Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (5 page)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the supreme master
dictating trends was Charles Frederick Worth. Born in Lincolnshire, Worth spent some time on the shop floor at Swan & Edgar’s in Piccadilly and several years working for leading silk merchants in both London and Paris. He opened his own salon on the rue de la Paix in 1858 and found fame by dressing Princess Pauline von Metternich and the Empress Eugénie. Monsieur Worth was sufficiently egotistical to think of himself as all-powerful – fashion titans usually do – but he wasn’t the first celebrated royal designer. That honour goes to Rose Bertin, dressmaker and milliner to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette. Rose Bertin’s celebrated skills were surpassed only by the astonishing bills she presented to the Queen. But even though she sent model dolls wearing miniature versions of her gowns to princesses at other royal courts in Europe, her reputation was restricted to just a few hundred people. Thanks to the growing influence of magazines in America, Worth was the first designer to become internationally famous.

He was the designer of choice for the wives of the super-rich – his were the original ‘red carpet’ gowns, created for women who made an entrance and whose husbands’ bank balances could stand the cost. His favourite clients were American since they tended to order several gowns at once and never queried the design or the price. Worth used to say ‘My transatlantic friends are always welcome – they have the figures, the francs and the faith.’ The thrifty French grandees on the other hand – such as the Comtesse Greffuhle, one of Proust’s models for the Duchesse de Guermantes in
A la recherche du temps perdu
– ordered individually and, worse, would have their dressmaker make ‘alterations’ so that the gown could be worn for longer.

Worth revolutionized the business of fashion by presenting his collection on live models in Paris to a slavishly devoted audience, which included most of the ‘Wall Street wives’. Travelling to Europe – particularly to Paris – was an annual event for the American rich, enabling them to stock up on art and antiques and visit Worth’s salon. Unfortunately for Worth, the Franco-Prussian War put paid to their travels. Worse still, his most famous client, the Empress Eugénie,
went into exile in England, his sumptuous salon was requisitioned as a hospital, and the bitter siege of Paris left people more worried about food than fashion. News filtered out that Parisians were eating their horses, cats and dogs, and
Le Figaro
reported that the chefs at the Paris Jockey Club showed culinary initiative in making ‘quite a good salami from rats’.

In the uneasy aftermath of the war, Worth reopened. Ably assisted by his son, Jean-Philippe, before long his business reached such dizzy heights that he had over 1,200 staff on his payroll. His masterstroke was to follow the money by taking his collection to New York and Rhode Island. There, as ‘the king of fashion’, his appearances resembled a state visit as society scrambled to have him as guest of honour at their cocktail receptions and dinners. Orders were then placed to be made up in Paris and shipped back to America.

There wasn’t a name from the Gilded Age that Worth didn’t dress, and a wardrobe by Worth became the sine qua non for rich American girls who were keen to acquire a titled British husband. Worth’s lifestyle mirrored that of his clients, and his beautifully dressed wife and two elegant sons became part of the Worth publicity machine which whirred so effectively that J. P. Morgan himself considered Worth a friend and is said to have cried when he died.

Having virtually invented the crinoline, Worth was equally pleased to get rid of it, as once more he changed the way women dressed. Drapers owed Monsieur Worth a debt beyond price. As each fashion plate of his latest gown was published, women would rush to buy material and commission a similar model. At Field & Leiter alone in the mid-1870s, there were 300 girls sewing in the top-floor workrooms, all busy making gowns for the wives of Chicago’s rich, while copies of Worth’s newly styled and lavishly trimmed jaunty hats flew out of the millinery department.

Despite the back bustles, which involved purchasing a collapsible framed contraption called a ‘dress improver’, women were finally discovering the delights of lighter lingerie, as ultra-heavy boned and back-laced corsets were replaced by less cumbersome underpinnings.
Corsets were still boned, but the most popular, unaccountably named ‘The Widow Machree’, was a curve-inducing, front-fastening model with kid-covered hooks and eyes. For the main part, women’s dresses were still buttoned up – at least during the day – but the décolleté evening gowns that were now emerging required new uplifting underwear. For those embarrassed about their meagre embonpoint, help was at hand from the Elastic Bosom Company which, having patented their padding, proudly announced that ‘in case of shipwreck it would be impossible for the wearer to drown’. In an astute move at a time when virtually all sales staff were male, Marshall Field employed women to work in the store’s burgeoning lingerie department, which meant that ladies could be accurately measured and fitted without embarrassment: particularly important as over-tight corsets could cause anything from fainting fits to uterine and spinal disorders.

Field’s brother Joseph had by this time been dispatched to England where he set up a company outpost in Manchester, the idea being that he would source new products, imports having cachet among the store’s wealthier clientele. Joseph was a dull, miserly man, given to wearing his overcoat in the unheated office and entirely lacking in the glamour associated with fashion, so it isn’t surprising that his purchases had a mixed reception. He did, however, send back all sorts of specialist textiles including Nottingham lace and Paisley shawls. Field & Leiter sold lace tablecloths that cost $1,000 a time, when the average weekly wage was $10, but they had plenty of customers who could afford them and who were not at all perturbed by the prohibitive import duties that added so much to the price.

Recession hadn’t halted the relentless progress of the rich in Chicago any more than it had held back the ‘Robber Barons’ of New York. Chicago manufactured, packed and shipped the thing that mattered most – foodstuffs – across America and over the ocean to Europe. By the end of the 1870s, the city was deafened by the sound of building as offices, warehouses and transport terminals sprang up alongside the shanty towns that housed the rising flood of immigrants from Europe. The building boom was financed by the new élite, who
were also busy building themselves palatial new homes, their principal requirements being that the result should be impressively large, have the requisite ballroom, and not be anywhere near the city’s riff-raff – Chicago was infamous for its brothels and booze. The city’s rich colonized their own safe havens, settling in Calumet Avenue, Prairie Avenue or a little further south in ‘Millionaire’s Row’ on Michigan Avenue.

Field himself moved his family (young Marshall II now had a baby sister called Ethel) to Prairie Avenue, commissioning the celebrated architect Richard Morris Hunt to build him a merchant’s mansion. Unusually for a Chicago commission, Field asked Hunt to ‘keep it simple’. Hunt, more used to clients such as the Vanderbilts (for whom he designed ‘The Breakers’, their faux-Italian Renaissance palace in Newport, at a cost of $11 million), was unable to exercise his imagination. Unlike the ostentatious Pullman home, or Cyrus McCormick’s vast and awesomely unattractive house nearby, Hunt’s three-storey dwelling for Field was a model of restraint. It was also the first house in Chicago to be wired for electricity, which shone brightly on the yellow silk-covered walls. Even so, the house was always described as being bleak and cold. It wasn’t a happy home.

Mrs Marshall Field could have become one of Chicago’s leading hostesses, but she seems never to have had the inclination. A gentle soul married to a man with absolutely no sense of fun, she was prone to chronic migraines and spent an increasing amount of time recuperating in the South of France, more than happy to leave Chicago’s social set to compete for the exalted role of leader. That honour went to Bertha Honoré Palmer, who became the undisputed ‘Queen of Chicago’ just as
the
Mrs Astor was the ‘Queen of New York’.

Young Bertha (who had been just 21 when she married 44-year-old Potter) had youth, good looks, quantities of money courtesy of her indulgent husband, and a sister married to President Ulysses S. Grant’s son Frederick, which gave her a cachet that money couldn’t buy.

Bertha adored jewels – her favourites being diamonds and pearls – and she soon had a prodigious quantity of them, seemingly often
wearing them all at once. Potter enjoyed this visible display of excess as much as Bertha did, being prone to remarking fondly, ‘There she stands, with half a million on her back.’ Actually, it was more like half a million round her neck and another half million on her head: one of Bertha’s famous ‘dog collars’ was set with 2,268 pearls, while her favourite tiara contained 30 diamonds each as big as a quail’s egg.

Given that she was pin-thin and petite, Mrs Palmer stood up very well to the rigours of running Chicago society, which she controlled with a rod of iron. At grand functions such as the entrance march to her annual Charity Ball, Mrs Palmer was flanked by the ladies who acted as her deputies and who ran the various ‘sub-divisions’ of the city. The Palmers themselves ruled the North-side from their awesome turreted castle where, in a show of extreme control, there were no exterior doorknobs – guests had to wait until a servant opened the door – and where the privileged few could ride to the upper floors in the first elevators installed in a private home in Chicago.

Mrs Palmer had a great fondness for Worth gowns and for Paris, where she maintained a home, just as she did in London where the Palmers held court in Carlton House Terrace. Perhaps it was just as well they had three large houses, for they owned an awful lot of art. Always at the cutting edge of fashion, Mrs Palmer was an early patron of the Impressionists. In one single year she famously bought twenty-five Monets, and she loved her Renoir
Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando
so much that it travelled with her wherever she went.

By 1877, Bertha had only to step over to Field & Leiter to buy a new gown by Worth, the store’s Paris agent having bought twelve models for Chicago’s first private orders from the great man. But before they could be delivered, the store went up in smoke. People mourned its loss as they would have done the death of a relative, and the
Chicago Tribune
produced a fine obituary: ‘The destruction of St Peter’s in Rome could hardly have aroused a deeper interest than the destruction of this splendid dry goods establishment … this was the place of worship for thousands of our female fellow-citizens. It was the only shrine at which they paid their devotions.’

Yet another temporary site was hastily found and while Field and Leiter anxiously debated their future, the Singer Company started to clear the rubble and rebuild. Confident that it was the best site in town, Field himself suggested not only moving back in but also buying the building. Levi Leiter was reluctant. He didn’t understand the new retail business; he was a traditional wholesaling man. Wholesale, he argued, was less complex to run and made much more money – in 1872 retail sales stood at $3.1 million against wholesaling at $14 million. Field disagreed. The cachet of running a prime retail site was what kept the wholesale customers loyal – one was inseparable from the other. Eventually the partners offered $500,000 to Singer, who immediately rejected it. It was $700,000 ‘take it or leave it’. Field was in New York on a business trip when Singer contacted Leiter for his final offer. Brusque and stubborn to the end, Leiter wouldn’t budge, losing the prime site to the ambitious Scottish duo, Sam Carson and John Pirie, who leased it at $70,000 a year. Field was furious and rushed back from New York to salvage the mess. He won – as he always did – but it cost him Singer’s original purchase price of $700,000 plus an extra $100,000 to buy Carson Pirie Scott out of their lease. He didn’t forgive Levi Leiter and he didn’t forget.

Field & Leiter moved into their new, spacious six-storey building in November 1879 where 500 assistants on the floor served Chicago’s best customers. Field used to say it was ‘everyone’s store’, and everyone came, from the celebrated actress Lillie Langtry – famous for her sexual exploits in England – to Carrie Watson, who knew a thing or two about sex herself, given that she ran Chicago’s most exclusive brothel. In keeping with the style of her ‘house’ – a three-storey mansion with more than twenty bedrooms plus a bowling alley and billiard room in the basement for those waiting to be served – Carrie’s girls were beautifully dressed. They ‘received’ in ball gowns, fluttered their fans in the most charming way and peeled off layers of exquisite underwear, all of which made Carrie Watson one of Field & Leiter’s most valued customers.

There was no such excitement in the basement of Field’s Market
Street wholesale building where young Harry Selfridge had just started his new job. Such thrills as he got were from reading the newspapers – which he devoured daily – or from visits to the theatre where he watched stars such as Lillie Langtry while nurturing dreams of his future. He didn’t have long to wait. Within the year, his boss, the immaculately dressed and fastidious John Shedd, sent Selfridge ‘on the road’ selling lace. Shedd, who would stay with Marshall Field throughout his career, ultimately becoming President on Field’s death in 1906, had joined the business as an enthusiastic wholesaling junior in 1871. He was organized, methodical and a gifted salesman who loved beautiful things. When Selfridge joined, Mr Shedd was running the lace department, one of the most profitable in the division. Shedd and Selfridge would become the two men who between them revolutionized the firm.

The Field & Leiter ‘linemen’, as they were known, were legendary. They were given a budget to ‘entertain’ alongside their suitcase of samples and swatches, and if they surpassed their target of $100,000 each year they received a bonus. No one knows if Selfridge hit the target, but we do know he hated the job. After three years he had had enough. Harry Selfridge – always urbane – knew he was an urban man and wanted to live in Chicago. Requesting a transfer to work in retail, he moved over to the State Street store in 1883.