ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the representation of the fashionable woman as clothing fixture and modern body in American department stores at the turn of the century. I argue that in the most public and private spaces of the store—the shop windows and dressing rooms—the female body was constructed as the ideal fashion figure, at once public commodity and object of desire. The seemingly opposing spatial enclosures defining the “face of the store” and its most inner sanctum marked the critical moments of initiation and submission in the ritual of shopping enacted as commercial exchange and consumptive fantasy. Within these interstitial spaces, the fashionable woman was displayed in varying stages of dress and undress and was thus activated as the embodiment of fashion as a fluid exchange between clothing and its wearer, and the individualized body and consumer society. The narratives of concealment and exposure of the modern female body that take place in the department store position women as the artifact and fetish of fashion, at once fixed commodity and mobile consumer.
