By Kirstin Purtich, Former Intern, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
In the eighteenth century, promenading among the shops along the rue St. Honoré became a fashionable leisure activity for men and women alike. This street was home to Paris's marchands merciers (known as "mercers" in English), a class of merchants who dealt in all manner of luxury goods, including textiles for furnishing and clothing. The mercers' exclusive right to finishing work — arranging for the addition of embroidery, buttons, braids, and sequins through a network of specialized workers — allowed their customers to choose the exact colors and patterns they wanted at the point of sale. The range of embroidery samples currently displayed in the exhibition Elaborate Embroidery: Fabrics for Menswear before 1815, on view through July 19, offers a small window into the level of decoration and customization possible for fashionable men of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The merchants of Paris sold their wares from elaborately painted, carved, and decorated shop fronts, each identified by the merchant's sign. Beginning around the mid-eighteenth century, the French began to adopt the English practice of glazing shop windows, which fostered the use of an ever-changing window display as a means to entice potential customers; thus the concept of window shopping was born. Today, visitors to the Museum can see an example of this type of facade installed in the Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts. Originally built in the 1770s and modified to some extent before entering the Museum, the shopfront from 3, quai de Bourbon, Île Saint-Louis (on view in gallery 545) demonstrates the emphasis Parisian shop owners placed on outward display, which prompted the Englishman Daniel Defoe to complain in 1726:
The French are eminent for making for making a fine outside, when perhaps they want necessaries; and indeed a gay shop and a mean stock, is something like one of those people, with his laced ruffles without a shirt.
Once inside a merchant's shop, customers were able to peruse a variety of goods in a showroom-like setting far removed from the workshops where luxury goods were actually produced. While some clients dealt directly with print merchants who specialized in embroidery patterns, most men chose the decorative trimmings for their jackets and waistcoats from small embroidery samples assembled by the merchant, and often they deferred to the merchant's intimate knowledge of the latest fashions.