For the past two years, the museum has been displaying one of them in a special street window. The other could be seen inside the building. The fact that the historical museum bought the window displays suggests that they are more than temporary marketing tools. Museum collections contain cultural values, and the window displays were recognized as one of them.
Lack of price tags and signs of labor
Innovations in mechanical engineering in the second half of the switzerland number data 19th century made two key materials for display cases available: cast iron and sheet glass. The Crystal Palace, the central pavilion of the 1851 World's Fair in London, was built entirely of these. Inside, consumer goods were displayed amidst technological advances, industrial marvels, and colonial propaganda.
The French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes noted that vision is the most magical of the senses because it removes the veil of mystery. Thomas Richards, a former professor of literature at Harvard, developed this idea in his book The Consumer Culture of Victorian England. In the vast, light-filled Crystal Palace, familiar goods took on a new role. Brought out of the dark and cramped Victorian shops, they were no longer simply objects with a certain material value. Magnificent display cases, as well as the absence of price tags and signs of labor, transformed commercial objects into objects with symbolic value.
The pleasure of wanting to "just look"
The consumer cult continued to grow rapidly in the decades following the World's Fair. Department stores, which proliferated in major cities, used sheet glass for display windows on an unprecedented scale.
Window displays displayed the variety of products on offer, and the dominant approach to their design during this period was “the more the merrier.” The window display became the key to luring passersby into the store. People who studied the products from the outside practiced a new activity: window shopping. This visual, rather than real, consumption confirms that the desire to “just look” can also bring pleasure.
This, in turn, suggests that shoppers are not just consumers, but also spectators. The appeal of modern window displays is vividly reflected in the French word lèche-vitrines. Literally translated, this means “to lick windows.”