Reading Fashion in the Corporate Archive: The Communication, Promotion and Collection of Dress at Eaton’s

The T. Eaton Co. (Eaton’s) department store operated in Canada between 1869 and 1999. A leading retailer for much of the twentieth century, it played a crucial role in the translation and dissemination of styles from abroad. This project investigates Canada’s early- to mid-twentieth-century fashion history using a selection of objects and media from the Eaton’s corporate archive, now held at the Archives of Ontario and the City of Toronto Museum Services. Through an interdisciplinary examination of these artifacts, this dissertation positions the corporate archive as a fashion collection with its own historical value: one that reveals the multiple processes of documentation, promotion, and interpretation that are central to fashion production.

Based on a material analysis of garments and accessories, and a close reading of fashion documents and images produced and assembled by Eaton’s, it highlights various intersections of fashion, commerce, and communication within the department store. These corporate artifacts offer concrete evidence of how a prominent Canadian retailer shaped consumption in the country and attempted to define itself as a fashion authority and resource.

The garments and accessories collected by Eaton’s—which range from the high-end to the ordinary—contain traces of their often-anonymous former owners and point to everyday forms of fashion consumption that have not been the subject of detailed academic study. A hybrid journal and catalogue published by the company in the 1920s and 30s borrowed the language of middlebrow fashion magazines to sell high-end European designs and their more affordable adaptations, while also deliberately positioning Eaton’s as a cosmopolitan destination in Toronto. Various office files, reports, and clippings illustrate how fashion was promoted and defined by the store, a process that involved multiple behind-the-scenes agents both within and outside the company. Fashion films produced by Eaton’s in the 1950s and 60s employed a visual style that combined the languages of high fashion photography and the department store display window, using specific selling narratives to train its staff and appeal to middle-class female consumers. Studied together, these archival fragments offer a unique perspective on historical fashion production and consumption in a Canadian context—located between the material and the discursive, the aspirational and the everyday.