Copies, Emulations and Reproductions and the Mele Department Store, a Step towards Ready-made Apparel

At the end of the 19th century, department stores become centres for the experimentation of the early attempts to produce standardised garments, while they also exploit new visual systems for the marketing of consumer goods. Inside them, it is possible to grasp the manifold aspects of the social, cultural and technical dynamics linked to the democratisation of fashion. In Naples, the best expression of the ‘consumer’ building is the Grandi Magazzini Mele (1889). In a modern city like Naples, the department store can be examined as the most striking manifestation of fashion as the locus of ‘imitation’. This concept has to be intended in a material sense, as the reproduction of low cost consumer goods on a large scale thanks to skilled workers, but also as the creation of ideal copies which allow the emulation process underpinning the spread of mass trends in fashion. The ensuing competitive mechanism drives the bourgeois to find in the ready-made gears a suitable answer to his need to feel adequately represented. This suit is based on a production scheme that involves a preparatory phase where some significant steps are delegated to the customer, who provides some indicative body measurements to obtain a satisfactory fit.