Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling Louisa larocci, Editor. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.With this collection of essays, architectural historian and editor Louisa larocci presents a fascinating thumbnail of the history of merchandising and its relationship to commercial visual culture. Together, the essays in this book examine spaces of display and consumption both historically and as an artistic practice. In a realm where art and commerce intersect, visual merchandising-or, the artistic presentation of retail goods-creates its own distinctive visual language aimed at cultivating visual appeal and consumer desire (10). These essays, initially brought together at the Society for Architectural Historians annual meeting, provide an innovative look at the intersections between visual culture, design, consumption, and public space.Organized along the themes of promotion, product, and place, the twelve essays in this book collectively argue that commercial space has played an important role in influencing consumer habits, in driving advertising practice, and in changing American culture after 1880. Part One considers the relationship between print advertisements and their relationship to geographic space, whether the neighborhood, city, or nation. Part Two explores the ways that particular commodities shaped the retail environment itself, and Part Three explores the relationship between interior/ exterior design and selling in spaces such as automobile dealerships. Like any good anthology, this collection combines broad historical overviews-such as larocci's discussion of window dressing, for example-with narrow examinations of particular practices and themes, including the purposeful design of retail space to heighten appeals to consumers, the iconography of automobile hood ornaments, changing mannequin designs, commodities with exotic appeal, the merchandising of luxury goods (such as Armani), and the commodification of death vis-a-vis the funeral home. Some of the most intriguing essays here include Kathleen Chapman's look at German advertising posters and Emily Bills' examination of AT&T's advertising campaigns in the early twentieth century.According to Chapman, the German Sachplakat, or object poster, was developed in response to the increasingly fast-paced and visually-saturated environment of the modern city at the turn of the twentieth century (38). The Sachplakat minimized design elements and eliminated the lengthy advertising texts more common in magazine advertisements of the time. The highly stylized posters functioned like a hieroglyph, a word-picture that [could] be apprehended instantly in a process that prioritize[d] seeing over reading (40). This type of environment-driven aesthetics became one of the first advertising appeals developed specifically for the fast-moving and visually-loud cityscape, complete with its omnibuses, street cars, dense foot traffic, and increasing use of electric lighting and signage. …
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 2018
B.T Chandru + 3
Open Access