Shops of Gold: Advertising Luxury in Seventeenth-century Paris

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1678, a Parisian periodical with a pan-European readership, Le Mercure galant, published a series of engravings that inaugurated modern fashion advertising. That same year, Le Mercure galant also published one of the first depictions of a new kind of emporium, the prototype for the up-scale boutiques that were then beginning to open their doors in Paris. This article explores the link between these two simultaneous developments—the creation of shops more elegant than any previously seen and the proliferation of new techniques for advertising the goods sold in these innovative shops—and the major redefinition of the experience of shopping that began in the final decades of the seventeenth century.