John Lewis: How We Live Today – The Design Museum, London

At what point is it ok to call an exhibition out on being mainly an advertisement?  This is how I felt about this one room exhibition on the John Lewis brand of department stores, which I briefly visited while at the Design Museum recently.

The stated aims of the exhibitions are to mark 150 years since the opening of the first John Lewis shop on Oxford Street, to look at “…the retailer’s influence on the British shopping landscape… “, and to consider “…the design thinking behind some of the everyday items that shape our lives.”  Ambitious perhaps for one largish room, but an interesting concept.

I think that, if this were an exhibition within the store’s own space, I would have found it quite well put together and a good attempt at exploring its role in the retail experience and the availability of modern design alternatives.  In the Design Museum space, however, and as the work of one of its own curators, I found it superficial – a brief comparison of consumer options and how the department store model can offer aesthetic or functional choice, a look at the evolution of products over 150 years, and an acknowledgment of ‘design archetypes’, but without the space to go into any of these ideas in depth.

What might have been interesting would be a look at the progressive model of the company under the leadership of John Lewis’s son John Spedan Lewis, or how the modernist design of the Peter Jones branch in Sloane Square reflected the modern consumer experience.  I think the part I most enjoyed in the end was the 150 years of fabric design as reflected around the walls of the exhibition, particularly those by Lucienne Day.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the worst exhibition I’ve ever seen, but just a bit flat, and certainly not worth making a trip for.