Novelty

There are numerous competing views about the development of consumer society (see, for example, Brewer and Porter 1993). Yet most researchers agree that novelty products have played a central role in shaping it. One view has it that the roots of consumer society can be traced back to Elizabethan England of the second half of the sixteenth century, when a large amount of novelties appeared on the market. Furniture, for example, began to be valued more for its novelty value than its patina. Although novelties had existed for a long time, their value as an organizing force of an economy became recognized in the early years of industrialization, most notably by Adam Smith.

The latter half of the nineteenth century marks another milestone in the evolution of consumer society. This was when mass production and mass distribution were made possible by organizational innovations like the assembly line and by better transport connections. It was also at this time that the first department stores opened in France and England, and the first world's fairs were organized expressly to display novelty products.

Early department stores were excellent showcases for novelties. They allowed all social classes free and equal entry to see industrially manufactured products. Émile Zola's famous novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) describes this transitional era from the viewpoint of a Parisian woman. Almost at the same time, the form and idea of the department store emerged at the fringes of Europe, for instance, the opening of the Stockmann's Department Stories in Stockholm (1843) and in Helsinki (1862). G. F. Stockmann, originally a German merchant from Lübeck, would subsequently sell both the first cars and the first bicycles in Finland. After the Second World War, popular toys such as Meccano sets, Lego bricks, and Barbie Dolls were first available at Stockmann's, and also the first practical RCA television set was introduced there in 1954 to the Finnish public. Today, the total amount of items at Stockmann's in Helsinki is about five hundred thousand.

At about the same time as department stores were conjuring a new world of commercial dreams, the first extravagant world's fairs were held to exhibit novelties to the general public. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, for instance, was first presented at [Page 1047]the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia—although it failed to attract much attention at the time. From the start, world's fairs emphasized the theme of technological progress and the divide between old and new. The atmosphere of a forward-looking society culminated in the twentieth century when Chicago's A Century of Progress fair in 1933 and New York's The World of Tomorrow in 1939 displayed groundbreaking novelties such as the tape recorder, television, washing machine, nylon, and asbestos. They introduced to the public whole new worlds of fashion and style, modeled along the principles of art deco and streamlined design and new lifestyles such as a mobile, car-based future.

As industrial production scales expanded, the gap between consumers and producers started to widen. Partly to relieve this tension, large companies began to invest in market research and advertising. Market segmentation and product differentiation prompted them to produce specific commodities for specific customer groups. Particularly during the Great Depression (1929–1939), the creation of new markets and new needs developed into an industry of its own. New professionals—advertisers, market researchers, designers, and fashion gurus—were hired to work for giant companies. New needs, both genuine and artificial, were produced and products became still more diversified.

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