The invention of shopping: how the department store brought us teenagers, naval disarmament, and Salvador Dali.

• Author: Larson, Christina
• Position: Service and Style - Book review

Service and Style By Jan Whitaker $35, St. Martin's Press

May I help you find suspenders to match the piano? A tie to go with your tea? Some Mozart for your handbag? If the modern art of selling depends upon creating associations, today's sales mavericks owe a lot to the history of the department store, the original lifestyle marketers.

In the early decades of the 20th century, if you were a person of moderate means and wanted to hear a piano recital, watch a film, sip tea, get a manicure, visit a travel bureau, or sign the kids up for bicycle lessons, the place to go was a downtown department store. Urbanization and rising wages created conditions for the retail giants to thrive, but their fundamental success hinged on an essential insight that still rings true today: Shopping was an excuse to have an experience.

Today, Americans shop for necessities, shop for status, shop to socialize, shop to escape, shop to people-watch, shop to educate, and shop as therapy. But it was not always a foregone conclusion that a nation of hardscrabble pioneers would become a nation of shopaholics. Jan Whitaker's history, Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class, helps shed light on the origin of the genus mall rat. A social historian whose previous book examined the 1920s tearoom craze, Whitaker here looks at the role of the department store in creating the modern consumer. She details how department stores, which dominated American retail in the early 20th century, helped give "material expression to vague ideas of what success, femininity, citizenship, and popularity might mean," then put the identifying accessories (briefcase, lingerie, top hat, tennis racket) within reach of most customers. The secret to the stores' success was that they were always selling more than the thing itself.

You might ask whether, on balance, Americans have been liberated or enslaved by the endless parade of newer, cheaper stuff. Historically, department stores have helped blur class distinctions (anyone can own a fur coat), unburden housewives (clothes come off the rack, not the sewing machine), assimilate newcomers (to attract new business, New York stores once hired translators for the Ellis Island crowd), spread culture (the living-room piano is a household fixture thanks to marketing), and keep hometown newspapers afloat (ads, ads, ads). On the other hand, you might wonder, do I really need to count the days of Christmas with shopping carts, renovate my wardrobe each season, purchase appliances every nine months (they just aren't made to last), and squeeze into the latest cut of jeans to feel sexy?

Whitaker doesn't try to answer. She is primarily concerned with documenting how Macy's...