Paris’s department stores transformed urban life. What can they teach today’s struggling shops?

On the top floor of the fabled La Samaritaine department store in Paris, an empty row of champagne-branded deckchairs is arranged on an artificial beach, facing a wall-sized digital screen of the sun setting over a sparkling sea. Downstairs, at the “beauty light bar”, futuristic face masks glow with red LED light, promising to stimulate natural collagen production and restore radiance to sagging skin. Nearby, an immersive Olympic retail experience awaits, promoting stuffed mascots in the shape of grinning anthropomorphised French revolutionary hats.

The only thing missing from this temple of modern shopping? Customers.

Originally opened in 1870 as the place where you could “find everything”, from lingerie to lawnmowers, La Samaritaine was acquired in 2001 by luxury conglomerate LVMH, which embarked four years later on a controversial 16-year, €750m renovation with Japanese Pritzker prize-winning architects Sanaa. The department store now also includes a five-star hotel where rooms start at about €2,000 a night.

Three years since the store reopened, however, it seems to be struggling to entice shoppers. Occasionally tourists pop in to photograph the building’s famous art nouveau atrium, but few stop to buy anything. And it’s not alone: department stores across the world are facing ever lower footfall, with many forced to close and take on new lives as co-working spaces, libraries, flats and offices.

Today’s forlorn shopping landscape is a far cry from the dizzying heyday of the French capital’s grands magasins, whose glamorous history is now on show in all its opulent glory at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, down the road from La Samaritaine’s deserted floors. It is a wistful feast of retail nostalgia (chiming with the city’s current wave of sentimentality for the last time Paris hosted the Olympic Games, in 1924), celebrating the birth of a building type and cultural phenomenon that transformed urban life as we know it. Could it also hold some answers for how today’s struggling stores might look to their history to find a new lease of life?

They didn’t have digital sunsets or fake beaches, but the world’s first department stores were astonishing spectacles. Supersized lithographs in the exhibition depict the gaping interiors of these palatial temples of consumption, which first emerged in the 1850s, spawned by the economic growth of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. Their vaulted glass ceilings groan with gilded chandeliers, above processional staircases that zigzag between cascades of balconies, held up by plump putti and buxom caryatids.

Sited at key points along the imposing new boulevards laid out in Baron Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, these cathedrals of commerce were built on a pharaonic scale. The Crespin-Dufayel store, for example, occupied more than two and a half acres, and employed 15,000 people. Inspired by opera houses, their interiors were conceived as theatrical stage sets for the newly minted bourgeoisie to see and be seen, where the rising social elite of industrialists, bankers and traders would flock to put themselves on display.

Crucial to its success, this new species of shop was designed as a place to linger, providing a regal setting for the newly leisured classes to enjoy a day out. They were havens of freedom and pleasure, where women could relax and socialise away from their husbands – a world of independence brought to life in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, The Ladies’ Paradise. People were welcomed as guests, rather than customers, with no obligation to buy – a radical innovation at the time. Against these lavish backdrops, store owners began to hone the emerging art of product display, juxtaposing items in intoxicating ways, a caption notes, to “provoke an irredeemable desire for possession”.

The stagecraft worked. Customers came, and bought, in droves. Recreating the image of a particular lifestyle was of the utmost importance to the new bourgeoisie, and the department store provided the one-stop shop to buy the complete aristocratic look – from the frock coat, to the dining table, tea set and lampshades. A section in the exhibition dedicated to the democratisation of fashion charts the emergence of the ready-to-wear look, fuelled by the mechanisation of the textile industry, when entire outfits and matching accessories were first produced in bulk and sold as a package. Advertising posters, displayed alongside, promoted “La Parisienne” – the ultimate incarnation of the chic, independent woman, an objectified projection of fantasies, who would set trends and cement Paris as the leading capital of taste.

The show reveals how sales techniques became increasingly sophisticated, with the invention of “special sales exhibitions” to stimulate purchases at off-peak seasons. The annual calendar began to revolve around monthly sales periods, boosted by advertising campaigns in the press, with January reserved for linens, April for suits, August for back-to-school items and December for toys. It was a way to shift stock, managing the flow of mass-produced merchandise, and induce a sense of panic in customers, encouraging them to stay on top of the latest trends. It was also the dawn of fast fashion – shown off here with cases of hastily produced fascinators, fans, neckties and hats, as if plucked from an antique Asos.

Can’t make it to the store in person? That’s no excuse not to spend! Behold the birth of the mail-order catalogue. One display at the museum is dedicated to beautiful examples of early catalogues from the late 19th century, featuring intricate illustrations of everything from umbrellas and canes to tennis rackets and bicycles, and countless other essential accessories for the modern consumer. A double-page spread of bathing costumes with matching bonnets from Le Bon Marché is a particular treat. And it might come as a surprise to learn that “subscription commerce” – an early ancestor of Amazon’s “Subscribe and Save”, designed to encourage continuous purchases – was already around in the 1850s.

The gaudy medley of merchandise and materialism makes for an entertaining and enlightening show, but the overall effect might make you feel a bit nauseous. This is where the epoch of unbridled consumerism began, where marketing methods were refined, sales techniques honed, and the global addiction to acquiring more stuff originated. A section titled “Children As the New Target Market”, charting the history of advertising directly to kids, is particularly queasy. A parallel display about the emergence of landfill sites, the networks of exploitative supply chains and the carbon footprint of the fast fashion and furniture industries would provide a useful corollary to it all.

If the department store’s days are numbered, is it really something that we will mourn? Or might it prompt us to imagine a new kind of urban public arena – spectacular, enriching spaces that don’t necessarily revolve around the consumption of aspirational products? Just like the wave of expanded libraries built across Europe in the past few years, could the last centuries’ multistorey palaces of spending be transformed into places to read, relax, learn, make, create and exchange – a new era of living rooms for the modern city?