Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge

by Lindy Woodhead

  Older established firms were invariably steeped in dark mahogany and staffed with imperiously mannered floorwalkers. There was very little of the theatrical about Debenham & Freebody, whose chilly Carrara marble halls in Wigmore Street were an oasis of genteel respectability serving upper-middle-class women who booked in at “Madam Pacard’s Dressmaking Department” for their special gowns.

  Virtually all these clothes were hand sewn, machines only being used for linings and petticoats. Selfridge’s, like all the “better stores,” had their own workrooms where seamstresses specialized in different sections—sleeves, bodices, or skirts. “Made on our own premises” was the benchmark of quality, although ever-increasing demand put additional pressure on production space and staff costs, leading to a marked increase in “sweated labor.”

  There were very few prestigious ready-made clothes available, other than cloaks and capes, which didn’t need fitting. The one exception was that mainstay of the Edwardian wardrobe, the beautiful blouse, which retailed at an average price of two to three guineas. Small, specialist manufacturers made up most of the lace and pin-tucked blouses and provided most lingerie—robes, lace-trimmed petticoats and camisoles. Such establishments might employ anything from a dozen to fifty girls, usually young, almost always immigrants, who earned somewhere between five and fifteen shillings a week. The girls often worked in appalling conditions, and the poor light and close work ruined their eyes. Makers of Our Clothes, published after the 1906 Anti-Sweated Labour Exhibition organized by the Cadbury family’s Daily News, describes the gruelingly long hours and low pay of people in workshops or at home, whose skills with a needle were the only way they could keep a roof over their head. Very few customers stopped to think how the clothes they were buying had been made.

  A lot of women used the department stores to buy part-made pieces, particularly unhemmed skirts and dresses with an open seam at the back, as clothes were not yet graded by size. Those with sewing skills or good local dressmakers bought “dress lengths” or “blouse lengths” ready cut, and of course all the trimmings from the haberdashery department, while the more affluent had made-to-measure “Paris models” replicated by the store’s workshops. Whether the gown in question was a paid-for model from Paris or simply been lifted from the pages of a magazine rather depended on the store in question, but regardless, a woman fond of fashion had to be “fitted and pinned,” devoting hours each week to the process.

  Selfridge’s never set out specifically to target the grander women of the Edwardian era, who still sourced their clothes in the more rarefied, opulent surroundings of court dressmaking establishments such as Redfern, Reville & Rossiter, and Mascotte in Park Street, the latter owned by the socially well-connected Mrs. Cyril Drummond. Arguably London’s first famous designer was the equally well-connected Lady Lucy Duff Gordon—known as Lucile—who had her own fashion house. She created her own distinctive look and had a flair for publicity—helped by the fact that her sister was the famously risqué author Elinor Glyn.

  Lucile eagerly adopted celebrity dressing, designing a wardrobe for the actress Lily Elsie in her role in The Merry Widow. She was also the first London designer to use live models, to color coordinate accessories to outfits, and to deliver clients’ orders packaged in bold striped boxes with ornate labels almost as sumptuous as the clothes inside. Selfridge’s, with its “house green” used on everything from the color of their delivery vans to the store carpets, came closest in such stylish coordination.

  The department stores were quick to copy Lucile’s ideas. Harrods promoted “a display of gowns on living models” for their 1909 Jubilee shows in their “Costume Department,” but while the store called itself the “Shrine of Fashion,” the truly fashionable worshipped at Lucile’s. No record exists of the full guest list for Lucile’s groundbreaking show held earlier that year, which she called “The Seven Ages of Women.” Her house mannequins included the statuesque beauties Hebe, Phyllis, and Florence, as well as the incomparable Dolores, who went on to become a famous Ziegfeld showgirl in New York. Among the audience were Queen Marie of Romania, Lillie Langtry, Queen Ina of Spain, Bertha Potter Palmer, Ethel Field Beatty, Margot Asquith, and what the media called “every society woman in London.”

  Change in fashion had been a long time coming. For over a decade Edwardian ladies had been poured into their favored boned “S-Bend” corsets, which created a lush embonpoint and a curvy derrière. The beautiful Mrs. Keppel, the king’s mistress en titre, had herself now swelled to Junoesque proportions, whereas the queen, at 64, still had a hand-span waist and porcelain complexion, albeit one liberally covered in makeup. The queen’s use of cosmetics was unusual. Lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara were still generally taboo and worn only by showgirls and good-time girls. Stores sold toiletries, which included scent, hairnets, brushes and combs, cold cream, face powders, tiny booklets of papier poudre sheets, and even the odd pot of rouge, but such things were generally tucked away in a discreet part of the building—at Selfridge’s at the back of the lower ground floor, next to “trusses and bedpans,” and at Harrods up on the first floor. All that was about to change.

  Fashion was being disseminated with increasing speed, spilling out of the pages of the ever-growing number of magazines and newspapers. In Paris the new “lean line” had just been launched by Paul Poiret, whose influence ultimately banished frilled and flounced petticoats and whose hobble skirts heralded the reinvention of what went underneath. Out went curved corsets and in came underpinnings specifically made to contour a long, lean and straight body. Poiret was fond of saying he had “liberated women” by introducing the brassiere and banishing boned bodices. In reality, real Poiret devotees wore long, hip-hugging foundation garments under skirts so tight they could hardly walk.

  Poiret found an enthusiastic following among the British fashion elite. The prime minister’s wife Margot Asquith invited him to present his collection at a special show for her friends at No. 10 Downing Street, where Helena Rubinstein herself was on hand to supervise the models’ makeup and apply some rouge to Mrs. Asquith, who had a penchant for cosmetics. Unfortunately the press took violent exception to this French invasion, creating such a furor that questions were raised in the House of Commons. The media were equally critical: “Not only does Mr. Asquith refuse his own people the right of protection, but he facilitates the intrusion of foreign merchandise by allowing exhibitions in the residence which has been paid for by the nation’s trade.” The prime minister’s wife, for once unusually subdued, was subsequently to be found at Lucile’s, while Monsieur Poiret basked in the publicity and department stores furiously copied his designs.

  One fashion that didn’t change was big hats. If anything, they got even bigger and were trimmed with a profusion of feathers and flowers. Big hair on the other hand was being toned down. Selfridge’s sold a huge selection of false hairpieces but the latest trend, thanks to Charles Nestle’s Permanent Wave Machine, was for waving. “Girls Prefer Curls” said the ads, which meant that at the store’s hairdressing department—featuring the most modern equipment in London—the ten senior stylists were kept busy curling. They were also coloring, thanks to the Frenchman Eugène Schueller’s new hair dyes.

  Clothes had also changed color, no longer confined to a palette of sweet-pea tones or Royal Mourning Mauve. Thanks to the Fauve movement in Paris, strong, bold shades had finally swept back into fashion.

  In July 1910, London’s grandees were treated to a Russian divertissement hosted by Bertha Potter Palmer at her palatial home in Carlton House Terrace. Harry and Rose Selfridge were among the guests who saw Anna Pavlova and her partner Michel Mordkin perform, with Pavlova wearing a sumptuous scarlet satin and gold tissue appliquéd robe designed by Ivan Bilibine. Dance in various forms inspired huge fashion trends, just as dancers like Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, and the notorious Maud Allan—famous for writing an illustrated sex manual for women—became style icons. When Maud Allan made her debut in Vision of Salomé at the
Palace Theatre, a production loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s equally notorious Salomé, she wore what Lady Diana Manners described as a “wisp of chiffon.” Maude also wore ropes and ropes of faux pearls, triggering a craze for fake jewels. Selfridge’s hastily opened a large costume jewelry department, which annoyed their Mr. Dix and Mr. Tanner, who presided over real stones in the store—but the fashion for fakes became an unstoppable trend.

  The biggest impact on fashion through dance, however, undoubtedly came from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, launched in Paris in the summer of 1909. The stunning sets designed by Alexandre Benois and Leon Bakst prompted a sea-change in home décor, triggering vibrancy in everything from paint colors to curtains and cushions and Selfridge’s dedicated their entire run of windows to a promotion for the Ballet Russe when Diaghilev brought the company to London in 1911.

  Selfridge’s was in the right place at exactly the right time. Daily it seemed the press was reporting a new invention or feat of bravura, but nothing captured the public’s imagination more than aviation. In the six years since Wilbur and Orville Wright had first taken to the air at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, the thrill of flight had taken hold. Newspapers—in particular Northcliffe’s Daily Mail and George Holt Thomas’s Daily Graphic—saw aviation as a means of boosting circulation, between them offering thousands of pounds in prizes to those who could make or break flight records. The fact that most entrants were opportunist self-publicists, with little hope of getting their machines off the ground, didn’t matter. It all made good copy.

  The French, having invented the hot-air balloon in the eighteenth century, were understandably keen to set their own aviation records. By 1907, the Voisin-Delagrande biplane had made it into the air, while in 1910, the colorful self-styled Baroness Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman in the world to receive a pilot’s license. Most exciting of all, the Frenchman Louis Blériot flew into the history books as the first man to fly over water. On a cloudy day in late July 1909, he soared into the air above Calais in a monoplane driven by a three-cylinder engine, attached to a two-bladed propeller, and headed for England.

  Blériot’s epic journey—which lasted just forty-three hair-raising minutes—was sponsored by the Daily Mail, who had enticingly offered one thousand pounds as prize money. Waiting on the Kent coast was an enthusiastic French reporter waving the tricolor, a Daily Mail photographer and newsman—and Harry Gordon Selfridge. A deal was struck. Louis—grateful apparently for some hard cash—agreed that Selfridge could exhibit his plane in his store for four days. It has been said that Selfridge was conveniently motoring in Kent that morning and just happened by. His son, however, said he had planned the coup like a military exercise, driving down to Kent having already made arrangements to transport the plane back to London. Whatever the case, young Gordon, confined to bed with a bad cold, missed the excitement. It seems unlikely that Lord Northcliffe would have allowed his prize-winning pilot—not to mention his plane—to be whisked away so promptly unless he had agreed in advance. Given his acquaintanceship with Selfridge and the publicity that a four-day exhibition offered the Mail, he had nothing to lose.

  Blériot’s plane, so fragile-looking that one observer said it seemed to be “all leather straps and balsa wood,” left Dover on an open railway wagon and arrived at Cannon Street Station at four in the morning. There was no motorized delivery van large enough to carry it, so the aircraft made its journey somewhat ignominiously by horse and cart to the store, where it was installed in the hastily cleared “bag and trunk” department on the lower ground floor, protected by a wooden barrier and guarded by six reserve police constables around the clock. Having spent hours on the telephone to Fleet Street, Selfridge was assured of headline-breaking news that would coincide with the store’s opening that morning. He had also booked advertisements, styling them like news announcements: “Calais—Dover—Selfridges,” screamed the copy. “The Blériot aeroplane, which flew the Channel yesterday, is on view, free of charge of course, on our lower ground floor. The Public are cordially invited to see this wonderful epoch-making machine.” Anticipating a rush of hot-blooded males, he tactfully added “Reserved space for lady visitors” underneath.

  It was the best show in town. Blériot’s plane was seen by 150,000 people, among them MPs who were given a special viewing, as were members of the House of Lords. On Thursday that week, the store stayed open until midnight to accommodate the crowds. Competitors called it a “cheap stunt.” Stunt it was—but it certainly wasn’t cheap. It was a classy, clever, extravagant, glorious piece of marketing genius, which at a stroke established Harry Gordon Selfridge as the showman of shopping. From that point on, his business started to take off.

  8.

  Lighting Up the Night

  “Dance, dance, dance, till you drop.”

  —W. H. AUDEN

  FOR A TREND TO DEVELOP CREDIBILITY AND PROFITABILITY, it has to become something that everyone is doing, however briefly. In 1910, “trend spotters,” as today’s consumer consultants are called, would have had a field day. Science was sexy. Almost all the inventions or technological refinements that were emerging in the late Edwardian era acted as a trigger of change: the airplane, the motorcar, the telephone, color printing, the advertising poster, graphic design, product packaging, refrigeration, processed food, recorded music, electricity, the camera, the embryonic cinema, even the six-hour boat to France. And of course there was the all-powerful popular press which, by promoting each one, helped create new consumer demand.

  In 1910, the public was dancing to big-band music, smooching and sighing to the lyrics of songs such as “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” and then buying phonograph wax cylinders to play the music at home (the cylinders were often sold with recording attachments, which gave the added excitement of being able to make a voice message). Professional musicians grumbled about the quality of the sound, which had a tinny echo—John Sousa, by now a world-famous bandleader, scathingly called the cylinders “canned music”—but it didn’t stop them flying out of the new phonograph department at Selfridge’s. Obsolescence being the lifeblood of retailing, however, the complex cylinders were soon superseded by pressed discs in paper sleeves, courtesy of Columbia Records: the big hit of 1910 at Selfridge’s was “Land of Hope and Glory,” recorded by Clara Butt.

  For young couples, music and dancing were an escape from stifling restrictions at home. Increasingly, independence came simply from having somewhere else to go, such as the Lyons’ tea shops where a respectable young man could take his girl. Yet the morality of the time still insisted that men and women should not be featured together. When Selfridge’s advertised their restaurant with a picture of a couple looking seductively at one another over the cutlery, it broke new ground.

  Independence also came through transport. In London this included the expanding Underground system and the newly introduced motor buses which were rapidly replacing their horse-drawn predecessors. On the route down Oxford Street, the conductor would shout out “Selfridge’s” as the bus pulled up at the stop outside. Selfridge’s booked bus-panel advertising, but there was never any name on the façade of the store. Selfridge, believing that signs would interfere with its architectural symmetry, reasoned that by now everyone knew his building. Instead, there were just two discreet plaques at each end of the window bays. He had long hoped that the Bond Street tube station might be renamed “Selfridge’s,” and constantly lobbied his close friend Albert Stanley, the influential managing director of the Underground Electric Railway Company. Mr. Stanley would smile indulgently whenever Selfridge raised the topic and then gently reject the idea.

  The store was now lit until midnight each night, shining like a beacon in the dark smoggy street, the window displays advertised as “being part of the city’s entertainment,” designed to “introduce the new art of window-shopping.” Unfortunately, the vast piles of tantalizing merchandise freely displayed inside—dozens of sponges, mountains of scented soap, layer upon layer of e
mbroidered handkerchiefs—also encouraged shoplifting. As more and more thieves were arrested, local magistrates accused Selfridge’s of “pandering to kleptomania.” Selfridge himself was curiously uncommunicative about shoplifting. It was almost as though he refused to believe people could steal and wanted the whole messy business to go away. He hated being associated with it. When a thief was on trial, his public relations staff were instructed to call the newspapers and ask them not to mention Selfridge’s by name but merely to write “at a West End store.”

  Dance continued to enchant and enthrall, as did the dancers. When Anna Pavlova made her first public appearance in London at Shaftesbury Avenue’s Palace Theatre in April, it was rumored that Selfridge was à deux with the queen of the pas de deux. He had first met her the year before and went to see her perform several times, sending her baskets of flowers that were as tall as she was, if not taller. They were seen having supper together, Selfridge immaculate in white tie and tails, and Pavlova in a “magnificent sable wrap,” the inference being he had provided it—though since she was being paid twelve hundred pounds a week, she could easily have afforded to buy her own. Selfridge’s certainly stocked sables in the fur department, and the couple’s lingering tour of the store was later vividly recalled by a staff member. But then “the Chief” was often to be found escorting famous women, a visit to Selfridge’s being a sine qua non for visiting celebrities who all signed their names with a diamond-tipped stick on a specially dedicated glass window panel in Harry’s office. His advertising manager, A. H. Williams, who later wrote a book about his two decades at the store, was adamant that not all these liaisons were of an intimate nature, claiming that Selfridge was merely a generous host and escort, albeit one hopelessly captivated by fame. Yet the rumor that he was a roué refused to die.