ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature and character of consumption in the modernity of nineteenth-century Paris. The number of locations for viewing and comparing one another with regard to fashion expanded greatly during the nineteenth century. In addition to department stores and world expositions, first the arcades and later the boulevards of Paris provided the spaces for strolling and observing. By promoting a fashion for a mass consuming public, the department stores promote the illusion of comfort, but in the long run deprived the goods they sold in great quantity of auras of luxury, which remained the preserve of a fashionable elite. By the end of the nineteenth century, the social role of fashion had become a subject of considerable interest to sociologists. The most famous of the investigators into fashion to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen, explored the sign system of fashion and prestige in his Theory of the Leisure Class.
