My Secret Love for the Glamorous, Technicolour, Transformative World of Department Stores

The department retailer up the street had, due to its state of post-apocalyptic ruin, become known in our household as “The 28 Days Later Store.” Fixtures dangled from the white fibreboard ceiling. Piles of folded sweaters and polo shirts cascaded into disorder, their tags boasting incremental markdowns that seemed to shout over one another. The escalator, unmaintained for close to a year, stood inert. Nervous-looking shoppers bouldered their way up its heavy corrugated steps in search of washrooms or the closest exit to the parking lot. All the beauty counters featured displays which had been denuded to East German levels of bare. The salespeople were few. Their job was to wander the floor, make vague eye contact, and prevent theft. But, as Adam and the Ants said, What’s the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?

The Bay—where I sat on Santa’s knee, was fitted for my first expensive bra by Mrs. V (an actual corsetiere), and eye-rolled my way through a summer job at a pop-up estate silver counter—was dead. The department store was dead. E-commerce and the big-box store reign supreme.

I am, however, a bloody-minded woman, and I have cleaved unto my secret love of department stores with all the tenacity of a sticker on the bottom of a remaindered soap dispenser at Winners. It began, around 1975, with outings to Eaton’s in downtown Vancouver. There, I would watch glamorous women in uniforms (suits with gold buttons or ludicrous white lab coats) cosmetically transform my mother into a Terminal City Bianca Jagger before she handed over her Chargex to be rammed through a small, fierce machine. There were milliners and shoe salons and hairdressers and (Oh God) toys. And there were cafes for the occasional special lunch; in the modular, faux-nautical splendour of the Marine Room, even a bowl of mushroom soup tasted extravagant.

The department store was, to my idealistic child brain, the way the world should be: a technicolour organism made up of co-operative parts. When you were in one, the chaos beyond faded into a Muzak-sweet nothingness. In June 1976, on a trip to London, my parents dragged me to Harrods to try on duffle coats. Beyond the store’s hallowed walls, the city was both wilting in a heat wave and writhing with tourists and locals. I may as well have been on a space station.

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As an adult, I try to consume in a way that is mindful. I mend, I thrift, I swap. I’m a fan of mum-and-pop coffee shops, and I cheer on small businesses. But old habits die hard. If a day of meetings in Toronto or family business in Vancouver has a gap, I sneak into Holt’s and drift amongst the bright displays, replacing an eye pencil or cajoling my way into a handful of perfume samples. When travelling, I seek out department stores as one might a hash dealer or a chapel or a walk-in clinic. I have seen actual counters dedicated to abanicos (hand fans) and mantillas (El Corte Inglés, Barcelona). I have been chased into the street for photographing a patisserie display (de Bijenkorf, Rotterdam). I have fainted in a Christmas Eve lineup and awoken in the jacked arms of a beautiful paramedic (La Samaritaine, Paris). Where else could these things happen?

Here’s one for the analyst’s couch: the grand magasin has officially entered my dreams. Since my mother’s death, in May 2024, I find myself, in the throes of REM sleep, roaming a nocturnal city. And I happen upon a gigantic department store. Dresses and furs hang from racks in mirrored salons; hats perch on plaster heads, like fantastical birds ready for flight. On the first floor, there are militarily aligned rows of lipsticks and glass displays of chocolates and petits fours. I am the only living person amongst this surreal curated abundance.

And there I stand, hours before waking into a world of disintegration and discord, my breath held. I wait for it all to magically switch back into action, like a well-maintained music box, like childhood, like the movement of the planets themselves.