Between 1880 and 1920 displays in leading department stores reached an unprecedented level of artistic and commercial ambition that required professional
skill, engaged with technology, earned consumer attention, and provided distinction between stores. Merchandise arrangements conveyed technical proficiency and
innovation specific to the retail setting while their form and content were also in conversation with current events, art, urban life, and popular culture. This thesis
explores the making, viewing, and meanings of display. Discussion will be framed around the following questions: What role did display design play in the development
of department stores in Chicago, New York and London at the turn of the twentieth century and how can the impact and significance of display be identified in the stores’
material and visual cultures?
Drawing from a diverse range of unexplored primary resources and archives, this thesis reveals a set of previously underrepresented design roles, tools, and
techniques of display production in the practice of architects, window dressers, shopfitters, and interior decorators who employed manual and mechanical methods to
create displays that were on constant view and in continual flux. In this newly changeable retail environment, display’s alignment with fin-de-siècle modernity is
explored through the themes of speed, variation, fragmentation, rationalization, and theatricality. Overall this thesis analyzes how display achieved an agency to transform everyday objects into commodities and to make consumers out of passersby.