Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [43]
But France was a world power and Paris was its capital. Emulating London’s Great Exhibition, with the expositions of 1855 and 1867, Louis Napoléon succeeded in attracting millions. These trade fairs celebrating the nineteenth-century cult of technology were nowhere invested in so heavily or used so impressively as in France. The Paris Expo of 1878, for example, launched the first experiments with electric street lighting; 1889 saw the building of the Eiffel Tower. This masterpiece of technology, at first condemned by the literary and artistic establishment as “the dishonor of Paris,” soon became one of the most iconic city emblems in the world. With the Expo of 1900, the Paris underground network, the Métropolitain, was opened.
While these fairs dazzled on an enormous scale, another type of urban spectacle was locating itself in a new kind of marketplace: the department store—le grand magasin. As multistory temples to modernity, the department stores overflowed with goods never seen before under one roof. (At Le Bon Marché one could find fifty-four different types of crinoline.) Lined up along Haussmann’s grands boulevards, these vast palaces of consumption became household names. They included La Belle Jardinière and La Samaritaine on the Right Bank by 1870; Le Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette, well established on the Left Bank by 1900. In ultramodern settings, using the latest technology, the grands magasins displayed their myriad luxuries in fabulous interiors at a range of prices everyone could manage, “from the duchess to the flirt and from the millionaire to the beggar.”4 At least, that was the theory. In practice, the poor couldn’t afford them.
If the better off had always had their dressmakers, many of the rest had bought much of their clothing from the wardrobe dealers selling castoffs in markets around the town. Although this trade would continue, by the 1850s, it had also become possible to buy a variety of inexpensive new ready-to-wear clothing. While the invention and development of the sewing machine spurred on this democratization, it was the grands magasins that first introduced off-the-peg clothes to a bourgeois clientele in upmarket settings. In these Aladdin’s caves, Parisians learned to indulge themselves as never before and acquired the habit of mass consumption. The launch of mail-order catalogues extended further the grands magasins’ influence, and thousands of women, such as Gabrielle’s aunt Louise, living far away from Paris, longed to visit these great cathedrals to the new religion of commerce.
Many disliked the new city of inexhaustible pleasures, and writers, such as Emile Zola, set out to record the particular conjunction of sexual and financial transaction seen as emblematic of Haussmann’s newly corrupt Paris. Fashionable women of all sorts now rubbed shoulders in the grands magasins, and one observer wrote, “One does not know, nowadays, if it’s honest women who are dressed like whores, or whores who are dressed like honest women.”5 Commerce became impersonal, and many of the small boutiques, relying on relatively local suppliers and serving regular customers, were overtaken by the department stores, which often bought from international sources and sold to people whom they had never met before.
Unlike old Paris, however, the new inner city did actually function. Despite the criticisms and the failure of “all classes to mix,” from the sanitation system to the department stores and the cafés, restaurants and theaters found on the grands boulevards, central Paris was indeed the epitome of modernity. Even those who disliked it were forced to admit that its thrusting energy and creative life gave the city a savage new, kind of magnificence.
While the nineteenth century had witnessed the confident emergence of the bourgeois, at first considered philistines in all matters of taste, their rise had left