ABSTRACT
As a primary means of communicating consumer messages to the public and enticing customers into the retail environment, the show window became the focus of attention in the United States in the late nineteenth century, reaching a peak of interest during the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the show window as a frame and stage for display design was driven by a number of factors, including the emergence of an independent profession of window display designers, the appropriation of modern stagecraft techniques and technologies, and focused attention on show window lighting from the electric industry and the newly defined field of illuminating engineering. While the history of the development of show window display design in the USA necessarily embraces all of these factors and others, this chapter gives pride of place to electric lighting, bringing it to the fore as both a medium of and conduit for modern design.
