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CLAH Lecture: Harrods Buenos Aires. The Case of the Unwanted Dresses, 1912–1940
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2020
Abstract
In 1912, a small department store called Harrods opened in Buenos Aires, one that by the 1920s expanded to almost a city block. Although named after the founder of the London store, the manager of Harrods London, Richard Burbidge, his son Woodman, and a few board members planned the purchase of land and opened the business, and then presented it to the entire London board. Unfamiliar with Buenos Aires, believing that women consumed more than men, and presuming that upper-class women there had the same consumer desires of those in England, the store opened catering to the upper-class female population and focused on readymade dresses. And, to the great surprise of the local manager, women of all classes did not want these dresses because they preferred to purchase cloth and take it to their dressmakers.
The dilemma facing Harrods Buenos Aires, detailed in company reports in the archive of Harrods London and in scans of Buenos Aires Harrods archives in the possession of British bookseller Jennifer Wilton-Williams, show that sales reports, rather than studies of the Argentine market like those published by the US Department of Commerce, shaped the new department store's response. Until the 1940s, Harrods Buenos Aires focused on the sale of less expensive articles that came from its dining room, its cosmetics department, and infants’ and children's clothing. Furthermore, employees purchased more than 40 percent of the clothing. Originally imagined as the flagship of the upper-class female shopper, it ended up as a store for the middle class, especially women who bought gifts and enjoyed being seen in the dining room. It closed in 1998.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History
Footnotes
I wish to thank Jennifer Wilton-Williams, of London, for access to Harrods Buenos Aires scans, Sebastian Wormell of the Harrods London Archives for access to the archives, and Gary Hearn for his skills at photography in Buenos Aires and Great Britain. I would also like to thank John F. Schwaller and the editorial team for their comments.
References
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2. To this day, the history of department store marketing is understudied.
3. As Richard Burbidge commented “Originally, when the Buenos Ayres company was mooted, the idea was that it should be entirely a Harrods business, but if you remember, [at] a meeting that was called to order in order to give the directors authority to guarantee shares and certain other matters . . . very serious exception was taken by some shareholders on the ground that his company had no right, or it was not prudent or politic to risk the funds of this company in making an outside promotion. . . . That consideration determined the directors not to make this a Harrods promotion.” The Economist, February 28, 1914. Harrods was offered 54,000 deferred shares, estimated at £30,000.
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7. “Burbidge Tells Plan for Chain South America: Of Harrods Reports to Stockholders of Visit America—Competition of New York to be Feared, He Says,” Women's Wear Daily, December 31, 1919, 25.
8. Letter to Woodman Burbidge, November 8, 1914. Letter is mistakenly labeled “Harrods Bs. As. Ltd. Annual Year 1915–1916.” Scanned copy from Jennifer Wilton-Smith. This letter is a copy that seems to have been written by Paul Foucher, the manager.
9. Found in the memoirs of Martin Tow, an American who opened Casa Tow in the early twentieth century. Martin Tow, A Retired Businessman, 191–193.
10. La Nación, April 3, 1914, 15. See 1937 Six-Month Report, Harrods London archives.
11. Women's Wear Daily 21:112 (November 12, 1920): 37.
12. Wearing Apparel in Argentina, prepared by Lew. B. Clark, Secretary to Commercial Attaché, US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Miscellaneous Series No. 68 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918). This 20-cent pamphlet seems to have been ignored by US department stores as well, as none arrived in Argentina until the late twentieth century.
13. Censo Industrial de 1935 (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Hacienda, Comisión Nacional del Censo Industrial, 1938), 69. These statistics are for the national capital only.
14. Harrods (Buenos Aires), Limited Second Half-Year, 1936–1937, Buenos Aires, October 20, 1937, scanned copy of report of Mrs. Merceré, 28, in possession of Jennifer Wilton-Williams.
15. “Harrods (Bs. A.) Ltd. Annual Year 1915-1916 [sic],” scanned copy.
16. Letter of November 8, 1914, scanned by Jennifer Wilton-Smith.