How House of Fraser changed shopping in Scotland - and heralded the modern age

In autumn sunshine on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, a busking Houdini, embalmed in cling film, is attracting a lunchtime crowd outside the venerable entrance to the House of Fraser flagship store. Inside, beyond the graceful sweep of the store’s main staircase, another show is in progress as women passing through the beauty hall stop and tilt hopeful faces towards the brushstrokes of sales assistants with

enameled smiles.

Within these fragrant walls, customers embark on their own form of escapology, breaking free from one look to slip into another. After their brows have been shaped and tinted, cheekbones blushed and dusted, eyes highlighted and lips outlined and glossed, they move closer to the mirrors, ­studying every angle of the flattering outcome, like an artist’s model examining her portrait for the first time. Meanwhile, the busking Houdini in Glasgow’s most stylish shopping precinct has wriggled out of his crazy cladding and is passing round the hat. What these contrasting vignettes have in common is a certain theatricality: commerce as performance art. Even when Frasers began its drapery business, 160 years ago, its drama lay in selling dreams, its fine ribbons, silks and satins the very stuff of transformation and frivolity.

In those early days, the Victorian crinoline held sway. Now, in abbreviated form, it’s back again, holding its own on the rails as a pert and pretty micro-crini. But it’s not too fanciful to claim that one of the defining moments of the store’s history occurred in the swinging sixties when the hosiery department found itself in the vanguard of revolution. Suddenly, stocking tops received their marching orders as counters were cleared to herald the arrival of tights.

Anne Kelly, mother of television’s Lorraine Kelly, was one of Frasers’s “Saturday girls” at the time. From her home in East Kilbride, she recalls “the wonderful, liberated feeling of being able to ditch suspender belts which were pure murder to wear”. All day in Frasers there were queues for the two best-selling shades: American Tan, which accentuated the leggy look, and American Cream Soda, its pearly lustre the groomed choice of Jackie Kennedy. “They cost about 10 shillings a pair which was really expensive in those days, but we could hardly keep up with the demand.”

Staff wore their own clothes when Kelly worked her Saturday shifts, and her outfit of choice was a simple shift by Quant in mauve with a pink Peter Pan collar, buttons and cuffs. “I also had a dark hairpiece with a velvet band, which was very chic at the time because if we didn’t want to look like Twiggy, we wanted to look like Sandi Shaw.” There was also a certain cash register protocol. “You’d ask a customer: ‘Cash or charge, madam?’ And if, on rare occasions, someone handed you a five pound note, you called for assistant to witness you putting the note into a hidden bit of the till and handing back any change.”

A department store’s purpose, says Elaine Webster, visual merchandising manager at Frasers, is to create an exciting environment for a wide band of customers who want style and quality under one roof. But the trick is also to make each shopper feel important, and nowhere is attentiveness more evident than in the changing rooms for exclusive modes. Within these tiny, mirrored cabins the personal shopping adviser becomes, by prior appointment, both diplomat and therapist as madam confides the difficulties of a dropped waist, a flat chest, or indeed, the triumphs of a convivial bosom.

“Listening to the customer is an essential part of the service” says Webster. “In the beauty hall, women may go for a pampering session but they will also be schooled in skin care and the new colours of the season.” And in the race for exclusivity, Frasers, whose 62 stores include Jenners in Edinburgh, has added “edge” to in-store brands such as Linea and Episode, and brought in the élan of New York label Kenneth Cole, while strongly promoting glamorous favourites such as Amanda Wakeley in womenswear, and, in menswear, Paul Smith and Ralph Lauren. The other week, it added the further temptation of a sushi bar to the ground floor.

Such strategies are paying off. Last month House of Fraser’s stores bucked the general trend, posting retail earnings of £10.7million for the 26 weeks to July 25, up from £9.2million in the previous year. It also noted that, despite the ongoing effects of the recession elsewhere, sales were beginning to rise.

Today, on entering Frasers, both the loyal customer and the browser still find themselves in seductive territory. From ground floor up, everything about the ambience is designed to evoke a spirit of luxury: the scents of tuber-rose and bergamot wafting around the perfume counters; the rustle of tissue in those preening alcoves of designer wear; and that paradise of gorgeous handbags stretching as far as the eye can see, a litany of labels filled with the likes of Mulberry, Gucci, Hermes, YSL and racy Lulu Guinness.

And on the same floor, behold a gallery of sensational shoes, each one arranged as if it were a piece of sculpture. Is there any other city which chooses its footwear so readily for swagger? Perched on these heels, Glasgow rises to its own make-believe for taking on the world.

To return to the beginning, by the mid 1840s, when a young Queen Victoria had reigned for almost a decade, Glasgow’s industrial prosperity encouraged airs and graces, an essential incentive for drapers with ambition. London was already establishing emporia with the grandeur of palaces, and style-conscious towns such as Bath were following suit. Now the trend was travelling north. In 1849, one year after Victoria and Albert gave Scotland cachet by their discovery of Balmoral, two tradesmen, the very dab in upward mobility, decided to form a partnership and add some shopping chutzpah of their own.

Of the pair James Arthur, a menswear retailer in Paisley, was the more financially endowed but his people skills were nil. Hugh Fraser, on the other hand, was convivial and charming, a merchant prince in the making. But he came from modest stock, his parents running an inn and ferry house at Cardross. From them, Fraser learned the value of good customer relations, an attribute he cultivated when he began his own working life, selling cloth around the doors.

Premises were rented in the former mansion of Andrew Buchanan, the maltser-turned-tobacco merchant who was so successful that the best boulevard in the city bore his name. In 1849, the two new boys on the block put up their plaque and in the Glasgow Herald of October 17, “Arthur & Fraser” announced the opening of “a new silk mercery, linen and woollen drapery establishment” at 8 Buchanan Street. Probably at Arthur’s insistence, the advertisement also explained the partners’ trading policy: “In soliciting a share of public patronage, Arthur & Fraser respectfully intimate that they intend conducting their business exclusively on cash principles. In thus avoiding the expense and risk connected with a credit-giving establishment, it will be in their power to adopt a scale of profits not attempted hitherto in Buchanan Street.”

By mutual consent, the Arthur & Fraser partnership was dissolved in 1865, Arthur returning to his Paisley shop and Fraser ­entering into an alliance with Alexander McLaren with a new department dedicated to furnishing hotels and private houses as well as the great liners built on the Clyde. As business prospered, Frasers eventually took over the magnificent building created in 1885 by another much loved store, Wylie & Lochhead, its elaborate interior a piece of drama in its own right: cupola and chandeliers, tiered galleries and elegant staircase all designed ­­to turn shopping into a memorable ­occasion.

A century later the high-street craze for ­Sixties-style boutiques panicked department stores into a clumsy period of Balkanisation, where the spaciousness which helped to make them special was carved up into ever-changing lots. Irene Auld was PR and marketing executive at Frasers until her retirement three years ago, and she recalls the head of the workshop, Bill Brown, walking through the store when a customer asked to be directed to the toy department. “Madam,” Brown replied, “if you stay where you are, it’ll probably pass by you in the next few minutes.”

Webster, who joined Frasers as an apprentice window dresser at the age of 17, remembers its air of paternalism with ­affection. “Just before Christmas, we’d be asked to go and decorate the directors’ villas for the festive season” she says. “A lovely job, because we’d be treated to sandwiches and lots of cakes, and the wives were always very appreciative.”

Auld likens Frasers to a village “where everyone knows, and cares about, everybody else”. She also cherishes those moments of Are You Being Served? hilarity when she would be away from her desk, discussing future marketing promotions, while colleagues would answer her phone with the words: “I’m sorry, Mrs Auld is unavailable. She’s on the floor with the general manager.”

But for all its starry attractions the department store begins each day by waking gently. Just before the doors open at 9am the staff, with make-up perfected, take up their counter positions. They stand and wait like players anticipating the next performance. And in that little prelude of stillness, Frasers becomes a beautiful stage set ready for the theatre of selling to begin.