Shopocracy

Abstract

This chapter explores the development of West End shopping between 1850 and 1914. The big change was the coming of the department store which in turn transformed Oxford Street in particular. The chapter shows the difference that Selfridge’s made although it argues that smaller shops were at least as important. Both allowed for the feminization of the West End as middle-class women increasingly found a trip into the district essential to keeping up with fashions and constructing the domestic interior. West End shops supplied a form of education in taste, fashion, and status. They dramatized capitalist abundance within a frame shaped by orientalism and cosmopolitanism. The chapter looks in particular at Liberty’s and Selfridge’s but also emphasizes the labour that made shops possible in the form of shopgirls.