Vintage and Antique Store Displays
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From Retail Palace to Zombie Mall: How Efficiency Killed the Department Store
By Lisa Hix — The once-vibrant shopping mall has one foot in the grave these days. About 20 percent of the 2,000 largest U.S. malls were failing in 2008, and by 2012, only 1,513 remained in operation. Current numbers predict more than 200 existing big malls will collapse in the next 10 years. Search the phrase, “dead malls,” and you’ll find photo after photo of tiled walkways littered with debris, untended planters near the darkened rest areas for bored dads, and empty indoor storefronts—the discolored...
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Losing Ourselves in Holiday Windows
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — As the deadline approaches for ordering last-minute gifts online, most of us must finish our Christmas shopping the analog way—walking into stores and picking things out by hand. If you're lucky enough to live in a city with an old-fashioned department store, you might get a glimpse of their fantastic holiday displays, packed full of animated elves and artfully piled gifts. But in most places, such scenes are extinct, remaining only in childhood memories. "Nostalgia has always been...
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Retail Therapy: What Mannequins Say About Us
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Cynthia’s face remained completely blank, wearing that same empty stare at the theater, Bergdorf’s, a private dinner party, and even her regular hair salon. Everywhere she went, Cynthia tantalized the paparazzi and her adoring public—always seen on the arm of the fashionable Lester Gaba, wearing the runway's latest styles and enjoying New York nightlife to the fullest—but still her gaze revealed nothing. Of course, that's because Cynthia was a mannequin, crafted by Gaba to promote his...
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The Disappearing Art of Porcelain Signs
By Dave Margulius — I liked to collect things even as a child. Things that didn’t cost anything, like different colors of stones. There was something about the advertising that I liked, so in the mid-1970s, I started to pick up porcelain signs. I got heavier and heavier into that, and by the 1980s, I had a fairly substantial collection. As a result of collecting telephone signs, I would run into other advertising specialists, and I started seeing the kind of stuff that other people were buying and looking...
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Signs, Tins, and Other Advertising Antiques
By Maribeth Keane — How did I get started collecting advertising antiques? My dad was a lecturer and tutor in graphics and art from the 1960s onwards, and was into vintage automobiles and advertising, like vintage signs, pumps, and globes. So I spent the large portion of my childhood going to auto swap meets and antiques fairs, I think it all started from there. The first thing I collected was old bottles. In one of the books I read as a child, there was an aqua green bottle and I thought it was great and I...