China at Bloomingdale’s and the Met

This article forms the first chapter of Debora Silverman’s Selling Culture. In her introduction, Silverman writes that she wishes to depict a broad “movement of aristocratic invocation in 1980s American culture, whose participants combined representatives from the worlds of the museum, the department store, fashion design, and the media.” Such cultural projects, she continues, “are tied to the big business of illusion-making and are perfectly suited to the politics of theater practiced in the White House.” We regret that we can here offer only one chapter of this fascinating book.—Eds.

In September 1980 Bloomingdale’s announced it had “unleashed the largest merchandising venture ever in the history of the store” by transporting the riches of China to New York. Advertisements declared that now consumers could travel to China without a passport. Embark on the journey to the East Side, urged the ads in the New York Times; in Bloomingdale’s one can experience the “sights, sounds, smells and scents of China.” The entire premises of the Lexington Avenue store were transformed into a vision of an opulent, hieratic China, land of em...