ABSTRACT
The earliest begiIlllings of organised commercial distribution of clothing can be traced back to the mediaeval livery companies such as the Merchant Taylors, cloth-workers and skinners who organised and regulated trade as early as the fourteenth century. Craftsmen and itinerant hawkers gradually took to stabilising their business through selling from small shops specialising in their own wares - clothiers, hatters, shoemakers, drapers and so forth. Elizabethan London, and other major cities, were characterised by a wealth of such outlets, as well as regular fairs and markets. Old prints of London show, for example, the original London Bridge covered end to end in shops and houses. The first organised market was Inigo Jones's Piazza (later to become Covent Garden), opened in 1631 (DeIlllis et al. 2005). Much of this infrastructure in the capital was swept away by the Great Fire in 1666. Shopping provision speeded up rapidly during the elegant regency period, with the Burlington Arcade opening in 1818 and early department-store companies having their origins during this time. The growth of the middle classes, improved transportation, better building materials and international product sourcing all fuelled the growth of department stores in the nineteenth century. Harrods, Whiteleys, Jo1m Lewis, Debenhams, Kendal Milne and Bainbridges are some of the many stores whose origins date back to the 1830-70 period (Adburgham 1989). Emile Zola's famous novel Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies' Paradise), still a classic of department-store vision, appeared in 1883 based on the famous Parisian store Au Bon March6, which had opened in 1852.
