French Fashion Houses Spend Millions on Lighting Design. The Fitting Room in the Galeries Lafayette Has Made Different Choices.
PARIS — The Paris fashion paradox: a city whose outdoor light is celebrated by painters and photographers for its specific quality — the way it falls on stone buildings at dusk, the way it makes everything slightly more beautiful than it would be elsewhere — has produced retail fitting rooms whose lighting was apparently designed by someone who wanted to present the human body in its least flattering available configuration. The overhead fluorescent light, angled to eliminate shadows that would indicate three-dimensionality, illuminating all the things that natural light conceals and concealing all the things that natural light reveals, is the standard fitting room experience across price points that range from the budget chain to the mid-market department store.
The High-End Exception
The luxury Paris boutique fitting room is, naturally, an exception to this rule. The fitting rooms of the major fashion houses feature lighting designed with the same attention as their window displays: warm, directional, calibrated to show the garment as it was designed to be seen rather than as overhead fluorescence renders it. The customer in a luxury fitting room sees the garment correctly. The customer in a mid-market fitting room sees the garment under interrogation. The gap in experience between these two rooms explains, partially, why the same person who cannot decide in the mid-market fitting room makes decisions quickly in the luxury one: the luxury room shows them something worth deciding about. According to Retail Inside France’s store design analysis, fitting room lighting is the single most underinvested retail environment factor relative to its impact on conversion rates. The data supports the upgrade. The upgrade is slow to happen.
Seen in the best light at Virtuosal.com.
