The Fashionista in All of Us

A shopping excursion earlier this month at Toronto's flagship Holt Renfrew department store reminded me of Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, for which I wrote a dissertation in one of my French literature classes oh-so-long ago. It got me thinking about consumer culture and how, despite changes that have taken place over the years, certain social norms have remained fairly constant in the course of the past couple of centuries.

The advent of the department store marked an innovative development in the retail industry in 19th-century France, but also in other parts of the world: England had its Harrods (1834); Hong Kong, its Lane Crawford (1850); France, its Galeries Lafayette (1893); the United States, its Saks Fifth Avenue (1898); and Canada, its Holt Renfrew, whose origins date back to 1837—three decades prior to Confederation, interestingly enough.

Since then, there's been a rising trend towards the independent boutiques (along Toronto's Queen Street West and in Manhattan's SoHo district, for instance), but the high-end department store is of historic and social significance because of the way it has revolutionized consumer culture around the world. It continues to symbolize what Zola quite accurately described at the time as a shopper's paradise (consider the convenience of having all your favourite boutiques housed in one architecturally stunning building), and it's perhaps for this very reason that I often regard shopping as not just a leisure activity, but also a cherished experience for the fashionista in all of us.