Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (15 page)

Selfridge may have upset a lot of people in London, but he genuinely wanted to make Oxford Street the pre-eminent shopping street in the world. It was proving harder than he had thought and he admitted his ideal would be to have ‘Harrods on one side of us, Whiteley’s on the other, and Swan & Edgar facing us. Then we should all do better.’

There were daily discussions about how to increase footfall. Determined to attract men into the store – either accompanying their wives and girlfriends or shopping themselves – Selfridge opened a rifle range on the roof terrace. Paintings that had failed to be selected for the Royal Academy’s Summer Show were exhibited in the store. ‘Artists have a hard enough time making a living,’ said Selfridge, ‘and anyway, there might be some undiscovered treasures amongst them.’ As it happened, there weren’t, but he was always keen to explore new ideas. Even his children weren’t allowed to leave the breakfast table until they had each made at least three suggestions. Rosalie, Violette, Harry Gordon (always called Gordon Jr) and Beatrice were now 15, 12, 9 and 8 respectively. Their upbringing was unusual to say the least. Their contemporaries didn’t breakfast with their parents, let alone discuss business ideas, nor did their fathers own stores that provided the unheard-of treat of ice-cream sodas for tea.

Grace Lovat Fraser, a friend of Rosalie’s, spent a lot of time at Arlington Street. The atmosphere was ‘lively and informal, with the house always full of young people, of whom gentle Mrs Selfridge was very fond’. Grace became very close to the children, often joining them on trips to matinées organized by their grandmother, whom she described as ‘unobtrusively formidable’ and ‘unquestionably the head of the household’. Rose Selfridge didn’t share her husband’s passion for London or its nightlife. Neither did she care for the rigid formality of the era. Even Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother and an early ‘dollar princess’ who was a member of Edward VII’s set, wrote in
her 1908 diary: ‘In England, the American woman is looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature with habits and manner something between a red Indian and a Gaiety Girl.’ Admittedly, Jennie had a snake tattooed around her wrist and a penchant for lovers younger than her own son, whereas Rose Selfridge wasn’t in the least flashy and loved nothing better than being at home with her family. Rose missed Chicago, travelling back there three, or sometimes four times a year to see her sister.

The children had very different personalities. According to Grace, ‘Rosalie was quiet and gentle, like her mother, while Violette was outgoing, pretty and given to improvising unexpected amusements which were indulgently regarded by the rest of the family.’ Violette, the ‘wild child’ of the family, once famously bluffed her way into her father’s office, disguised in a blonde wig, and solicited a fairly generous cheque from him for a fake charity.

The girls went to Miss Douglas’s school in Queen’s Gate, had dancing classes at Mrs Wordsworth’s, and learned to curtsey and to speak ‘very pretty French’. Young Gordon meanwhile was sent away to prep school. Groomed from an early age to join the business, his holidays filled with private tuition, even as a child he often appeared at his father’s side for photo opportunities. The store was the children’s playground. The three girls were treated like little princesses in the toy department, the pet department, the girls’ clothes department and especially the confectionery department. Gordon Jr and his friends probably preferred the vast lower basement, where men stoked the coal furnaces that heated the steam radiators throughout the store, or Irongate Wharf in Paddington, where the delivery vans, carts and horses were kept.

The children led a very international life compared to many of their classmates. Summers were spent in Chicago, while in winter they went to St Moritz to ski and skate. In London, they cycled around town, played tennis and took judo classes, activities for which they were dressed by the store where sports clothes and equipment were stocked in depth.

While sportsmen now wore lighter clothes, women were still covered from chin to ankle, or from chin to knee in the case of swimwear. In 1909, Mrs Charlotte Cooper Sterry, who had previously won the Wimbledon Ladies’ Championship five times, said: ‘To my idea nothing looks smarter or more in keeping with the game than a nice white skirt – about two inches off the ground – white blouse, white band and a pale coloured silk tie and white collar.’ What she didn’t say was that she was – as all women were – still wearing a corset, although the newly introduced ‘sports corset’ was a smaller affair, made in cotton, shaped like a waist-cincher and much more lightly boned. It took what had originally been introduced as a child’s garment – the ribbed cotton liberty bodice – to liberate sportswomen from corsets when an enterprising manufacturer made them in adult sizes, marketing them as a lighter-weight cover-up.

Women who played golf fared little better. The struggle between the new woman’s enthusiasm for golf and her clothes became so acute that special golf courses were laid out with short holes as they couldn’t hit a long drive wearing a tightly cut jacket. At this point, Burberry – having made their name with special weather-proofed motoring clothes – came to the rescue with their ‘Ladies’ Free-stroke Coat with patent
Pivot
Sleeve and adjustable skirt’.

There’s little evidence to suggest that the Selfridge girls enjoyed country pursuits – understandably, given that their father didn’t even own tweeds, once famously annoying his hostess by turning up for a weekend in the country still wearing his usual formal coat and striped trousers.

Above all, the family talked together, with Madam Selfridge marking up interesting passages in the morning and evening newspapers for daily discussion round the dining-table. Selfridge was a fond father, indulgent towards his children and himself indulged by his devoted wife and mother. Edward Price Bell, who knew them in both Chicago and London, observed that his home and family ‘provided [Selfridge] with emotional riches of astonishing affluence’. Despite
all this, it wasn’t enough. Selfridge had a compulsion for conquest – whether in work, or with women.

Financial security came three months after the opening of the store when, despite some scepticism in the City, Selfridge succeeded in raising money through the company’s share offering. The originating £900,000 capital was split into £400,000 worth of 6 per cent cumulative preference shares at £1 each, and £500,000 worth of ordinary shares at £1. Selfridge himself owned well over 200,000 preference and 300,000 ordinary shares. There was a further offer of £400,000 worth of 5 per cent first mortgage debentures at £100 each. Selfridge, having alerted investors ‘not to expect dividends for a year or two’, immediately went out and bought sixteen adjoining buildings, increased his advertising budget and hired 200 new members of staff.

Though the store was too new to have earned a place in London’s fashion hierarchy, customers were drawn by the depth of accessories beautifully displayed in individual departments: parasols, coq feather boas, trimmed millinery, handkerchiefs, gloves and lace. Selfridge’s also specialized in shoes, sold the most mouth-watering tea gowns and had some of the best-stocked children’s wear and corsetry departments in town. Servants’ liveries, nurses’ uniforms, even clothes and dog-collars for the clergy – Selfridge’s sold them all.

It was a good beginning, but it wasn’t enough. Existing stores already had an established customer base. Harrods served ‘society’ and the classier end of the artistic world – Oscar Wilde, Lillie Langtry and Ellen Terry had been among the first to sign up for monthly credit accounts when Harrods launched them as early as 1884. Swan & Edgar was the store of choice for actresses, dancers and the
demimonde
, all of whom ordered delicious clothes made in their workshops under the supervision of the talented Ann Cheriton. Swan’s real claim to fame came when W. Somerset Maugham used it as a model for his fictional ‘Lynn & Sedley’ in
Of Human Bondage
, paying the floorwalker Gilbert Clarke 30 guineas to give him a blow-by-blow description of the rigours of retailing, right down to the depressing and dirty staff hostels.

Older established firms were invariably steeped in dark mahogany and staffed with imperiously mannered floor-walkers. There was very little of the theatrical about Debenham & Freebody, whose chilly Carrara marble halls in Wigmore Street were an oasis of genteel respectability serving upper-middle-class women who booked in at ‘Madam Pacard’s Dressmaking Department’ for their special gowns.

Virtually all these clothes were hand-sewn, machines only being used for linings and petticoats. Selfridge’s, like all the ‘better stores’, had their own workrooms where seamstresses specialized in different sections – sleeves, bodices or skirts. ‘Made on our own premises’ was the benchmark of quality, although ever-increasing demand put additional pressure on production space and staff costs, leading to a marked increase in ‘sweated labour’.

There were very few prestigious ready-made clothes available, other than cloaks and capes, which didn’t need fitting. The one exception was that mainstay of the Edwardian wardrobe, the beautiful blouse, which retailed at an average price of 2 to 3 guineas. Small, specialist manufacturers made up most of the lace and pin-tucked blouses and provided most lingerie – robes, lace-trimmed petticoats and camisoles. Such establishments might employ anything from a dozen to fifty girls, usually young, almost always immigrants, who earned somewhere between 5 and 15 shillings a week. The girls often worked in appalling conditions, and the poor light and close work ruined their eyes.
Makers of Our Clothes
, published after the 1906 Anti-Sweated Labour Exhibition organized by the Cadbury family’s
Daily News
, describes the gruellingly long hours and low pay of people in workshops or at home, whose skills with a needle were the only way they could keep a roof over their head. Very few customers stopped to think how the clothes they were buying had been made.

A lot of women used the department stores to buy part-made pieces, particularly unhemmed skirts and dresses with an open seam at the back, as clothes were not yet graded by size. Those with sewing skills or good local dressmakers bought ‘dress lengths’ or ‘blouse lengths’ ready cut, and of course all the trimmings from the haberdashery
department, while the more affluent had made-to-measure ‘Paris models’ replicated by the store’s workshops. Whether the gown in question was a paid-for model from Paris or simply been lifted from the pages of a magazine rather depended on the store in question, but regardless, a woman fond of fashion had to be ‘fitted and pinned’, devoting hours each week to the process.

Selfridge’s never set out specifically to target the grander women of the Edwardian era, who still sourced their clothes in the more rarefied, opulent surroundings of court dressmaking establishments such as Redfern, Reville & Rossiter and Mascotte in Park Street, the latter owned by the socially well-connected Mrs Cyril Drummond. Arguably London’s first famous designer was the equally well-connected Lady Lucy Duff Gordon – known as Lucile – who had her own fashion house. She created her own distinctive look and had a flair for publicity – helped by the fact that her sister was the famously risqué author Elinor Glyn.

Lucile eagerly adopted celebrity dressing, designing a wardrobe for the actress Lily Elsie in her role in
The Merry Widow
. She was also the first London designer to use live models, to colour co-ordinate accessories to outfits, and to deliver clients’ orders packaged in bold striped boxes with ornate labels almost as sumptuous as the clothes inside. Selfridge’s, with its ‘house green’ used on everything from the colour of their delivery vans to the store carpets, came closest in such stylish co-ordination.

The department stores were quick to copy Lucile’s ideas. Harrods promoted ‘a display of gowns on living models’ for their 1909 Jubilee shows in their ‘Costume Department’, but while the store called itself the ‘Shrine of Fashion’, the truly fashionable worshipped at Lucile’s. No record exists of the full guest-list for Lucile’s ground-breaking show held earlier that year, which she called ‘The Seven Ages of Women’. Her house mannequins included the statuesque beauties Hebe, Phyllis and Florence, as well as the incomparable Dolores who went on to become a famous Ziegfeld showgirl in New York. Among the audience were Queen Marie of Romania, Lillie Langtry, Queen
Ina of Spain, Bertha Potter Palmer, Ethel Field Beatty, Margot Asquith and what the media called ‘every society woman in London’.

Change in fashion had been a long time coming. For over a decade Edwardian ladies had been poured into their favoured boned ‘S-Bend’ corsets, which created a lush embonpoint and a curvy
derrière
. The beautiful Mrs Keppel, the King’s mistress
en titre
, had herself now swelled to Junoesque proportions, whereas the Queen, at 64, still had a hand-span waist and porcelain complexion, albeit one liberally covered in make-up The Queen’s use of cosmetics was unusual. Lipstick, eye-shadow and mascara were still generally taboo and worn only by show-girls and good-time girls. Stores sold toiletries, which included scent, hairnets, brushes and combs, cold cream, face powders, tiny booklets of
papier poudre
sheets and even the odd pot of rouge, but such things were generally tucked away in a discreet part of the building – at Selfridge’s at the back of the lower ground floor, next to ‘trusses and bedpans’, and at Harrods up on the first floor. All that was about to change.

Fashion was being disseminated with increasing speed, spilling out of the pages of the ever-growing number of magazines and newspapers. In Paris the new ‘lean line’ had just been launched by Paul Poiret, whose influence ultimately banished frilled and flounced petticoats and whose hobble skirts heralded the reinvention of what went underneath. Out went curved corsets and in came underpinnings specifically made to contour a long, lean and straight body. Poiret was fond of saying he had ‘liberated women’ by introducing the brassiere and banishing boned bodices. In reality, real Poiret devotees wore long, hip-hugging foundation garments under skirts so tight they could hardly walk.