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2 Department Stores and Downtown Shopping

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A City Consumed
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47department stores, at the heart of newly constructed urban space, epito-mized for many people the temptations offered by the commercial sector as it expanded under the colonial and semicolonial regimes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 The wide plate-glass shop windows of depart-ment stores visually and spatially marked them off from smaller shops nearby and from the open-front stalls of the suqs in the medieval urban cores and in the lower-class or baladi shopping districts in other neighborhoods. Even the glass-front shops of the Muski lacked the pristine clarity and enormity of the vitrines of the new downtown stores that lay to the west of ʿAtaba Square in Cairo or around the central squares in Alexandria and provincial cities. Run-ning for entire blocks and outfitted with mannequins, props, and display racks for goods, these department-store display windows held up metropolitan mer-chandise in a partitioned space above the dusty, active street—encasing and en-shrining ifrangi consumer goods to represent the modern world “in miniature” for shoppers and passing spectators.2 A writer for the local French-language magazine L’Egypte nouvelle dramatized in 1923 the commercial spectacle of-fered by such windows.On ʿImad al-Din Street, in front of the store window [vitrine] on the corner of a department store. There, in this plate-glass window, is a ravishing girl, all pink and white. . . . Adorned in a small dress of white silk chiffon, hair arranged and feet shod with exquisite taste, she lifts toward onlookers the naïve look of her faïence eyes, which give to her small wax face a natural and lively expression. Oh, the delicious child!2deParTmenTsTores and downTown shoPPing
© 2020 Stanford University Press, Redwood City

47department stores, at the heart of newly constructed urban space, epito-mized for many people the temptations offered by the commercial sector as it expanded under the colonial and semicolonial regimes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 The wide plate-glass shop windows of depart-ment stores visually and spatially marked them off from smaller shops nearby and from the open-front stalls of the suqs in the medieval urban cores and in the lower-class or baladi shopping districts in other neighborhoods. Even the glass-front shops of the Muski lacked the pristine clarity and enormity of the vitrines of the new downtown stores that lay to the west of ʿAtaba Square in Cairo or around the central squares in Alexandria and provincial cities. Run-ning for entire blocks and outfitted with mannequins, props, and display racks for goods, these department-store display windows held up metropolitan mer-chandise in a partitioned space above the dusty, active street—encasing and en-shrining ifrangi consumer goods to represent the modern world “in miniature” for shoppers and passing spectators.2 A writer for the local French-language magazine L’Egypte nouvelle dramatized in 1923 the commercial spectacle of-fered by such windows.On ʿImad al-Din Street, in front of the store window [vitrine] on the corner of a department store. There, in this plate-glass window, is a ravishing girl, all pink and white. . . . Adorned in a small dress of white silk chiffon, hair arranged and feet shod with exquisite taste, she lifts toward onlookers the naïve look of her faïence eyes, which give to her small wax face a natural and lively expression. Oh, the delicious child!2deParTmenTsTores and downTown shoPPing
© 2020 Stanford University Press, Redwood City
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