A Brilliant Commodity by Saskia Coenen Snyder

Author:Saskia Coenen Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3 “Diamonds on Credit” Loftis Bros. & Co. Advertisement. The Ladies’ Home Journal 21 (December 1903), 55.

Figure 4.4 “Diamonds on Credit,” Loftis Bros. & Co. Advertisement. Puck 54: 1395 (November 25, 1903), 13.

Before the 1880s, Americans purchased their everyday merchandise at neighborhood shops, pharmacies, and modest-sized dry goods firms whose inventory was regularly stocked by local producers or wholesalers. People of leisure purchased luxury goods at specialty stores. By the end of the century, however, shopping habits were at the cusp of change. Most major cities boasted at least one new department store, concentrating selling power into a single massive building. In New York, Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, Siegel-Cooper, and A. T. Stewart opened “pleasure palaces of desire,” while Philadelphia and Chicago became home to Gimbels, Marshall Field, the Fair, and Carson’s. Together with mail-order businesses and retailing chains, modern department stores soon dominated urban trade, selling everything from ready-made clothing, pianos, and liquor to cheeses, tropical fruits and vegetables (irrespective of season), kosher food, South African diamonds, and even exotic animals.129 At Marshall Field more than seven thousand employees catered to Chicago’s clientele gawking at dazzling window displays. Visitors spent hours shopping in half a million square feet of merchandising space. As many as fifty thousand people a day crowded into this castle of commerce, spending seventeen million dollars annually by the end of the 1900s.

The department store was the place to see and be seen, to fantasize, and to imagine a way of life defined by comfort, beauty, and style. Strolling through Macy’s or Gimbels stimulated the senses. Glass window displays and electric lighting visually amplified merchandise, while small orchestras played soothing and seductive chamber music in the background. Pleasant smells of chocolate perfumed the air and the soft fabrics of cashmere shawls and fur coats excited the touch. In this constructed environment, the acquisition of diamonds granted access to affordable decadence. If purchasing diamond jewelry in a department store proved too costly, customers could always admire, select, and mail-order on credit.

An advertising innovation in the form of small, brightly colored cards targeted department store shoppers and theater patrons. A series of diamond cards surfaced in the 1890s, opportunely placed in packets of cigarettes, coupling famous diamonds with women of different national origins. The “Cape Diamond,” for example, featured a white, bohemian-looking woman with golden, looped earrings, posing on an African shield, adorned by fur and spears (see fig. 1.1). A cloth head cover decorated with jewels surmounts her flowing hair, suggesting that she is not aristocratic in the Western tradition. Rather, she blends whiteness and exoticism, conveying white ownership and appropriation of South African diamonds. Similarly, the card titled “Kohinoor” (fig. 2.1) confirmed that the world’s largest diamond belonged to the British Empire, positioning it as the heart of British royalty. “The Blue Diamond” (fig. 3.1), portraying a woman wearing a traditional Dutch headdress surrounded by windmills, attested to the importance of the Netherlands in diamond production. Another card simply titled “Diamond” featured a veiled woman

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