Department Stores: Trading in Sensory Pleasure

In this chapter, we look at the role of sensory experience in the early construction of mass consumer markets. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the newly created department stores became innovative spaces for the incorporation of marketing techniques. Taking the Parisian Bon Marché as a starting point, I identify practices that, in the context of department stores, mobilise the senses to contribute to sales. On the one hand is the creation of an atmosphere that favours sales, on the other is a new physical-sensory relationship between the public and the product, linked to the birth of ready-made clothing and the open display of products. This led to the practice of kleptomania, which was examined at the time in Doctor Paul Dubuisson’s treatise Les Voleuses de grands magasins (The Department Store Thieves, 1902). I argue here that in the second half of the nineteenth century, within the dynamics of the capitalist market, the aesthetic dimension was democratised to create desires in such a way that, in the face of the rational criteria of discourse, appealing to the senses allowed sales to fit with the transitory nature of the modern experience.