Marshall Field's big idea was to "give the lady what she wants", which was - the department store. Everything from corsets to creams via domestic equipment all under one roof. Field gave them window shopping, too, plate-glassloads of it; saucy French ladies chose to call it leche vitrine, literally, "licking the display cases". Commodity fetishism or what?
From the 1860s, Field brought about a revolution in American social manners. His shops provided ladies with dining rooms for lunching outside the home, and somewhere warm and colourful to stroll other than the public park or city art gallery. More than that, they gave women a place to work, even pursue a career. Field became extremely rich doing his particular bit for the liberation of American women.
Field also changed the face of shopping, socially and architecturally. The magnificent store he built in Chicago was enlarged between 1892 and 1914 and remains one of the world's biggest, most ambitious and best-looking shops. It was declared a national monument in 1978. Here, grandiloquent beaux-arts classicism rubs shoulders with rainbow-hued Tiffany glass, palatial Florentine Renaissance decor and the latest in 19th-century steel-framed construction technology.
Field's architect was Daniel Burnham, who liked to say "make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's bloods". Nor women's. Burnham knew all about making big plans. He had been the chief of construction for the Chicago World Fair of 1893, a phantasmagoric display of inventions, gizmos and goodies from around the globe. This was one of the great exhibitions that followed in the wake of the original held in Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, a year before Field entered the world of retail. In a sense, Crystal Palace was the first - if temporary, and accidental - department store. Millions of people came to gawp at the all-but-countless goods on show. Many were for sale. The Great Exhibition was a chance to shop on an unprecedented scale.
The Big Shop idea went transatlantic before returning to England in the monumental guise of Gordon Selfridge's store on London's Oxford Street. Work on this New Roman palace - steel-framed beaux-arts classicism dressed in stone, granite, marble and bronze - began in 1907; perhaps unsurprisingly, the architect brought in to advise on the design was Daniel Burnham. From then on, the department store set the pace for European city shopping until the second world war.
Some of Europe's most radical architects, notably Germany's Erich Mendelsohn, took up the challenge: Mendelsohn's expressionist stores for Shocken in Stuttgart (1926-27) and Chemnitz (1928-30) were streamlined wonders that pushed architecture onwards. In the mid-1930s, the design of the Chemnitz store was translated by the British architects Slater and Moberly into swish, curtain-walled, evergreen Peter Jones, overlooking Sloane Square. The store was much admired, and aped.
This was the heyday of the department store. But at the end of the second world war, its urban allure was tarnished in Britain and the US by the exodus of the nuclear family from city centres. The flight to the suburbs was eventually matched by the rise of the subtopian shopping mall, that land-hogging temple to modern, car-based consumerism. Laid out on cathedral-like plans, these retail behemoths grew faster than the out-of-town monasteries of medieval Europe.
In Britain, Brent Cross shopping centre, a retail child of the 1970s, was followed in the 1980s by the even bigger Metro Centre in Gateshead. Both were dwarfed in scale and architectural ambition, however, by Bluewater, that 1990s shopping galaxy in north Kent. By now, shopping was a deep-pocketed hobby played out on an increasingly global scale. It was also a banal, sanitised experience. The shiny new shopping experience signalled a farewell to many old high-street shops and street markets; it was privatised, commodified and wilfully naff. Mall competed with mall to reduce architecture to a game of tarting up colossal, air-conditioned sheds - with some token art, perhaps. As Norman Foster put it, this was "lipstick on the face of the gorilla".
At the same time, city centres - well, London, initially - began to offer an alternative to the mall. Here, the 1980s witnessed a new wave of precious, shrine-like shops designed by couture architects for the knowingly sophisticated haute bourgeoisie. This was the era of exclusive, beautifully crafted, often minimalist shops, their white walls adorned with just a few imaginatively priced items of Japanese clothing. Here was the shop as zen temple. There was, and there remains, something deeply fetishistic about walking silently among the fashion world's latest creations in an atmosphere more reverent than that of a monastery.
The Zen retail masters were Claudio Silvestrin and John Pawson, who designed fashion shops that felt like a fusion of monastic church and modern theatre. In the 1990s, Pawson was commissioned to design a monastery for a silent order of Cistercian monks in the Czech Republic; intriguingly, the monks had found their architectural inspiration in Pawson's admittedly beautiful Calvin Klein store in New York. Perhaps shopping really was the new religion.
Not exactly. Come the late 1990s, the most fashionable shops were edging towards exclusive theatre rather than popular religion. Far removed from Marshall Field's notion of the democratisation of shopping, Prada, the Italian couturier, commissioned three architectural houses - Rem Koolhaas's Rotterdam-based OMA, Zurich's Herzog and de Meuron and Tokyo's SANAA - to "redefine the concept of shopping" on its behalf.
Koolhaas's New York Prada store opened in December 2001, on the same day as the vast new Toys 'R' Us on Times Square. Both were playpens: one for the wealthy pretending to be experiencing art while shopping for natty bags and fancy shoes; the other for kids of all ages. But only the Koolhaas store merges shopping with theatre, worship, fashion, architecture, design and art. It could easily be mistaken for an ultra-modern art gallery, a conceit calculated to appeal to many of its customers, for whom Prada clothes are on a par with painfully fashionable Donald Judd minimalist furniture.
Koolhaas's Prada is where you go for a sybaritic spell of cultured shopping; the mall, on the edge of town, is where you send the kids to learn the shopping habit. Like it or not, this is, it seems, what the punters want. Licking the display cases, from Marshall Field's to Bluewater via Prada.