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IADS Exclusive - The great Marks & Spencer reset: A retail transformation case study

Christine Montard

Jul 2026

IADS Exclusive - The great Marks & Spencer reset: A retail transformation case study

Christine Montard

Jul 2026

PRINTABLE VERSION HERE

With its 142 years of history, Marks & Spencer (M&S) is a British retail institution, originally a penny bazaar in Leeds with the radical proposition: “don't ask the price, it's a penny”. M&S built its first competitive advantage not on price alone but on simplicity and trust, principles that remain the foundation of the brand. From the 1930s, the company began bypassing wholesalers entirely, working directly with British manufacturers with quality specifications, and selling exclusively under its own St Michael label. By 1997, M&S had become the first UK retailer to record a pre-tax profit of £1bn, a milestone followed by a continuous decline triggered by stiff competition and overreliance on UK sourcing (until the 1990s, M&S’s policy was to sell 99% UK-made products). FY2000/01 ended with a £145m pre-tax profit. In 2000, the St Michael brand was retired. In 2008, M&S started selling external brands, which confused consumers. The following fifteen years saw clothing sales falling while food sales increased.

The current recovery, under chairman Archie Norman (the architect of Asda's 1990s turnaround) and CEO Stuart Machin from 2022,has restored M&S to its strongest competitive position in over two decades by returning to fewer, better products, quality and value for money. In FY2025/26, group sales grew just 1.9%, from £13.9bn to £14.2bn. The food division accounted for £9.7bn, growing by 7% YoY.When it comes to general merchandise, in FY2024/25, M&S held 10.5% of total UK clothing sales despite losing a fifth of its UK clothing market share between 2014 and 2024. Group profit before tax hit £881.1m in FY2024/25, the highest in over 15 years. FY2025/26 fell to £671.4m, down 23.8%, due to a severe April 2025 cyberattack that paused e-commerce operations for approximately eight weeks.

The turnaround plan is on at the legacy retailer, but what is driving the change? Rationalising the product offering, transforming the brand's style credentials, developing a new consumer and marketing strategy, and an operational rethink could represent a basic plan, but its execution seems to be what matters for M&S.

How M&S redesigned its product offer

M&S Food: feeding growth

When Machin took the helm, M&S Food was a business with a strong identity but increasingly perceived as an expensive treat destination rather than a credible everyday choice. As stated in their 2024 annual report, Machin doubled down on product quality, upgrading over 1,000 existing products and launching more than 1,300 new lines, while simultaneously addressing the value perception gap through a Trusted Value Promise that delivered price cuts across more than 200 products. This dual approach, protecting M&S's elevated DNA while making the brand more accessible, proved effective. Food delivered LFL sales growth of 8.6% in FY2024/25, followed by a further 7% growth in FY2025/26. Critically, these figures were not inflation-driven as M&S outperformed the market over the three years leading to FY2024/25.

However, structural limitations remain. M&S Food still operates primarily through convenience-sized stores and food halls rather than full-line supermarkets, which limits its ability to capture the full weekly food shopping. M&S Food is seen as a complementary premium destination for most households rather than their primary grocer. However, Machin does a lot to reduce the gap with mainstream grocery by increasing store surfaces to offer a larger daily product range and more conventional meal planning.

Fewer, better: fashion brand portfolio simplification

Not only is food on the menu, but M&S is also undergoing a fashion makeover. Long derided by some as a destination for the over-55s, the retailer enforced a strategy to become a more style-conscious, trend-aware brand. The brand portfolio was simplified. M&S eliminated range clutter, reduced product options by 9% season-on-season until Spring/Summer 2026, and focused its tiered architecture on five clearly defined brand identities built around private labels: M&S Collection for everyday essentials, Per Una for a feminine occasion-wear customer, Goodmove for activewear (launched in 2020, it became M&S's biggest in-house own-brand by 2022, selling over 1.6 million items annually), Autograph for accessible premium, and a curated third-party brand platform.

The Autograph case demonstrates private-label relevance. Total Autograph sales grew 47% year-on-year in 2025. Men's Autograph alone reached approximately £200m, up from £50m just three years earlier, a four-fold increase driven by buying more deeply into core lines, elevating quality (cashmere, merino, Supima cotton, silk), increasing style and fostering innovation. For example, in October 2025, M&S launched Autograph Performance, a men’s technical workwear featuring four-way stretch, crease-recovery, water-resistance and machine-washable tailoring, which grew by 100% in under two years. Best-selling styles within Autograph include a £20 Supima cotton t-shirt that generates approximately £20 million annually on its own.

In parallel, the focus was on full-price discipline. By the end of 2025, about 80% of clothing was sold at full price, up from 63% pre-Covid, demonstrating that disciplined full-price selling offset any volume reduction. Furthermore, the time spent holding stock in inventory has fallen from 18 to 11 weeks. The Fashion, Home & Beauty (FH&B) division revenues grew from £3.72 billion in FY2022/23 to £4.24 billion in FY2024/25, while operating margins expanded from 8.7% to 11.2%. However, in FY2025/26 and mostly due to the April 2025 cyberattack, FH&B revenues were down 7.7% to £3.92 billion, and margins compressed to 5.5%. But the second half of that same year returned to +4.3% LFL growth. Online FH&B sales dropped 41% in H1 and recovered to +5% in H2.

Finally, a Brands at M&S platform was built as a parallel strategy, primarily conducted online and in-store, where relevant. M&S onboarded 60 external brands by FY2022/23, growing that revenue by 67% to £158m. In 2025, partner-brand fashion sales online increased by 42%, and the overall third-party brand sales exceeded £200m. Labels include Hugo Boss, Nobody's Child, Whistles, Hush, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas, Sweaty Betty and Speedo. Those brands strengthen categories where M&S is weaker, while reinforcing its quality and fashion positioning by association. The external brand strategy was tried in 2008 without any success, as it was introduced as a substitute because M&S's own brand had lost credibility. There was no clear strategic rationale or curation principle. Rather, it looked like a contingency plan. Finally, it confused customers about what M&S stood for. What seems to be different this time is that M&S’s own brands have been fixed first and foremost. External brands are complementary, only filling gaps where needed. Brands at M&S also expand into beauty with the addition of brands like Clinique. In 2022, the strategy proved efficient in driving cross-selling: 96% of third-party brand purchases included another product.

M&S had done a good job re-establishing its value, quality and style credentials, with apparel market share rising to 10.5% in 2024/25, from 9.1% in 2021/22. In early 2025, John Lyttle, Managing Director of Clothing & Home, was tasked with transforming the end-to-end supply chain, consolidating suppliers to reduce risks and doubling online FH&B revenues from £1.4 billion to approximately £3 billion.

Home categories: less is more

In Spring 2024, the company formally exited its own-brand bulky furniture business. The logistics cost relief accrued in FY2025/26 contributed to overall supply chain cost reduction even in a year severely disrupted by the cyberattack. Bulky furniture required a dedicated distribution network with structurally low returns. Exiting it allowed M&S to concentrate its home investment on categories where its quality credentials are strongest: bedding, bath, soft furnishings, tableware and home fragrance. In addition, the Kelly Hoppen collaboration, launched in September 2024, gave M&S a design identity in the home that matches what Autograph does for fashion: authority through private labels.

From perception to purchase: M&S's consumer strategy

Demographics and brand perception

The critical data point regarding consumer perception of M&S is that style perception improved, reaching #1 for style in YouGov rankings, overtaking all competitors despite the trading disruption caused by the cyberattack. Quality and value perception both maintained #1 positions. In more detail, M&S clothing's brand perception and market position strengthened from 2020 to the 2025 cyberattack, rising from 40 to 50.1 in 2025. It now significantly outperforms the average high street fashion retailer in quality, value, reputation, satisfaction, and recommendation scores. M&S ranks first among all high street fashion brands for consumer consideration, with a score of 46.8%, well ahead of Next (34.8%) and Primark (30.1%). With 54% conversion from consideration to purchase intent, M&S also leads in converting interest into actual purchase intent (Next is at 40%, and Primark at 45%). Private labels also help the retailer’s consumer perception. The demographics of Autograph's new customers proved particularly relevant for attracting a younger crowd: 52% of Autograph menswear buyers in FY2024/25 were new, and 55% of all Autograph customers were under 45.

With consumer data stolen, the question of customer loyalty rapidly emerged in the wake of the cyberattack. A survey of 500 UK consumers on the public perception of M&S, conducted by consumer research company Maru, found that the number of consumers who would recommend M&S to others dropped from 87% before the cyberattack to 73% after it was made public. Despite the devastating event, YouGov's Best Brand Rankings 2026, measuring full-year 2025 data, show M&S as the #1 brand in the UK for the second consecutive year, with a score of 52.7, leaving the second-ranked brand (IKEA at 42.6) more than 10 points behind. In 2019, the retailer’s reputation score was 38.9. It was 45.6 at the end of 2025.

Influence, celebrity and community: M&S's marketing playbook

A commercially efficient example of the retailer’s marketing strategy is the M&S Insiders Programme, 22 colleagues in 2025 who post on Instagram and TikTok about M&S fashion and home products. Early on, they had a combined following of over 300,000. They found that with an M&S Insider post, customer sentiment is, on average, 10% higher, and 30% more customers choose to shop through M&S.com compared to a conventional influencer post. In FY2023/24, the programme generated 21 million impressions.

The celebrity layer has been developed over the years. Sienna Miller's September 2023 Anything But Ordinary collection and campaign exemplify M&S's A-list positioning. The campaign generated a Google search spike and a viral TikTok creator moment. A second party-oriented Sienna Miller collection followed in October 2024, driving younger customers in-store, 10 years younger than the store average of 35- to 50-year-olds. It also sold through quickly, with more than 42,000 customers clicking “contact me when available” for the sold-out styles. According to M&S, 92% of customers who bought from the Sienna Miller collection also bought from the store’s core womenswear lines. Their Bella Freud collection sold 9,000 jumpers in two hours. Machin regretted that it was a small buy.

In March 2026, Gillian Anderson joined M&S as "Chief Compliments Officer" in a new role focused on affirmation and customer connection, including expansion into platforms like TikTok Shop. This quirky initiative builds on the retailer’s Love That! campaign, which originated as a social media series and quickly gained viral traction, generating 20 million views. Through this approach, M&S is tackling emotional branding to increase its bond with customers.

Loyalty scheme: Sparks reignited

In April 2026, M&S overhauled its Sparks loyalty scheme, replacing traditional point-earning and burning with spendable cash rewards. The new digital Sparks wallet allows shoppers to earn cash rewards across all categories, with additional bonuses for cross-category purchases and partner activities, such as booking holidays with Virgin Atlantic. This overhaul is possible thanks to advanced AI and data analytics, enabling the delivery of offers tailored to individual shopping habits. The programme also encourages customers to explore new areas of the store, rewarding discovery and engagement beyond their usual purchases.

The M&S's comeback: culture, international expansion, crisis and infrastructure transformation

A new management style and mindset

Chairman Archie Norman created the conditions for Machin to succeed by enabling candid conversations about the state of the business. With more than 60,000 employees and around 1,500 stores, Machin’s leadership style is hands-on and detail-obsessed. For example, Machin is the number one M&S menswear customer, buying everything from shoes to jackets, regularly visiting stores unannounced to shop and observe. Also, he keeps a black book in which he writes down every product, its price, his views on it, and comparisons with competitors. Store managers have his phone number in case they need to text him with questions or feedback. The Straight to Stuart programme allows any staff member to contact him with ideas and to get a reply. More than 25,000 people have written to him in his first two and a half years as CEO.

One of Machin's earliest moves was to break a culture of defensiveness and silence. Key actions included standing on a box every Monday to share real trading numbers with the team, including bad news, creating psychological safety for staff to speak up, and tackling resistance to change from within, which Machin compares to the instinct to reject a transplanted organ.

Machin articulated a simple, memorable strategy: protect the magic, modernise the rest. That transformation includes closing shops, reducing the space M&S dedicates to clothing, and improving its online capabilities to reach 50% of the clothing business achieved online. Despite strong results, Machin resists complacency, describing himself as positively dissatisfied. He warns against "rose-tinted spectacles" and maintains that the journey is ongoing, especially considering the April 2025 cyberattack.

A renewed international expansion

M&S started its international expansion in the 1970s by buying local chains. By the mid-1990s, they were rapidly opening franchised and owned stores, with the ambition to reach 25% of revenues from overseas by 1997. The overexpansion unravelled quickly, leading to a complete withdrawal from all international markets. Starting from 2006, CEO Stuart Rose relaunched international growth, this time through a lighter franchise model, including the first store in China in 2008. His successor, Marc Bolland, declared the ambition to become a truly international retailer, with India and China as priorities. After Bolland opened a flagship on Paris’ Champs-Élysées in 2011 and announced plans for 250 new stores worldwide, his successor, Steve Rowe, reversed course entirely, closing 53 overseas stores in 10 countries in 2016, including Paris.

Under Machin, and learning from past experiences, M&S pursues its international development differently. This time, they partner with other established e-tailers and retailers: online with Zalando from 2022 and with Amazon from 2026 in European markets, and also with department stores in the US and Australia. M&S has partnered with 24 David Jones stores in Australia since 2025 and, more recently, with Nordstrom in 30 stores and online. With these partnerships, M&S acts as a brand rather than a retailer, capitalising on established customer bases to build brand awareness and test its appeal in new markets, while avoiding risky standalone stores. This move demonstrates the relevance of department store partnerships. Finally, to enhance global brand visibility, initiate additional partnerships and confirm its fashion ambition, M&S’s latest initiative is to present a see-now-buy-now collection at London Fashion Week in September 2026.

The attack that accelerated everything

The assault on M&S began quietly, months before it became public. Threat actors infiltrated the company's systems, stealing the database containing passwords for all domain users. The entry point was a social engineering attack in which hackers impersonated an M&S employee, convincing staff at a third-party IT contractor (reported to be Tata Consultancy Services, which has provided IT helpdesk services for over a decade) to reset an internal user's password.From there, the group linked to Scattered Spider deployed ransomware that encrypted M&S's virtual machine infrastructure. Customers first noticed something was wrong when contactless payments and click-and-collect terminals began failing across the chain. By April 25, M&S had shut down all online purchases. The online store remained closed for 46 days. In May, M&S confirmed that personal customer data had been stolen, prompting a mass password reset and official notification to affected customers.

BCG

Selvane Mohandas du Ménil

Jul 2026

PRINTABLE VERSION HERE

Last March, the IADS was interviewed by a French newspaper that wondered about the "recent incursion" of art into department stores. The journalist wanted to know whether this was a new way to lure customers or to offer them a novel type of luxury experience.

The question revealed a common misconception : the relationship between art and the department store did not begin with experiential retail, with Instagram, or with the contemporary art market's global expansion. It began at the inception of the format itself, in the 1870s, for reasons that were at once commercial, cultural, and societal: the need to offer an extraordinary experience to customers in the nineteenth century, the ambition to position the department store at the forefront of the avant-garde, and, in some countries, the imperative to replace cultural institutions that did not yet exist. Department stores did not wait for art to become a global market before making it part of their business model. They were there from the start.

What follows is a detailed examination of this history — from the founding gestures of the 1870s to the art foundations and museum partnerships of today — drawing on documented sources across five continents. It is addressed to the leaders of the department store sector, in the conviction that understanding this heritage is not a matter of nostalgia but of strategic clarity.

Born Together: Why Art Is in the Department Store's DNA

A shared origin with the museum

The modern department store and the modern public museum emerged in the same historical moment and share deep structural affinities. Both organise the display of objects within architecturally spectacular spaces; both choreograph a visitor's movement through carefully sequenced environments; and both rely on the power of visual staging to create desire, whether for knowledge or for acquisition. As historians argue, the "model rooms" of early department stores borrowed directly from museum display techniques, and the influence flowed in both directions.

Émile Zola captured this convergence when he described Le Bon Marché as a "cathedral of modern commerce" in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). Zola's metaphor was not merely literary: it reflected the ambition of founders such as Aristide Boucicaut to create spaces that would elevate the act of shopping into a broader cultural experience, one that entertained, educated, and inspired.

Architecture as the first artistic statement

Before any painting was hung or any concert staged, the department store building itself constituted an artistic proposition. Le Bon Marché, designed by Louis-Charles Boileau, with Gustave Eiffel serving as consulting engineer, introduced an iron-and-glass structure of extraordinary ambition. Galeries Lafayette commissioned a neo-Byzantine dome executed in 1912 by the master glassmaker Jacques Gruber, whose stained-glass work also adorned El Palacio de Hierro in Mexico City. Across Europe and beyond, department stores deployed cupolas, monumental staircases, ornamental ironwork, and elaborate façades that placed them squarely within the vocabulary of civic and artistic architecture.

This was no accident. From the 1880s onward, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris included the department store as a formal architectural programme in its competitions, confirming that the building type had earned a place in the artistic imagination.

The mechanisms of art integration

Beyond the building envelope, department stores developed a distinctive set of mechanisms through which art was woven into the retail experience. Four channels stand out.

The first was the store window as a space of artistic creation. The Viennese architect Frederick Kiesler theorised this practice as early as 1929 in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, while the American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes conceived the windows of Franklin Simon in New York as a form of "street theatre." This tradition has recently been the subject of scholarly re-examination, notably through the exhibition Fresh Window at the Museum Tinguely in Basel (2024–2025).

The second was the integrated art gallery. Wanamaker's in Philadelphia opened a dedicated art gallery as early as 1881; Le Bon Marché, founded in 1852, established its own picture gallery in 1875; and Mitsukoshi in Tokyo created a formal art section in 1907. These were not marginal amenities: they occupied prominent floor space and were actively programmed.

The third was the cultural event as a service to clients. The Boucicaut introduced the concerts of the Harmonie du Bon Marché in 1873, alongside a reading room and a picture gallery, explicitly integrating culture into the customer proposition. In Japan, the Mitsukoshi Hall hosted kabuki performances, dance recitals, and public lectures, fulfilling a role that extended well beyond commerce.

The fourth, and perhaps the most significant in societal terms, was the democratisation of access to art. At a time when public museums were scarce — particularly outside major capitals — and commercial galleries catered exclusively to collectors, the department store opened art to a far broader audience. This function was especially pronounced in Japan, where the museum network remained embryonic until the post-war period, and in the United States, where department stores played a role in introducing modernist art and design to the middle-classes.

Strategic functions: prestige, differentiation, and flow

The integration of art into the department store has never been purely altruistic. From the beginning, it has served identifiable strategic functions that remain relevant today:

Art confers prestige and social distinction. For the rising bourgeoisie of the 19 century, the department store's cultural programming — exhibitions, concerts, encounters with contemporary artists — offered a form of social legitimation. For today's high-net-worth clients, the presence of significant artworks continues to signal that a store operates at a level above purely transactional retail.
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Art is also a powerful instrument of commercial differentiation. It separates the department store from more functional formats — the supermarket, the category specialist, the online marketplace — by embedding the shopping journey within a broader sensory and intellectual experience.
Finally, researchers have identified two specific spatial effects that art generates within the store environment. The "fountain effect" describes the contemplative pause that an artwork or installation creates in the customer's path, slowing the pace and deepening engagement with the surrounding offer. The "shower effect" refers to the downward flow of visitor traffic from an upper-floor exhibition back through the selling floors, generating incremental exposure to merchandise.

A Consistent Commitment to the Avant-Garde: Department Stores and the Contemporary Art of Every Era

A common assumption is that department stores' embrace of contemporary art is recent, a response to the rise of experiential retail, social media, or the blurring of luxury and culture. The historical record tells a very different story. From the 1870s onward, in every decade and across every major market, department stores have consistently supported, exhibited, and commissioned the art that was most advanced in its time. This is not opportunism but a structural pattern.

1870–1910: embracing the avant-garde before the term existed

The earliest gestures were already bold. As described in the previous section, the Boucicaut gallery at Le Bon Marché (1875) did not confine itself to safe academic painting — it exhibited artists refused by the official Salon, aligning the store with the avant-garde before the term existed. By 1912, a gallery of decorative arts had been added, and in 1923, the store launched the Atelier Pomone, a dedicated furniture workshop aligned with the emerging modernist design movement.

La Samaritaine offered another demonstration that department stores sought out the most advanced architectural language of their time. When Ernest Cognacq commissioned the architect Frantz Jourdain to design the store's new building in 1905, the result was a manifesto of Art Nouveau applied to commercial architecture — polychrome ceramic façades, exposed iron structure, and decorative programmes that placed the store at the cutting edge of contemporary design. A second phase, completed in the 1930s by Henri Sauvage, added an Art Deco riverside façade of equal ambition. The Cognacq-Jay were also art collectors; their holdings eventually formed the Musée Cognacq-Jay, a public museum in the Marais.

In the United States, John Wanamaker's Philadelphia gallery (opened in 1881) imported French painting directly from the Paris Salons — a sustained acquisition programme documented in the Smithsonian Archives over more than three decades.

In Japan, the trajectory was different in origin but equally forward-looking. Mitsukoshi organised its first art exhibition in 1904, featuring works by the painter Ogata Kōrin. A formal art department was established in 1907, and in 1908, the Osaka branch hosted what is recognised as the first modern art exhibition held in a Japanese department store. This was not an imitation of the West but an expression of the Meiji-era ideology of Bunmei Kaika — "Civilisation and Enlightenment" — which positioned department stores as institutions capable of bridging progress and cultural preservation.

1920–1940: modernism enters the selling floor

The interwar decades represent perhaps the most striking chapter in this history. Department stores did not merely exhibit modern art — they became active vectors for its dissemination to audiences that no museum or gallery could reach. In New York, the Wanamaker's Belmaison Gallery (1921–1925) exhibited Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Braque alongside American artists. At Lord & Taylor in 1928, Dorothy Shaver drew more than 300,000 visitors to a full-floor Art Deco exhibition, including works by Picasso. At Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh (1929), ten monumental frescoes celebrated "Art in Industry." These programmes are examined in detail in the following section: what matters here is the pattern — in every case, the department store was engaging with the most advanced art of its moment.

The store window itself became a site of artistic confrontation. Salvador Dalí's surrealist windows for Bonwit Teller in New York (1936, 1939) — the latter ending in scandal, censorship, a shattered plate-glass window, and the artist's arrest — demonstrated that department stores were not exhibiting tame, decorative art. They were taking real risks with the avant-garde.

In Paris, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs — the event that gave Art Deco its name — featured dedicated pavilions from Le Bon Marché, Galeries Lafayette, and Le Printemps. Their presence alongside national delegations confirmed that department stores were recognised participants in defining contemporary design, not mere retailers of it.

In Canada, a lesser-known but well-documented chapter unfolded in Montréal, where department stores played an essential role in the city's artistic life between 1900 and 1945. Henry Morgan & Co. organised exhibitions of etchings by Whistler, Zorn, and Millet as early as 1909. Ogilvy's, T. Eaton Co., and Dupuis Frères followed with their own programmes, functioning as cultural relays in a city still building its institutional infrastructure.

1950–1999: the institutional turn

In the post-war decades, the relationship between department stores and contemporary art deepened into something approaching institutional permanence — most dramatically in Japan, but with significant parallels in Europe and the United States.

Japanese department stores entered what can only be described as a golden age of cultural programming. Takashimaya exhibited Picasso as early as 1950. Mitsukoshi, Isetan, Hankyu, Odakyu, Keio, and Tobu all maintained integrated art galleries and mounted frequent exhibitions of both Western and Japanese masters, functioning in practice as the country's primary network of accessible art venues at a time when the public museum system remained limited. The most ambitious expression of this model was the Seibu Museum of Art (1975–1999), which operated at a genuine museum standard for a quarter of a century — a case examined in full in the following section and in the portrait of its founder, Seiji Tsutsumi.

In France, Galeries Lafayette inaugurated the Salon de Mai within the store as early as 1946, where the public could discover Nicolas de Staël and Giacometti — establishing a commitment to contemporary art exhibition that would deepen over the following decades.

In the United States, the tradition continued through new forms. At Bonwit Teller, Gene Moore's practice of hiring struggling young artists as window designers gave early public visibility to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. At Barneys New York, Simon Doonan's arrival as creative director in 1986 made the store's windows one of New York's most visible platforms for contemporary art. These episodes, which deserve detailed examination, are presented in the following section.

2000 to the present: the avant-garde as declared identity

The twenty-first century has seen an intensification, not an invention, of this relationship. What has changed is not the impulse but the scale, the institutional form, and the visibility.

Le Bon Marché launched its annual cartes blanches programme in 2016 — full-store artistic takeovers by leading international artists from Ai Weiwei to Daniel Buren. Galeries Lafayette opened Lafayette Anticipations in 2018, a production-oriented foundation for contemporary creation. Selfridges established The Art Block, a permanent sculpture destination curated by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Each of these programmes is examined in detail in the following section.

In New York, Bergdorf Goodman has sustained one of the most visible ongoing commitments to art in American retail. Under the creative direction of David Hoey since 2004, the store's holiday window programme has become an annual cultural event in its own right, while rotating exhibitions on the seventh floor have provided a dedicated gallery platform within the store. In 2025, Bergdorf Goodman formalised a partnership with Salon Art + Design, further anchoring its position at the intersection of retail and the contemporary art market.

New formats have emerged that dissolve the boundary between store and gallery entirely: Dover Street Market (founded 2004 by Rei Kawakubo), Colette in Paris (1997–2017, more than 200 gallery exhibitions), 10 Corso Como in Milan, K11 Musea in Hong Kong and PARCO in Japan all represent variations on a model in which the department store is, by design, a cultural institution. These are documented in the following section.

A global phenomenon, not a Western exception

One of the most compelling aspects of this history is its geographic breadth. The integration of contemporary art into the department store is not confined to Paris, New York, or London. It has manifested with equal conviction — and often greater institutional depth — in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Montréal, Mexico City, and Milan. Each market has inflected the model according to its own cultural logic: in France, through architectural monumentality and bourgeois cultural performance; in the United States, through the store window as democratic public art and the opening of cultural space to women; in Japan, through the most deeply integrated model of all, in which the department store functioned for decades as a genuine substitute for the public museum; in Canada, through the department store as cultural relay in a city forging its artistic identity; and in the United Kingdom, through the synthesis of American retail spectacle with established British cultural institutions.

Landmark Exhibitions and Artistic Programmes Across the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Our thesis is that department stores have consistently championed the contemporary art of their time, from the 1870s to the present day. What follows is the detailed record — a survey of the most significant exhibitions, commissions, and artistic programmes that department stores have mounted across the major retail markets over more than a century.

The United States: the department store as incubator of modern art

In the U.S., department stores did not merely exhibit established artists — they provided critical early platforms for artists who would go on to reshape twentieth-century art.

The case of Bonwit Teller in New York deserves detailed examination because it encapsulates the phenomenon in its purest form. Gene Moore, the store's art director from the late 1930s onward, made a practice of hiring struggling young artists to design store windows — offering them both income and public visibility at a moment when neither was available through conventional art-world channels. In the mid-1950s, two young artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, worked as Bonwit Teller's window designers under the shared pseudonym "Matson Jones." In 1957, Johns exhibited his painting White Flag on Orange Field in a Bonwit Teller window — its first public showing. That same year, Rauschenberg displayed a modified version of his Untitled (Red Combine Painting) in the same context. In 1951, Moore had hired Andy Warhol to create works for the store's windows. A decade later, in 1961, Warhol hung five paintings based on comic strips and advertisements behind Bonwit Teller's mannequins — an event widely regarded as his first act of public recognition as a fine artist, and a foundational moment in the emergence of Pop Art. James Rosenquist, who would become another leading figure of the movement, also designed Bonwit Teller windows before his gallery career began. The store's earlier engagement with the avant-garde was no less bold: Salvador Dalí's surrealist windows in 1936 and 1939, the latter of which ended in his arrest after he smashed the plate glass in protest against the store's censorship, remain among the most famous episodes in the history of art and commerce.

This pattern — the department store as a place where future art-historical significance was first made visible to the public — was not limited to Bonwit Teller. At Lord & Taylor in 1928, Dorothy Shaver transformed an entire floor into an Art Deco exhibition featuring works by Picasso. At Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh in 1930, ten monumental frescoes by Boardman Robinson, depicting "Art in Industry," encircled the first floor. At Marshall Field's in Chicago, the store maintained art exhibitions for several decades in the early twentieth century; its Walnut Room, completed in 1907, featured a Tiffany glass ceiling composed of more than 1.6 million individual pieces — a work of decorative art on a scale that few museums could match.

In the twenty-first century, American department stores have continued to engage with contemporary art through evolving formats. At Barneys New York, the tradition initiated by Simon Doonan culminated in projects such as the 2014 collaboration with Alex Katz and the Art Production Fund, which produced a fifty-six-foot frieze of eighteen black-and-white female figures displayed across the store's windows. At Bergdorf Goodman, the 2014 programme "Art Matters! Ten Artists for Ten Spaces," co-curated by Linda Fargo and Kyle DeWoody, commissioned site-specific installations throughout the store, including Peter D. Gerakaris's Rappaccini's Origami Terrarium. In 2025, Bergdorf Goodman formalised a partnership with salon Art + Design, anchoring its position at the intersection of luxury retail and the art market. At Saks Fifth Avenue, a "Fine Art Collection" was launched in 2024, offering more than 100 limited-edition contemporary prints — by artists including Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Donald Sultan — through pop-up gallery spaces in stores from New York to San Francisco. At Bloomingdale's, the 2025 "Just Imagine" campaign with the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Ilori brought his distinctive colourful visual language into the store's windows and interiors.

France: from in-store gallery to dedicated foundation

The French trajectory is distinctive in its progression from early in-store galleries to full-scale institutional commitments — a movement that has accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first century.

Le Bon Marché has pursued the most sustained and visible programme of any European department store. Since 2016, the store has hosted an annual carte blanche each January — a full-store artistic takeover by a leading international artist, timed to coincide with the historic "mois du blanc" (home linen sale month) that Aristide Boucicaut himself invented in 1873. The roster to date constitutes a survey of major contemporary art: Ai Weiwei (2016), whose installation "Er Xi" (Child's Play) included a sixty-five-foot dragon and twenty illuminated silk-and-bamboo creatures suspended above the cosmetics department, fabricated by twelve kite-makers from Shandong province; Chiharu Shiota (2017); Leandro Erlich (2018); Joana Vasconcelos (2019); Oki Sato of studio Nendo (2020); Prune Nourry (2021); Mehmet Ali Uysal (2022); Subodh Gupta (2023); Daniel Buren (2024), whose "Aux Beaux Carrés" deployed more than 1,500 polycarbonate squares beneath the glass ceiling, with his signature 8.7-centimetre black-and-white stripes extending across escalators and columns; Ernesto Neto (2025), who suspended a twenty-eight-metre crocheted serpent from bamboo arches under the glass roof; and Song Dong (January 2026, the programme's eleventh edition), who transformed the main store windows into individual installations and created two immense chandeliers flanking the central escalator. This programme operates at a scale and with a curatorial seriousness that is comparable to that of many contemporary art institutions. The store also maintains a permanent collection of contemporary art assembled since 1989 and a design collection, both displayed throughout its selling floors, and offers monthly guided cultural tours.

Galeries Lafayette have followed a parallel but institutionally distinct path. The "Galerie des Galeries," a dedicated 300-square-metre exhibition space within the boulevard Haussmann store, has operated since 2001, presenting three to four exhibitions per year of French and international contemporary art, fashion, and design. In 2023, the artist Kimsooja installed "To Breathe" beneath the store's historic dome: a diffraction film that transformed the 1912 Jacques Gruber glass cupola into an infinite spectrum of projected colour, accompanied by an audio component composed of the artist's own breathing rhythm — the first immersive light installation of its kind in Paris. In 2026, the group launched "Pour Toujours," a carte blanche to four artists — the sculptor Gloria Friedmann, the photographer Birgit Jürgenssen, the Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou (on the main dome), and the American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner (on the terrace) — confirming the ambition of its cultural programming.

The most significant institutional step, however, has been the creation of Lafayette Anticipations (the company’s foundation), which opened in 2018 at the Marais area of Paris, in a building rehabilitated by Rem Koolhaas's OMA. Unlike an in-store gallery, Lafayette Anticipations is a production-oriented foundation with a dedicated budget, commissioning and exhibiting new work by international artists including Lutz Bacher, Katinka Bock, Martin Margiela, Cyprien Gaillard, and Mark Leckey. This represents an evolution from exhibition to production — from showing art to making it possible.

The broader cultural recognition of this history was confirmed in 2024, when the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris mounted "La Naissance des grands magasins" (April–October 2024), followed by a presentation at the Cité de l'Architecture (October 2024–March 2025), of which the IADS was a partner. The decision by France's leading design museum to devote a major exhibition to the department store as a cultural and artistic phenomenon — and to seek the sector's own international association as a collaborator — affirmed what this article has argued throughout: the relationship between art and the department store is not peripheral but constitutive.

The United Kingdom: Selfridges and the art of spectacle

Selfridges in London has built a sustained programme of art commissions and installations, starting when the store opened in 1909, with its first window displays paying homage to the French painters Fragonard and Watteau.

The contemporary programme is remarkable for both its scale and the calibre of artists involved. In 2003, the photographer Spencer Tunick staged "Be Consumed," in which 600 nude volunteers posed inside the Beauty Hall. In the same year, Barbara Kruger created a graphic campaign for a promotional campaign, deploying her iconic declarative typography across the retail environment. In 2012, Selfridges hosted a Yayoi Kusama × Louis Vuitton concept store, with the entire façade and interior overtaken by Kusama's signature polka dots and pumpkins, including a colossal figure of the artist on the façade. In 2022, 55 works by Victor Vasarely were exhibited in partnership with the Fondation Vasarely and Paco Rabanne. Other artists who have exhibited or created commissions for Selfridges include Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Banksy, Brian Eno, Fernando Botero, David LaChapelle, Joana Vasconcelos, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

The 2019 "State of the Arts" campaign further elevated the model. Nine artists — Darren Almond, Spencer Finch, Douglas Gordon, Chantal Joffe, Yayoi Kusama, Simon Periton, Michal Rovner, Conrad Shawcross, and Richard Wright — were given the Oxford Street windows as exhibition spaces, while "The Art Store" at the Corner Shop was developed in partnership with galleries including Gagosian, Pace, Perrotin, Victoria Miro, and White Cube.The department store and the commercial gallery system operated not in parallel but in direct collaboration.

The most structurally significant development, however, is The Art Block, a permanent sculpture destination at the centre of the Accessories Hall, designed by David Chipperfield Architects and curated by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Since its opening in 2018, The Art Block has hosted rotating six-month residencies, including Holly Hendry's "Phyllis" (2018), a nearly four-metre sculpture incorporating excavation material from the Crossrail project; Matthew Darbyshire's three-metre reinterpretations of classical deities (2018–2019); and Gray Wielebinski's "Exhibition" (2023), a monument inspired by Victorian public architecture.

Beyond Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason has hosted exhibitions from the Frank Cohen Collection of modern and contemporary British art, and Harrods maintains the Halcyon Gallery, a dedicated contemporary art space on its third floor.

Japan: the deepest integration

Japan's department stores represent the most profoundly integrated model of art and commerce in the global retail landscape.

The Seibu Museum of Art, which operated within the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, from 1975 to 1999, stands as the apogee of this model. Founded by Seiji Tsutsumi, the museum opened with "The View of Japanese Contemporary Art," featuring twenty-seven artists, including Shusaku Arakawa and Tadanori Yokoo. Its programme over the following quarter-century was of genuine museum calibre: "30 Years of American Art" including Jasper Johns (1976); a Jasper Johns retrospective in collaboration with the Whitney Museum (1978); "Calder's Universe," also originating from the Whitney (1979); a major Man Ray solo exhibition (1990); and "Abstract Expressionism: The Golden Age of American Contemporary Painting" (1996). The museum assembled a permanent collection of approximately 800 works, now housed at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa.

Seibu's influence extended well beyond its own walls. The broader "Culture Sezon" movement, shared with PARCO — founded in 1969 and developed as a platform for visual culture, theatre, and film — transformed an entire segment of Japanese retail into a cultural ecosystem. PARCO's visual identity was shaped by the graphic designer Eiko Ishioka, whose 1975 campaign featuring Faye Dunaway remains iconic. Today, PARCO continues to operate PARCO Museum Tokyo, Gallery X, and PARCO Theatre, while events such as "Shibuya PARCO Art Week 2025" demonstrate the model's ongoing vitality.

Takashimaya's contribution deserves particular attention for its engagement with the Japanese avant-garde. In 1956, the store hosted early exhibitions of the Gutai group — the radical post-war movement that anticipated Happenings and Fluxus. In 1958, Takashimaya Osaka mounted "International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai," a landmark exhibition curated in collaboration with the French critic Michel Tapié that placed the Japanese avant-garde in direct dialogue with European abstraction. In 1960, the "International Sky Festival" on the rooftop of Takashimaya Osaka suspended reproductions of works by American Abstract Expressionists and European Informel artists from balloons — a gesture of extraordinary audacity for a department store, or indeed for any institution.

Mitsukoshi, the pioneer, has continued its mission without interruption. The Mitsukoshi Nihombashi Art Gallery and the Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery host four to five exhibitions per week, spanning Japanese painting, international contemporary art, sculpture, and craft. Over the decades, the galleries have exhibited masters including Yokoyama Taikan, Tsuguji Fujita (Léonard Foujita), and Shoji Hamada.[xxvi] At Isetan in Shinjuku, the art gallery programme includes ongoing exhibitions of contemporary art in partnership with CADAN (Contemporary Art Dealers Association Nihon), while a 2021 retrospective, "80 Years of Design at Isetan," was produced in collaboration with the Eames Office.

New frontiers: Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy

The model has expanded well beyond the historical centres. In Seoul, the LOTTE Museum of Art, established within the Lotte Department Store in 2017, mounted "Daniel Arsham: Seoul 3024" in 2024 — the artist's first solo exhibition in Asia — while Shinsegae has opened the House of Shinsegae Heritage, a new exhibition space inaugurated with "Embracing and Delivering," devoted to the art of bojagi, traditional Korean wrapping cloth.

In Hong Kong, K11 Musea, opened in 2019 by Adrian Cheng of New World Development, represents perhaps the most radical contemporary expression of the department-store-as-cultural-institution concept. Conceived as a "museum-retail complex," K11 Musea integrates a permanent collection of more than 100 works by international contemporary artists — including Paola Pivi, Sterling Ruby, Joan Cornellà, and Adrian Wong — into its architecture and public circulation spaces. It is not a store with art in it; it is a space in which art and commerce are architecturally inseparable. Lane Crawford, also in Hong Kong, has adopted a lighter but consistent approach, with its 2025 Art Month In-Store Guide featuring collaborations with artists and designers including Ruan Hoffmann, Jaime Hayon, and Kristjana Williams.

In Amsterdam, De Bijenkorf launched "Room On The Roof" in 2015 — an artist-in-residence programme housed in the tower of its historic Dam Square building, initially in partnership with the Rijksmuseum. Residents have included the designer Maarten Baas (2015) and the artist Rutger de Vries, who exhibited works across seven De Bijenkorf branches.

In Berlin, KaDeWe has progressively inserted itself into the city's gallery ecosystem. In 2007, the artists Osko + Deichmann installed a 150-square-metre wheat field in the store's entrance hall. In 2025, "SCHAU, FENSTER im KaDeWe" was admitted to the official programme of Gallery Weekend Berlin — a signal that the art world now recognises the department store as a legitimate exhibition venue.

In Milan, La Rinascente has used its windows facing the Piazza Duomo as a platform for contemporary art commissions, notably Paola Pivi's "I am tired of eating fish" (2017), which placed feathered polar bears in eight vitrines during the Miart art fair.

The evolution of practice: from window to foundation

Taken as a whole, this record reveals not a static tradition but a clear evolution in how department stores engage with contemporary art. Four distinct phases can be identified.

First, the store window was an artistic medium — from Bonwit Teller's collaborations with Dalí, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol to Selfridges' "State of the Arts" windows and Barneys' annual holiday commissions. The window was art's first point of entry into the department store, and it remains a vital format.

Then, department stores developed the integrated gallery — a dedicated exhibition space within the store itself. Le Bon Marché's picture gallery (1875), Wanamaker's art gallery (1881), Mitsukoshi's art department (1907), the Galerie des Galeries (2001), and Selfridges' Art Block (2018) all represent variations on this model.

The third moment was the museum within the store — an ambition realised most fully by the Seibu Museum of Art (1975–1999), which operated for a quarter of a century at genuine museum standard, and echoed today by the LOTTE Museum of Art in Seoul and Harrods' Halcyon Gallery.

The fourth, and most recent phase, is the independent foundation — a legally and physically separate institution created by a department store group to produce and exhibit contemporary art. Lafayette Anticipations (2018) is the leading example, but the pattern is visible in the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong and in the institutional partnerships that Selfridges has built with Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Frieze, and the ICA.

This progression — from window to gallery to museum to foundation — does not represent a replacement of one model by the next. All four coexist today. What it does represent is a deepening of commitment: from display to curation, from curation to production, and from production to institutional permanence. The department store's engagement with contemporary art has not merely persisted; it has matured.

The Great Dynasties: Department Store Founders and Families as Art Patrons

The preceding sections have documented a structural relationship between department stores and the visual arts — one that spans geographies, decades, and artistic movements. But structures do not create themselves. Behind the galleries, the foundations, and the exhibitions stand individuals: founders, heirs, and executives whose personal passion for art shaped the cultural identity of their stores and, in several remarkable cases, left a permanent mark on the museum landscape of their countries.

The founding generation: commerce as cultural ambition

The earliest department store founders did not merely tolerate art within their commercial enterprises. They actively sought it, collected it, and made it part of their personal and institutional identity.

Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut, the founders of Le Bon Marché in Paris, were passionate collectors who understood that culture could elevate the department store beyond the transactional. Their establishment of a picture gallery for Salon rejects (1875) and of the Harmonie concerts (1873), described in Part I, was not a business decision in the modern sense — it was a personal conviction that commerce and culture were inseparable. After Aristide's death in 1877, Marguerite continued the cultural programme with equal commitment.

Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ, the founders of La Samaritaine, pursued a different but equally significant path. Over several decades, the couple assembled an important collection of eighteenth-century art — paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, and objets d'art — which they bequeathed to the City of Paris in 1928. That collection forms the Musée Cognacq-Jay, housed today in the Marais area. It is one of the clearest examples in retail history of a department store founder's personal collecting activity producing a permanent public cultural institution.

In the United States, John Wanamaker brought the same conviction to his Philadelphia store. The art gallery he opened in 1881 was an active programme of acquisition, not a decorative afterthought. His son Rodman Wanamaker deepened the commitment, financing the construction of the store's monumental organ — with 29,000 pipes, the largest playable instrument in the world — installed in 1911 and still operational today. Rodman was a recognised philanthropist whose ambition was to make the store a genuine centre of artistic and musical life.

Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened his London store in 1909, conceived of spectacle and culture as foundational to the retail experience. He published The Romance of Commerce in 1918, articulating a philosophy in which commerce and aesthetics were inseparable. The cultural ambition he established — from the Fragonard-and-Watteau-inspired opening windows to the institutional partnerships of today — has been sustained and amplified by successive managements over more than a century.

Potter Palmer, who founded the Chicago store that would become Marshall Field's, married Bertha Honoré Palmer, who became one of the most significant art collectors in American history. Bertha Palmer assembled an Impressionist collection of extraordinary depth: twenty-nine paintings by Monet (including nine from the Haystacks series), eleven by Renoir, and works by Degas, Pissarro, and Cassatt. In 1893, she commissioned a major mural from Mary Cassatt for the Woman's Pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Palmer collection, donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, forms the core of the museum's celebrated Impressionist wing — one of the finest in the world.

Collectors whose legacies became museums

Several department store figures produced collections of such scale and quality that they entered the permanent fabric of their countries' museum systems. The phenomenon is striking for its geographic breadth and for the calibre of the institutions that were shaped by these gifts.

Samuel Henry Kress, who built the S.H. Kress & Co. chain to 264 stores across the United States by the 1930s, devoted his fortune to assembling more than 3,000 works of European art, with a concentration in the Italian Renaissance. The collection included masterpieces by Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Titian. In 1939, Kress donated nearly 400 works to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. After the war, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation distributed a further 700 Old Master paintings to eighteen regional museums. In total, the collection was dispersed across ninety institutions in thirty-three states — an act of cultural philanthropy without equivalent in the retail sector, which ensured that communities far from the major coastal cities could access works of the highest quality.

Percy and Edith Straus, whose family became sole owners of Macy's in 1896, assembled a distinguished collection of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, including works by Fra Angelico, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Hans Memling. In 1941, they donated the entire collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Stanley Marcus, president and chairman of Neiman Marcus, was a noted collector of art and rare books. He founded the Neiman Marcus Art Collection in 1951 and, with his wife Linda, built a significant collection of Southwestern art. The Dallas Museum of Art honoured his legacy with the exhibition "The Eye of Stanley Marcus" in 1994.

Multi-generational dynasties: the Moulin-Houzé family

Among all the families associated with department stores and art, the Moulin-Houzé dynasty of Galeries Lafayette stands apart — not only for the depth of its commitment but for its continuity across five generations.

Théophile Bader, who founded Galeries Lafayette, was himself a collector of Impressionist painting, establishing from the outset a link between the family's commercial enterprise and the art of its time. His descendant Ginette Moulin (1927–2025) sustained the tradition through the second half of the twentieth century, supporting artists of the second École de Paris — Serge Poliakoff, Jean Fautrier, André Lanskoy — at a time when their recognition was far from assured.

The most transformative figure is Guillaume Houzé, Théophile Bader's great-great-grandson. Houzé created the group's patronage directorate in 2010, established the “Fondation d'entreprise” Galeries Lafayette in 2013, and launched the Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin — a family endowment fund that now holds more than 400 works of contemporary art. He presides over Lafayette Anticipations, the production-oriented foundation whose programme and building are described in Part III. Under his leadership, the group has become a partner of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris+ par Art Basel, ANDAM, and the Villa Noailles. Houzé is himself a recognised collector, and his activity has been described in the French press as embodying an "authentic cultural identity" inseparable from the commercial enterprise.

What distinguishes the Moulin-Houzé dynasty is not merely longevity but escalation: each generation has deepened and institutionalised the family's engagement with art, progressing from personal collecting to in-store exhibitions, to a corporate foundation, to an independent production institution. It is a five-generation arc from Impressionism to the commissioning of new work by living artists — a trajectory that mirrors, in microcosm, the broader evolution traced in this article.

The Tsutsumi dynasty: two generations, one cultural revolution

In Japan, the Tsutsumi family produced what is arguably the single most consequential act of art patronage in the history of department store retailing.

Yasujiro Tsutsumi (1889–1964), the founder of the Seibu group, established the Takanawa Art Museum Foundation in 1962, housing a collection of paintings, Buddhist statuary, lacquerware, and Oriental ceramics. The museum operated in Tokyo until 1981, when it was relocated to Karuizawa.

His son Seiji Tsutsumi (1927–2013) transformed this inheritance into something far more ambitious. A published writer and poet under the pen name Takashi Tsujii, Seiji Tsutsumi was unique among department store executives in combining literary and artistic sensibility with commercial leadership on a national scale. He founded the Seibu Museum of Art in 1975, the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa in 1981, and the Saison Foundation in 1987, funded from his personal resources, to support the performing arts. The scale of these achievements — approximately 260 exhibitions, a permanent collection of some 800 works, collaborations with the Whitney Museum of American Art — is documented in Part III. What matters here is the man: a poet who ran a department store empire, and who believed that art was not an amenity for customers but a responsibility of commerce toward society.

In 2012, the Japanese government recognised Seiji Tsutsumi as a Person of Cultural Merit — an honour that acknowledged what the art world had long understood: that his contribution to the cultural life of Japan, delivered through the medium of a department store group, was of national significance.

Contemporary figures: the tradition continues

The pattern established by these founders and dynasties continues in the present generation — adapted to contemporary institutional forms but driven by the same fusion of personal conviction and commercial leadership.

Guillaume Houzé, discussed above, is the most prominent European example. At Le Bon Marché, Patrice Wagner, as CEO, has overseen the implementation of the annual carte blanche programme and the continued development of the store's permanent collection — ensuring that the cultural ambition initiated by the Boucicaut family in the 1870s, and sustained by LVMH since its acquisition of the store in 1984, remains a defining feature of the brand.

In Asia, Adrian Cheng, the founder of K11 and an executive of New World Development in Hong Kong, represents a new model: the entrepreneur-collector who conceives an entire retail-and-cultural complex as an integrated act of patronage. K11 Musea, described in Part III, is not a store that happens to contain art; it is a vision of what the department store might become when its founder's identity as a collector is made architecturally inseparable from its identity as a retailer.

In Japan, the tradition takes a more institutional form. At Mitsukoshi, the art department, established in 1907, continues to operate as both a gallery and a commercial intermediary in the art market. At Takashimaya, the company's historical museum documents the store's role in art and culture, while the Takashimaya Foundation maintains an explicit mission to support emerging contemporary artists and to compensate for the limitations of the commercial gallery system — a philosophy that positions the department store as a patron in the fullest sense.

Conclusion: A Strategic Asset, Not a Cost Centre

The relationship between department stores and the visual arts is not a marketing tactic, not a recent discovery, and not a luxury that can be dispensed with when trading conditions deteriorate. It is a constitutive dimension of the format — present at its origins, sustained across every major market, and carried forward by founders, families, and institutions over more than 150 years.

The department store and the public museum were born in the same historical moment and share the same structural logic: the staging of objects in architecturally ambitious spaces, designed to provoke desire, curiosity, and aspiration. From the Boucicaut gallery of Salon rejects in 1875 to Lafayette Anticipations in 2018, from Dalí's shattered window at Bonwit Teller to Ai Weiwei's takeover of Le Bon Marché, from Mitsukoshi's first exhibition in 1904 to K11 Musea's permanent collection today, department stores have not followed the art world — they have, at critical moments, led it, bringing the avant-garde of every era to audiences that established cultural institutions could not or would not reach.

The twenty-first century has seen this relationship cross a new threshold. What was once an in-store gallery or a patron's personal collection has become, in the most advanced cases, an independent foundation with a dedicated building and a production budget (Lafayette Anticipations), a permanent sculpture programme curated by a national arts institution (Selfridges and Yorkshire Sculpture Park), or an entire architectural complex conceived from the outset as a fusion of museum and retail (K11 Musea). At the same time, department stores have entered the commercial art market directly (Saks Fifth Avenue's fine art collection) and have been admitted into the institutional calendar of the art world itself (KaDeWe at Gallery Weekend Berlin). The boundary between the department store and the cultural institution is no longer blurred — in several significant cases, it has been deliberately dissolved.

For the leaders of the sector, the implication is clear. Art is not a cost centre to be optimised. It is part of the founding DNA of the department store — an inheritance carried forward, in the most successful cases, across generations by families whose personal passion became institutional identity. The Moulin-Houzé dynasty at Galeries Lafayette, Seiji Tsutsumi at Seibu, Bertha Palmer at Marshall Field's, Ernest Cognacq at La Samaritaine: these are not peripheral figures. They are central to what made their stores culturally significant — and, not coincidentally, commercially enduring. In an era when the department store must justify its existence against every other retail format, this history is not a sentimental indulgence. It is a strategic asset.

Appendix : A Practical Guide — Which Department Stores to Visit for Art

Paris

Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche remains the essential destination. Each January, a monumental carte blanche transforms the store. The permanent collection of contemporary art and design is visible year-round, and guided cultural tours are offered on the last Sunday of each month. Admission is free. Lafayette Anticipations (9 rue du Plâtre, Marais), the Galeries Lafayette foundation housed in a building by Rem Koolhaas, offers a production-oriented programme of contemporary art exhibitions. At the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann, the 1912 Gruber dome is itself a masterwork; temporary installations beneath it and the Galerie des Galeries on the first floor complement the architectural experience.

Maya Sankoh

Jun 2026

PRINTABLE VERSION HERE

American Apparel anticipated many of today’s retail priorities, from sweatshop-free manufacturing and domestic production to real workers in low-fi, unretouched campaigns — before any of these had become standard commercial expectations. At its peak, the brand sold a worldview in which a T-shirt carried values, politics and aspiration. And yet, within a decade of becoming one of the most recognisable fashion brands of the 2000s, it had entered a prolonged crisis, embroiled in scandals and business challenges: founder Dov Charney was suspended in 2014, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015 and again in 2016, and Gildan acquired the brand and selected assets in 2017.

That trajectory is, above all, a governance story: the reputational damage followed from the governance failure, not from a separate cause. American Apparel was early to many ideas that now dominate retail strategy: local manufacturing, ethical production, real people in campaigns, cultural immediacy and a rejection of over-polished fashion imagery. But the organisation behind the brand did not mature at the same pace as its cultural relevance.

That is precisely the argument the 2025 IADS White Paper, DEI at a crossroads in retail, developed at sector level: that DEI cannot function as a communications layer applied to a weak culture, and that it requires embedding in leadership, operations, governance and everyday behaviour. American Apparel demonstrates what the White Paper describes: DEI claims that lived in the brand's external positioning, not in the governance structures behind it, and a decade of conditions that could not protect what the brand was promising.

Its collapse is a warning about what happens when cultural relevance outpaces institutional accountability. For department stores, that argument has a direct operational implication: brand evaluation needs to reach behind the brand story and into the governance, complaint-handling and founder dependency of every significant partner.

What American Apparel built

A basics business with cultural charge

American Apparel built desire around everyday items: T-shirts, sweatshirts, leggings, bodysuits, crop tops, disco pants, hoodies, and underwear. It built a business around an idea that would not have a category name for years: that the most functional items in a wardrobe were also the ones most open to carrying cultural meaning.

Its clothes existed inside a larger story: Los Angeles, youth, sexuality, anti-corporate energy, domestic production and a rejection of glossy fashion perfection. Its 2014 annual report described the company as a vertically integrated manufacturer, distributor and retailer of fashion basics based in downtown Los Angeles.1 As of March 2015, it had approximately 10,000 employees, 239 retail stores in 20 countries, and a global e-commerce site serving more than 50 countries.

American Apparel’s “sweatshop-free” positioning gave its basics a moral dimension. At a time when much of the apparel industry had moved production offshore, the company promoted its Los Angeles manufacturing model as proof that fashion could be produced differently. The commitment to domestic labour had measurable substance. According to contemporary reporting, the average American Apparel factory worker earned between $80 and $120 per day, compared with $30 to $40 at most other Los Angeles-based garment factories during the same period.2 Employees also received subsidised lunches, health care, English-language classes and transit passes. The commercial logic behind local, ethical manufacturing was sound. That the same company simultaneously normalised conduct in its creative and management operations that contradicted those factory standards is not a simple contradiction. It reflects the case's most precise structural finding: the same concentrated authority that produced genuine worker welfare in the factory produced unaccountable conduct in the parts of the organisation that authority reached most directly. American Apparel's production model anticipated what would become a mainstream retail expectation. The failure came because the company did not build the governance and culture needed to sustain it once it had grown to 239 stores, 10,000 employees and operations across 20 countries.

When authenticity became exposure

American Apparel's advertising was equally distinctive: internally developed, visually direct and deliberately provocative. Its annual report described its campaigns as “edgy, high-impact, and visual.” The brand’s imagery often used real people, including employees and street-cast models, in low-fi, unretouched images.3

But the same strategy also created risk. The campaigns were frequently criticised for sexualising women and young-looking models. The company’s aesthetic became inseparable from questions about power, consent, and exploitation.4 What looked like authenticity to some audiences looked like predation to others. The deeper issue was that American Apparel’s identity became inseparable from Dov Charney, who was also the company’s chief executive. His taste, politics, instincts and behaviour shaped the product, advertising, workplace culture and public story. The company’s strongest differentiators (provocative campaigns, local manufacturing, and anti-corporate voice) lived too heavily on one person. For a young founder-led company, that can look like creative energy, but for a global retailer, it becomes a governance exposure.

How the business unravelled

Financial pressure exposed operational weakness

American Apparel did not collapse overnight. By the time its leadership crisis reached public view, the company was already under financial pressure. Its 2014 annual report shows total net sales falling to $608.9 million from $633.9 million in the previous year, and a net loss of $68.8 million.5 Several weaknesses converged, but two were structural: governance dysfunction as Charney's conduct became unmanageable, and the reputational damage that followed. These accelerated the financial pressure that overexpansion and declining traffic had already created.

In June 2014, American Apparel’s board suspended Charney as president, CEO, and chairman, and stated its intention to terminate him for cause after a cure period.6 The company’s SEC-filed announcement said the decision stemmed from an ongoing investigation into alleged misconduct. The same announcement warned that the management changes may have triggered an event of default under the company’s credit agreements.7 Founder risk had become a capital-structure issue: lender confidence, debt agreements and business continuity were now bound up in a single individual's conduct.

American Apparel’s workplace culture was often described as creative, intense, and start-up-like. Former employees have spoken about being given responsibility quickly, moving between retail, creative and operational roles, and feeling part of something larger than a clothing company.8 Yet the same informality also created serious exposure. The workplace appeared to operate with weak boundaries between professional life, personal loyalty, sexuality, creative production and founder access. Former employees interviewed in recent documentaries and reporting have described a workplace where sexually explicit behaviour was normalised, employees were expected to be constantly available, and Charney’s private home became part of the company’s informal power structure.

The founder’s behaviour became a governance problem

Allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate workplace behaviour had accumulated around Charney for years before they reached the boardroom as formal governance issues. Several claims were dismissed, settled or moved into confidential arbitration, partly because employees had signed agreements channelling complaints away from public litigation.9 Charney has denied all allegations against him.10 Still, the pattern shows a company spending significant organisational energy managing conduct risk around the person most closely identified with its brand, while it was trying to address serious financial and operational pressures.

The ethical problem was structural: power was concentrated in a single individual who controlled the brand, creative direction, hiring culture, employee access and public narrative. In that environment, professional opportunity could become difficult to separate from personal loyalty or implicit pressure. American Apparel's advertising often used employees and street-cast models, while former employee accounts describe a workplace where sexualised behaviour, late-night access to Charney and blurred boundaries between work and his private home were normalised11. When creative visibility, career advancement and proximity to the founder are all controlled by the same person, employees may not feel they are operating on equal terms. American Apparel's ethical contradictions were embedded in its operating model. The brand built commercial credibility through claims of fairness (sweatshop-free production, real workers, transparent supply chains) while reportedly tolerating internal conditions that contradicted those claims.

The conduct pattern and the governance conditions that sustained it came from the same structure: authority and creative control concentrated in one person, with no mechanism to challenge the culture that concentration allowed. By the time Charney was suspended in 2014, those conditions had been building for a decade.

What remains of American Apparel now

Gildan bought the name, not the old machine

American Apparel still exists, but not in the form consumers knew in the 2000s. In January 2017, Gildan won the court-supervised auction to acquire the American Apparel brand and certain assets. Its final cash bid was approximately $88 million and included worldwide intellectual property rights and certain manufacturing equipment. Gildan also stated that it would separately purchase inventory but would not purchase any retail store assets.12

Gildan acquired the name, but the Los Angeles factory, the physical store network, the founder-led creative machine and the original subculture context did not transfer in the same form. American Apparel became a brand asset within a portfolio, rather than a stand-alone cultural retailer.

A narrower, safer, more conventional brand

Today’s American Apparel is much narrower than the original. Its FAQ states that it does not currently have store locations and that Amazon is now its first-party retailer, with plans to expand to other retail channels in the future. The production story has also changed. The brand’s FAQ states that its products are made in sweatshop-free facilities around the world, including the US. The result is a safer, more conventional American Apparel.

For department stores, the Gildan acquisition illustrates the gap between brand recognition and brand substance. What Gildan acquired was the name; what it could not acquire was the business model that had originally made the name matter. That the brand continues to trade on Amazon without the factory or the values story does not disprove that those things created commercial premium at the time. It shows that name recognition, once built, outlasts the conditions that built it. The department store question is not whether the name still sells; it is whether it sells at the same premium without the substance behind it.

What happened to Dov Charney

Dov Charney did not disappear after American Apparel. In 2016, he founded Los Angeles Apparel, a new company built around many of the same ideas that defined American Apparel before its retail expansion: domestic manufacturing, vertical integration, wholesale basics and sweatshop-free production.13 Nearly a decade after its founding, the company continues to operate on the same model. Its own materials describe a vertically integrated structure, a starting wage of $20 an hour, and garment workers earning up to $35 an hour with productivity bonuses. In 2025, it opened a flagship of more than 20,000 square feet in SoHo, New York, its first retail expansion beyond its Los Angeles base.14

That continuity does not establish Los Angeles Apparel as a comparable commercial success; revenue and profitability are not public. What it does establish is that the operating model has continued demand at a contained scale: a single Los Angeles facility, wholesale distribution and no investor pressure to expand to 239 stores across 20 countries. What American Apparel never built was the specific set of structures the model required as it grew: a complaints process that ran outside the founder's authority, a board empowered to intervene before conduct became a capital-structure event, and hiring practices that did not make career opportunity contingent on personal access to one person.

At the same time, Los Angeles Apparel has faced its own scrutiny. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cal/OSHA15 cited Los Angeles Apparel after an inspection that began in July 2020.16 The citation document refers to COVID-19-related illnesses and fatalities among employees and failures to record fatalities on OSHA forms. The citation points to the same structural gap as American Apparel, and it complicates the case's lesson in a useful way. The governance failure at American Apparel was partly about growth: a model that might have been sustained at a smaller scale, with the accountability structures it never built. Los Angeles Apparel tests that reading. Operating at a fraction of American Apparel's scale, without the pressure of 239 stores or public investors, it shows the same founder-accountability gap. For department stores, both lessons apply: ask whether a founder-led brand is building governance as it grows, and ask whether the model, at any scale, is capable of being held accountable by someone other than its founder.

What department stores should learn

When curation stops at the brand story

Department stores are in the business of curation — of products, yes, but also of the organisations, supply chains, and workplace cultures those products represent. Every brand carried, every concession hosted, and every exclusive collaboration signals something about the department store's taste, values, and judgment. American Apparel shows why a brand can have strong product relevance, cultural visibility and customer loyalty and still carry serious governance and culture risks that commercial review alone will not surface.

American Apparel shows what those questions are. How does a brand treat workers, and is there evidence beyond the marketing? American Apparel's factory wages were documented; its internal harassment was not. How are complaints handled when they involve the founder? American Apparel routed them to confidential arbitration. Can the business survive without a single dominant individual? American Apparel's lenders found out only when Charney's suspension triggered a potential event of default. These are the questions that belong in brand evaluation before a partnership is signed, not after the brand makes news.

Values-led branding needs proof

American Apparel's story also shows where ethical claims hold and where they break: the claims that could be independently audited held; the ones that depended on the founder's personal accountability did not. "Made locally", "sweatshop-free", "sustainable", "inclusive" and "community-driven" can all create consumer trust, but only when supported by wage transparency, independent grievance channels and clear accountability for leadership behaviour.

American Apparel illustrates the documentation gap directly: its wage claims were widely cited in contemporaneous reporting; its governance, harassment reporting structures and board-level accountability remained insufficient to contain the risks around its founder. The failure takes different forms across values-led brands. Everlane built its following on "radical transparency" but disclosed only what supported the brand. When the company faced a union drive and internal culture allegations, the transparency did not extend there. Reformation built a sustainability-led identity while its internal culture contradicted it; in 2020, allegations from former employees prompted its founder to step down and the company to commit to new diversity governance structures.17 The failure modes were distinct; the structural condition was the same: a founder whose authority defined both the ethical positioning and the limits of accountability around it.

In March 2024, the UK Competition and Markets Authority secured formal undertakings from ASOS, Boohoo and George at Asda requiring environmental claims to be accurate, clear and specific.18 Wage data and factory conditions are verifiable through reporting and third-party audits. Governance accountability and campaign ethics require a different set of questions: how complaints are handled, whether accountability mechanisms exist independently of the founder, and how people in campaigns are protected before and after they appear.

The relevant test for any authenticity-led campaign, as the ASA's 2009 and 2012 rulings against American Apparel established in practice, is whether the people in it held meaningful power over how they were represented: the ability to refuse, to set conditions on their appearance, and to exit without professional consequence. American Apparel's advertising record shows how "real people" branding can function as a legitimising strategy rather than a protective one. In 2009, the UK Advertising Standards Authority banned a campaign that the brand defended on the grounds that its models were "real girls," often employees or friends of the company, unretouched, doing their own hair and makeup. The ASA found the images could be seen to sexualise a model who appeared to be a child.19 In 2012, a second campaign was banned for what the ASA described as a "voyeuristic quality" and the inappropriate sexualisation of a model who appeared to be a child.20 In both cases, the authenticity frame was the brand's defence of content that a regulator found harmful. Appearing in a campaign is not the same as having power within it.

Why this is a DEI and company culture case

Visibility is not inclusion

Christine Montard

Jun 2026

PRINTABLE VERSION HERE

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the largest in the tournament's history: 104 matches across 16 cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada (40 matches more than the last edition), running from 11 June to 19 July, with an estimated six billion people — roughly three-quarters of the planet — expected to engage with it. For scale, the Paris 2024 Olympics drew around five billion viewers. The magnitude of the audience makes headlines, but the actual impact comes elsewhere: audiences have only a modest national effect, with the main beneficiaries being host cities through tourism, services, and consumption. As a result, the most interesting story may not happen on the pitch but in retail, especially in department stores that are seizing the moment as both a business opportunity and a chance to become cultural destinations. Here's how the biggest names in retail are playing the game.

The economics: large in aggregate, modest in practice

A vast audience, a small footprint

The macroeconomic case for the World Cup is surprisingly thin. The U.S. is projected to gain approximately $17 billion in incremental GDP — less than 0.1% of annual output. Canada's impact is similarly marginal at around 0.1% of GDP. Mexico is the relative winner: with 13 matches generating an estimated $3 billion in economic benefit, the impact represents between 0.2% and 0.5% of GDP, a meaningful uplift by comparison. Mexico is also expected to benefit from tourism, as tightened U.S. immigration controls may dampen international arrivals to the largest host nation. Around 5 million visitors are anticipated in Mexico, generating tourism revenues exceeding $1 billion.

The real commercial action, however, is not at the national level. It is highly localised and concentrated in host cities and in the strategies of brands and retailers willing to invest in the moment.

The sportswear equation

Adidas, Nike and Puma collectively kit out more than 75% of the 48 participating nations. Adidas leads with 14 national teams, followed by Nike with 12 and Puma with 11. With North America accounting for over 40% of Nike's annual revenues, the brand enters this tournament with a structural home advantage and estimates the tournament could generate $1.3 billion in incremental revenue. Adidas projects a comparable $1.2 billion uplift. Retailers stocking Nike products have committed to offering 40% more football merchandise by volume than during Qatar 2022, when an estimated 14.4 million shirts were sold. Projections for 2026 range from 18 to 23 million units, with the three major brands expected to capture 80% of that market.

With the demand for football products largely pre-allocated to mono-brand stores and sportswear retailers, the strategic question for a department store is elsewhere: what to do with a sport they don't necessarily own? Also, what does the World Cup mean for footfall, dwell time, brand perception, and customer acquisition?

El Palacio de Hierro: the full playbook

The tension every premium retailer has to resolve

Football is mass, emotional and culturally democratic. A premium or luxury department store like El Palacio de Hierro is none of those things by default. The instinct to drape the building in tournament colours would lack credibility with customers accustomed to more elevated store communications.

El Palacio de Hierro articulated this tension clearly. With Mexico having hosted in 1970 and 1986 — both woven into national memory — the 2026 edition carries emotional weight. But the company understood it could not wrap itself in soccer colours and claim authenticity it does not have. Instead, El Palacio de Hierro positioned itself as the stage on which the World Cup experience is elevated. The campaign's central premise, "if the World Cup brings the world to Mexico, El Palacio de Hierro sets the stage", aims at reconciling premium and mass through emotion.

Three phases for an unprecedented campaign

The warm-up phase activates Noches Palacio, the store's flagship loyalty promotion. The mechanic (purchases earn coins, coins are redeemed for tiered prizes at the end of each promotional weekend) creates urgency and repeat visits. Crucially, as observed by El Palacio de Hierro in the first days, the promotion has proven to attract both loyal, affluent customers and new entrants, serving as a retention and acquisition tool simultaneously. Live music, performers, F&B programming and World Cup theming transform participating stores into destination experiences.

The pre-tournament phase shifts to experiential and pop-up activation. The standout is a branded pop-up that deliberately juxtaposes brands that do not typically coexist in luxury retail: Adidas, Hisense, Don Julio and Buchanan's. The logic is curation beyond product selling: assembling a premium watch-party environment in which the purchase of merchandise, the consumption of premium spirits, and the viewing of a World Cup match become a single, continuous experience.

The match phase is the most commercially intensive: special gastronomy programming aligned to which national teams are playing on a given day, watch parties in the store's restaurants, and interactive installations, including the Palacio Arcade, a soccer-themed entertainment zone designed to extend visit duration across entire families.

Beyond the in-store programme, two additional initiatives deserve particular attention.

The Yellow Pitch, a publicly accessible soccer pitch built directly in front of the Durango flagship in Mexico City, is the campaign's most provocative element. It requires no purchase and is open to everyone. It is designed to generate organic social content and street-level energy. For a luxury retailer, it is an act of deliberate democratisation: the tension between free public access and luxury equity should result in a new form of brand authority for El Palacio de Hierro.

The luxury city guide, distributed to premium hotels and airport arrival lounges in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara, functions simultaneously as a tourist service, a brand ambassador and a commercial acquisition tool. It reinforces El Palacio de Hierro’s position as a cultural authority, helping visitors to make the most of their visit.

From New York to Stuttgart: same tournament, different perspectives

Bloomingdale's: the lifestyle and menswear lever

Bloomingdale's approach to the World Cup is to connect several commercial objectives at once: menswear growth, Father's Day gifting, host-city relevance and fashion discovery.

The flagship activation, Game Day with Boss, occupies the 59th Street Carousel pop-up space from June 4 through August 24, a timeline that deliberately extends well beyond the tournament. The assortment of approximately 200 products spans fashion, accessories, beauty, wellness and lifestyle, anchored by around 70 Boss exclusives, including a performance collection developed for the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team. The addition of curated vintage jerseys connects World Cup culture to fashion nostalgia, elevating merchandise into collectable territory.

The format is being replicated across six additional locations near host-city markets (SoHo in NYC, Aventura in Florida, Century City in Los Angeles, Lenox Square in Atlanta and Bergen County in New Jersey), with the SoHo store receiving an expanded version featuring FIFA 1904, a heritage-focused football collection. Father's Day activations on June 13 add a commercial layer, blending food, beverages and wellness experiences with the World Cup framing.

Bloomingdale's experiment suggests that a World Cup activation does not require deep soccer credentials or sportswear-only activations, but rather the definition of its own version of the World Cup. For Bloomingdale's, the answer is a focus on male customers embedded in a lifestyle approach.

Macy's: the inclusive community play

Where Bloomingdale's focuses on lifestyle aspiration, Macy's has built its activation around inclusion and community access. World Soccer HQ is a multi-brand activation spanning Nike, Adidas and Puma, avoiding any single-sponsor dependency. The more distinctive element is the partnership with the U.S. Soccer Foundation, directing investment toward grassroots soccer access in underserved communities. This is not cause marketing in the traditional sense, but an attempt to build emotional legitimacy with a soccer audience that the brand does not yet own.

The activation extends nationwide with live entertainment, athlete appearances, and product customisation events. Macy's is using the World Cup to make a claim about its role in American cultural life, not simply to sell merchandise.

Nordstrom: the sponsor-led merchandiser

Nordstrom's partnership with Adidas takes a different stance, built around product discovery, localisation and a structured cadence of weekly activations across 35 stores. Every Thursday brings new gift-with-purchase offerings and sweepstakes; every other week, an Archive Zone spotlights a historically significant Adidas piece linked to that week's featured country. Weekend programming is aligned to whichever national teams are in focus, a country-by-country journey through the tournament that gives customers a reason to return week after week. The $75 qualifying purchase threshold for customisation events is worth noting.

What about Europe? Breuninger and Manor

Mexico and the United States are not the only countries to reclaim their share of the event. Breuninger's approach is more localised. The Stuttgart flagship has transformed its signature Eduard's Bar into a dedicated sports bar with Adidas for the duration of the tournament. This conversion builds on the store's identity as a destination for gastronomy and community, not just retail, as demonstrated by Breuninger’s annual Fashion x Food events, which bring gastronomy and fashion together. The Adidas partnership, which in 2024 already produced the redesign of the flagship facade for the soccer European Championship, is being extended with World Cup-themed activations across multiple locations: jersey customisation pop-ups, exclusive product drops, and competitions for signed merchandise.

Manor’s One Game, One Love campaign for the FIFA World Cup 2026 features official national team jerseys from Puma, Nike and Adidas, as well as exclusive fan merchandise, lifestyle apparel, and collectable items, to attract sports enthusiasts without losing fashion customers. Creative collaborations, such as the limited-edition Football Bags by Geneva-based designer Joana Bender, anchor the store locally while mixing exclusive products with street style. The campaign’s themed activations and limited-time collections are designed to drive footfall, customer engagement, and cross-category sales during the tournament.

For department stores, the FIFA World Cup 2026 is not about soccer or promotions but about their strategic self-knowledge. The retailers that will emerge strongest are not those with the deepest soccer credentials, but those who answer the question of who they are and what this moment means for them. From that perspective, the World Cup is not a retail strategy or a must-have, but an additional opportunity to show more than just a house of brands and to become a host and experience curator, while increasing repeat visits and dwell time. As such, the initiatives will amplify whatever a retailer already does well, and whatever remains unconvincing.

Credits: IADS (Christine Montard)

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