Yesterday's post closed with a video showing people rushing to Selfridges in the days following Christmas to find some genuine bargains during the sales.
According to the latest news, yesterday was a successful day for British retailers and projections for this long Boxing Day weekend claim that by tomorrow (Monday, a Bank Holiday in Great Britain) sales will reach more than 100 million pounds in London's West End.
Yet, if you're among those ones who suffer from an irrational fear of large crowds and gatherings of people (or, like myself, are prone to getting lost in huge and densely crowded department stores…), but still like watching store displays and shop windows, check out the selection of images entitled "Through the Shop Window" on the RIBApix site.
This is a visual archive of over 85,000 architectural digital images spanning thousands of years and allowing people to admire the world's built heritage.
This series of pictures featuring photographs of British shops and shopping from the RIBA Collections was presented during Shanghai Fashion Week to accompany the windows of the Xintiandi Style shopping plaza designed by RIBA architects for the RIBA Shanghai Windows Project 2015.
The "Through the Shop Window" series is a wonderful mix of images, going from black and white photographs portraying shops and stores like the Black & White Milk Bar, Gray's Inn Road, London, portrayed at night in 1937 in all its Art Deco glory, to pictures showing murals in vibrantly vivid colours in Carnaby Street during the Swinging London years.
The photographs show a variety of goods on offer: from the Cresta Silks dress shop in Brompton Road in 1930, to the Bally shoe shop in 1960, but there are also electric appliances, kitchen utensils, Habitat crockery and household wares, wigs, hats and headpieces on display.
People interested in drawing should check out the designs and sketches for a shoe shop, for a salon for Helena Rubinstein and for the entrance area and the knitwear department of the Jenefer fashion shop, Poultry, London (1957).
Some images show everyday street scenes, others are suspended between social documentation and fashion, but all of them introduce a tiny fraction of architectural history.
The design and style of the various shops and department stores tell us indeed a lot about the times they were built introducing us to Art Deco, the Depression, the Second World War's austerity, and Modernism.
They show us a touch of experimental design and avant-garde in a '50s student display and give us a glimpse of the Space Age via the see-through plastic balls suspended from the ceiling of the Keddies Department Store in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.
German critic Walter Benjamin was so fascinated by the Parisian arcades that he put together a huge collection of essays and writings about them.
In a similar way to the "worlds in miniature" lining those early Parisian temples of commodity capitalism, the shops shown in these images allow us to study their displays and spy inside their doors to look at the furniture, goods and design in general, acting as architectural introductions to universes designed to lead consumers into temptation.
All images in this post are taken from the RIBA Collections Archive.
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