Window on the World

The use of transparency to create a mediating zone between the perceived private enterprise of the department store and the public domain of the surrounding city is symptomatic of the reconstitution of a product’s place as a fixture in society. But the prior tactic of inverting the market to form the department store conceals the “world inside,” and seems to make sense on some level – the function of pictorial advertising alone (catalogs, etc.) may be to heighten desire for a product as an agent promising a new and better way of life, independent of that product’s placement in a window display and association with the manufactured world of that display. However, as items are brought down from the shelves, dusted off, and placed in situ, they are necessarily removed from their context as frivolous luxuries and begin to assume a role in a larger, more personal picture.
The emergence of this pattern of buying for the purpose of altering life and behavior is a triumph of a fetishism of commodities, where social relationships are confused with their medium, the commodity. With the advent of the window display, the department store recognized and reached out for its lifeblood – the public domain, and more specifically, street life. And after proffering an opportunity for a better life through a sense of beauty or convenience (once something a human relationship could offer), the display window denies the most basic instinct to directly experience that life – to advance, to touch, to feel. The connection is only visual. Upon entering the store, liberated from the solely visual experience, the senses are overwhelmed with opportunity and the drive to buy. The problem of the department store as introvert (the purchase of commodities is seen as the fulfillment of a decadent desire) is solved indirectly by means of promising a new kind of relationship with merchandise, one which echoes human bonds in its potential to alter and improve life - and it all starts with the display window.