If Paris is indeed a fashion capital of the world, Parisian department stores are making it standard bearers. Visitors come from all over the world to discover what embodies all of French chic and Parisian life. Many, they are real institutions.

The most famous are those on Boulevard Haussmann, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette.

On Boulevard Haussmann, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette compete in splendor. Between their main stores and their branches, they invest the boulevard and its adjacent streets to deploy a city in the city, dedicated to shopping.

For Christmas and from November, it is the whole that lights up with grandiose decorations, the windows are animated with creations always renewed, for the happiness of children: do not miss the Haussmann fairyland!

They were both born around the same time, in the heyday of department stores, around 1880. The bourgeois class was emerging, with increasing purchasing power. Prices fell, and the industrial revolution democratized consumption.

The offer is becoming wider, and the interest of this new form of trade is then to concentrate everything, with larger stocks. Originally smaller, the shops have now grown into magnificent buildings typical of Haussmannian architecture.

The façade of Printemps has retained all of its Art Nouveau style, adorned with sculptures, gilding and mosaics. Inside the Printemps de la Mode, the main store with an elegant and refined style, you can admire the original dome.

It was the first of the department stores to be equipped with electric lighting: On the mezzanine is discovered, behind a window, the "electric factory". The Galeries Lafayette are decorated with neo-Byzantine stained glass, they are the second most visited monument in Paris, after the Eiffel Tower.