be left to the whole world for generations.
On the legal counterpart of a luxury brand’s control over its image: Copad v. Dior: The Limits of Micro-Management in Trademark Licensing.
Sources
For the source: https://www.lebonmarche.com/fr/magasin/culture/histoire-lebonmarche
https://haussmann.galerieslafayette.com/en/the-paris-haussmann-shop-windows/
https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-monologue/