From the great department store with love: window display and the transfer of commercial knowledge in early twentieth-century Sweden

Abstract

This article highlights the transfers and practical uses of the commercial knowledge of window dressing in early twentiethcentury Sweden through the analysis of the professional career and family business of Oscar Lundkvist, Swedish display pioneer and former window dresser in chief of the largest and first Swedish department store, Nordiska Kompaniet. Building on rich source material including unique written and photographic documents from the Lundkvist family, educational material and trade journals, we show how the innovative and spectacular became ordinary and mundane in retail praxis. We argue that the emergence and professionalization of window display brought with it the dissemination and trivialization of the same practice. By focusing on not only the most conspicuous aspects and cultural meanings of window displays but also on the materials and competences involved, we explain how setting up the displays became an everyday commercial practice and how it was positioned between advertising and retail as well as between the artistic and the commercial.

The technicians of consumer society: the creation of advertising men and practical advertising knowledge in early twentieth-century Sweden

“…Historian Elin Gardeström has referred to the Swedish advertising professionals at the time as engaged in utopian ideas and being convinced of their importance (Gardeström, 2019, p. 484). There was a momentum for advertising that manifested itself in several ways, such as the formation of local advertising clubs, ambitious periodicals, international collaborations and increased press coverage of the activities of the advertising industry (Åström Rudberg and Kuorelahti, 2021; Arnberg and Husz, 2018). The printed advertisement, in the daily press or magazines, was the most important form of advertising and was reinforced by cartel agreement between the largest advertising agencies and newspaper publishers (Åström Rudberg, 2019), but other forms such as direct advertising, window display and packaging were also beginning to draw increased interest (Arnberg and Husz, 2018; Torell and Lee, 2010).…”

“…The comprehensive 19-letter course was intended for intensive part-time studies of at least 20 weeks; this in comparison with 125 SEK for a month-long course in window-dressing and advertising offered in Stockholm, to which the costs of lodging (another 125 SEK) and lost income must also be added. In comparison, in 1937, the average yearly income of a retail employee was 2,400 SEK for a man and 1,850 SEK for a woman (Arnberg and Husz, 2018). Thus, a correspondence course for 75 SEK was well within reach of an ambitious person with limited means.…”

The corset and the mirror. Fashion and domesticity in Swedish advertisements and fashion magazines, 1870–1914

“…29 This meant competition, within a burgeoning commodity culture emphasizing the importance of the visual representation of goods. 30 This in turn led to an increased amount of advertisements depicting women in corsets, with a clear development towards a sexualization and glamorization of the woman wearer: the corsets were pictured as objects of desire, for men of course, but also for the women which the corsets were meant to reshape not only bodily, but in terms of lifestyle, quality of life and success. After the turn of the century, almost all corset ads were set within a toilet scene and contained an autoerotic aspect: the act of the woman mirroring herself happily dressed in her new corset became central to the genre.…”

Beyond Mrs consumer: competing femininities in Swedish advertising trade publications, 1900–1939

“…Jon Stobart (2010) has problematised how retail history and the history of consumption have been theoretically and empirically separated areas of research. Likewise, advertising and retailing are often studied separately, but are historically intimately linked and even overlapping; not only in the sense that advertising included consumer goods and that retailers advertised in local newspapers, but also in the sense that the very appearance of the shopwith its windows and the presentation of the goodswas itself considered part of the sphere of advertising (Arnberg & Husz, 2018;Ugolini, 2003, pp. 83-84).…”