Free Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge by Lindy Woodhead Page A

titled friends in Europe. Everything in fact that a woman could want or need – except cosmetics.
    Not that entrepreneurs involved in the embryonic business of beauty didn’t want to exhibit. Madame Yale, famous for her lectures on ‘The Religion of Beauty, the Sin of Ugliness’, was keen to promote her products. But Mrs Palmer and her committee were utterly determined that she should not. Rouge and lipstick were, said Mrs Palmer, ‘not things we wish to dwell on or emphasize’. In banning Mrs Yale, Bertha Palmer was following the mores of the day, which determined that cosmetics were ‘not respectable’. Ladies like Mrs Palmer took care of their skin with soap, water and a face-mask made with old-fashioned oatmeal. They may have tried Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s exclusive ‘Recamier’ cream – Mrs Ayer herself being from a good Chicago family – but more often than not they were content with a greasy lanolin-based cream made up by the local pharmacist. Given Chicago’s brutal winter weather, they would almost certainly have used lip salve (one excellent local recipe included hog-fat, a useful by-product of Chicago’s stock yards), and eyebrows were plucked and waxed. Finally, a light dusting of fine powder would have been applied to avoid shine. Further than that, they would not go.
    As a consequence, in smart stores like Marshall Field’s, the toiletries department was of minor significance. It sold hand mirrors, brushes and combs, hair accessories, eau de cologne and a wide range of beautifully packaged scented soaps. Neither did Field’s attempt to enter the business of hairdressing or offer beauty treatments such as manicures and massage, which were the fiefdom of small, individual beauty parlours. Field’s held out against the onslaught of cosmetics for a long time, though others soon succumbed. As early as 1897, theSears catalogue offered its own line of cosmetics, including rouge, eyebrow pencils and face powder, while Harry Selfridge himself would famously go on to open England’s first major cosmetics department in 1910.
    With 25 million visitors expected to attend the Fair, Marshall Field astutely set a retail expansion plan in motion. Early in 1892 he began to buy buildings to the east of the store, commissioning Daniel Burnham to design a new nine-storey annexe, which had to be ready in eighteen months. Despite his awesome workload overseeing the erection of more than two hundred buildings for the Fair, Burnham managed to bring the new Field project in only two months over deadline, and by August 1893 it was open for business.
    Harry Selfridge became minutely involved in planning the layout and fitting of this new space of more than 100,000 feet, which ultimately gave the store an overall total of nine acres. Under Burnham’s expert tutelage, he received a master class in building, lighting and shop-fitting. Technical innovations included the installation of thirteen high-pressure hydraulic elevators and twelve separate entrances with revolving glass doors. Interior fixtures included lavish hand-carved mahogany counters trimmed in bronze and, in a welcome first for shoppers, a majestic suite of ladies’ lavatories. There were now a hundred different departments at Marshall Field’s, all of them dressed to the nines to welcome the international visitors who were touring the Fair and who, inevitably, were also drawn into the store.
    For Selfridge, 1893 was a momentous year. In addition to the World Fair and the expansion of Field’s, he and Rose had a baby daughter, Rosalie, born on 10 September – which explains why Rose was absent from most of the festivities connected with the Fair: when pregnant, ladies of the day never socialized in public.
    Harry was among the welcoming committee that greeted the Duke of Veragua – a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus – and his Duchess when they arrived in Chicago in May for the opening celebrations. Despite his lofty titles, among them ‘Admiral