Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (16 page)

Poiret found an enthusiastic following among the British fashion élite. 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’ make-up 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 furore 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 hair-pieces 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 colouring, thanks to the Frenchman Eugène Schueller’s new hair dyes.

Clothes had also changed colour, 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 Maude Allan – famous for writing an illustrated sex manual for women – became style icons. When Maude Allan made her debut in
Vision of Salome
at the Palace Theatre, a production loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s equally notorious
Salome
, 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 jewellery 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 colours 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 colourful self-styled Baroness Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman in the world to receive a pilot’s licence. 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 £1,000 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 acquaint-anceship 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.

‘Dance, dance, dance, till you drop’
W. H. Auden

F
or 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 aeroplane, the motor car, the telephone, colour 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 were 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 band-leader, 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 life-blood 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 embroidered 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 enthral, as did the dancers. When Anna Pavlova made her first public appearance in London at Shaftesbury Avenue’s Palace Theatre in April, it was rumoured 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 £1,200 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 rumour that he was a roué refused to die.

Royalty’s own roué, King Edward VII, died in May 1910 and was deeply mourned. Thousands of people got up before dawn to line the route of the funeral procession, hoping to catch a glimpse of his coffin. As the cortège wound its way through London, with his dog Caesar faithfully following behind, many members of the public wept. No one was really in the mood for shopping, and business slipped back at almost every shop and store, except ironically at the grand
fashion houses where staff were busy making elaborate dresses for Royal Ascot in, to paraphrase Henry Ford’s slogan for his Model T car, ‘every colour, so long as it’s black’. There were some who felt Ascot should be cancelled that year, but the race meeting went ahead in what famously became known as ‘Black Ascot’.

A few weeks earlier, Selfridge’s had published their figures, which revealed a mixed year. The Blériot effect had by now worn off. Selfridge dipped into his personal funds to the tune of £28,500 to pay the 6 per cent interest due to preference shareholders. The store’s figures were not well received, even though it was clear that the enormous sums invested in the store would obviously take time to recoup. Many stores in Oxford Street – even crusty old Marshall & Snelgrove – admitted that their business had ‘dramatically improved since the opening of Selfridge’s’. Yet the man himself got a poor financial press.

Fortunately for Selfridge, his new best friend Sir Edward Holden, Chairman of the Midland Bank, chose to ignore it. Sir Edward, having become the Midland’s General Manager in 1891, had spear-headed such an aggressive expansion programme that at the peak of his friendship with Selfridge in 1918, he was presiding over what was then the largest bank in the world. Sir Edward’s vision for international expansion meant he frequently travelled to America, a country he admired and where at one point during the early 1900s he had considered opening branches in New York and Chicago. While that idea never materialized, in 1905, uniquely among British banks, he had the foresight to open a foreign exchange department. Sharing Harry’s belief in the lucrative prospects of the widening travel market, Sir Edward was an enthusiastic supporter of his grand plans.