18. Department stores are a reflection of how times have changed, not necessarily for the better
Marshall Field, the founder of the Chicago icon which bears his name, was an extremely conservative man who, believe it or not, found department stores to be distasteful. He felt that encouraging hard-working people to part with their money was vulgar, an unusual attitude to be found in a merchant, to say the least. He also believed that displays of fashion were vain and thus un-Christian, and that some such displays were downright obscene. He refused to allow women’s undergarments to be displayed on manikins in his stores, and objected to – though he allowed – their being shown in display cases where they could be seen by all. One cannot but wonder what he would say should be stroll past a display window at Abercrombie and Fitch, or Victoria’s Secret.
Field’s also objected to women wearing makeup anywhere other than onstage at the theater, and he strictly forbade his employees from doing so, though then as today makeup and cosmetics were a large part of the store’s product line, as dictated by Harry Selfridge before he fled to his own store in London. Mr. Field also had strict rules against men waiting on women in the store. It was perfectly all right for a male clerk to wait on a woman in men’s fashions, for example, but if a lady was considering a purchase for herself, such as shoes, a dress, or the aforementioned undergarments, only another woman was allowed to wait on her, preventing men from committing the social faux pas of mentioning, perhaps, a bodice in mixed company. Fields also restricted male employees from standing idly near stairs, to save them from the temptation of glancing up women’s skirts, whether deliberately or not.
