If you happen to visit Selfridges before August 31, be prepared to do more than just shopping. The famous department store is currently holding an exhibition titled, "Ultralounge Centenary" charting its 100-year history.
The exhibition is held on the lower ground floor, between the duty-free section, the restrooms and in front of its Yellow coffee shop - a very smart strategy in attracting customers. Since it began on May 2, the exhibition has already attracted over 120,000 visitors, said Katie Dyer, the Centenary Project Manager.
The installations, designs and various sections in the exhibition are quite impressive, and all have a yellow theme to refer to the colour of the store’s logo. Black and white videos and photographs present a fascinating visual history of Selfridges.
As the exhibition unfolds step by step, each image and video brings you back in time. It was amusing to see three middle-aged women gathered around a display of the oldest Selfridges bags to the newest, counting how many of these bags they had collected over the years.
A section is dedicated to displaying different artists, actors and actresses who launched their books or perfume brands in the store. Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, visited the store in 1988 to launch her perfume “Passion.”
Photographs and videos show how many British artists were invited to launch products as well as international actors and singers, including Amitabh Bachchan and Mariah Carey. To pick up this tradition, every weekend until the end of the exhibition, Selfridges is hosting an entertainment event.
The Centenary is also an attraction for children. There’s a section that allows them to colour in Selfridges’s postcards and hang them on the wall as part of the shop’s history. Some adults seemed to enjoy colouring the postcards as much as the children.
For those who do not have enough time to tour the entire exhibition, a 10-minute documentary runs continuously showing the history of the store. Taj Alwan, a new employee at Selfridges who came from the US, said people would approach her and narrate stories of when they used to work at the store, discussing how things used to be. Some children, she added, would point out photos on the wall in which their father or grandfather appears.
Presenting the history of 100 years in one exhibition is a hard task, yet Selfridges succeeded in bringing beautiful memories to its visitors, and giving new information to shoppers.
One wonders whether Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858-1947), the store’s founder who was known as the “showman of shopping”, foresaw that his store would become one London’s foremost tourist attractions. His picture displayed in a big gold frame is somehow proof he is still here and what he started is not yet finished.
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