• Paris’s department stores transformed urban life. What can they teach today’s struggling shops?

    Paris’s department stores transformed urban life. What can they teach today’s struggling shops?
    Inspired by opera houses, the grands magasins were astonishing spectacles, built on a pharaonic scale. A new exhibition in the French capital charts the golden age of a dying conceptOn the top floor of the fabled La Samaritaine department store in Paris, an empty row of champagne-branded deckchairs is arranged on an artificial beach, facing a wall-sized digital screen of the sun setting over a sparkling sea. Downstairs, at the “beauty light bar”, futuristic face masks glow with red L

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