"Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion" by Stella M. Barber

 No doubt, some of my regular readers will recognise the name "Myer" from my "Lost Department Stores of Australia" series.  That's because it's not only a store that is definitely not lost, but also because it took over (and rebranded) many of the independent stores I've been writing about.

Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion is a bid of a hybrid.  It is the history of a department store... and it is a history of twentieth century fashion.  To tell you the truth, it is fairly superficial on both topics.  The fashion history looks at the major trends in women's clothing decade-by-decade from 1900 to the early 21st century.  The department store history hits the high points of Myer's story in the same period, with particular emphasis on the selling of fashion.  Thus we learn that Myer had a "Model salon" specialising in haute couture during the 1950s and held fashion parades, without getting much information about either.  The same goes for the Myer Miss Teen Shop and the Myer woollen mills (to name just another couple of examples).

(To be fair, this is clearly meant to be a promotional publication, and the author has written much more detailed books about Myer and members of the Myer family!)

Where Myer: Celebrating 100 Years of Fashion excels, however (and why I bought it) is in the illustrations.  Myer not only has an extensive archive of its own, but has acquired the archives of all the stores it has taken over.  The editors of this book have happily dug into all of this material, reproducing pages from catalogues (not necessarily its own) advertisments, invitations and brochures, photographs of their stores and events, and pictures of models wearing the latest Myer fashions down through the decades.  It's a visual delight!

Myer: celebrating 100 years of fashion / by Stella M. Barber
Woolloomooloo, N.S.W. : Focus Publishing, 2008
ISBN: 9781921156403