The boutique – the very word conjures up images of swinging London
and the King’s Road in the 1960s – was the humble descendant of two
specific types of retail entities. The first, found in the arcades of the
metropolitan centres of the nineteenth century, was the small shop
with carefully crafted interiors purveying specialist commodities. The
second was the appended prêt-à-porter concern of haute couture houses
of the early twentieth century, offering well-designed accessories rather
than couture at affordable prices.1 The boutique of the 1960s shared
characteristics of both: the idea of being special sprinkled upon
customers by the nineteenth-century shop and the accessibility and
entertainment provided by au courant design.
The boutique – that special enterprise, that little world unto
itself, enticing customers to its interior, seducing them, offering
them something exclusive and unique reflecting their proprietors
and, by association, their own individuality – suffered from the
twentieth century’s particular elaboration of the condition of
modernity. The devastation of the Great War (1914–18), the ensuing
political uncertainty, global economic collapse and the catastrophe
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