this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Nostalgia

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nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia

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My Secret Love for the Glamorous, Technicolour, Transformative World of Department Stores | The Walrus (thewalrus.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/nostalgia@lemmy.ca
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I seek them out as one might a hash dealer or a chapel or a walk-in clinic

An excerpt:

The Bay—where I sat on Santa’s knee, was fitted for my first expensive bra by Mrs. V (an actual corsetiere), and eye-rolled my way through a summer job at a pop-up estate silver counter—was dead. The department store was dead. E-commerce and the big-box store reign supreme.

I am, however, a bloody-minded woman, and I have cleaved unto my secret love of department stores with all the tenacity of a sticker on the bottom of a remaindered soap dispenser at Winners. It began, around 1975, with outings to Eaton’s in downtown Vancouver. There, I would watch glamorous women in uniforms (suits with gold buttons or ludicrous white lab coats) cosmetically transform my mother into a Terminal City Bianca Jagger before she handed over her Chargex to be rammed through a small, fierce machine. There were milliners and shoe salons and hairdressers and (Oh God) toys. And there were cafes for the occasional special lunch; in the modular, faux-nautical splendour of the Marine Room, even a bowl of mushroom soup tasted extravagant.

The department store was, to my idealistic child brain, the way the world should be: a technicolour organism made up of co-operative parts. When you were in one, the chaos beyond faded into a Muzak-sweet nothingness. In June 1976, on a trip to London, my parents dragged me to Harrods to try on duffle coats. Beyond the store’s hallowed walls, the city was both wilting in a heat wave and writhing with tourists and locals. I may as well have been on a space station.

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