Den Gyldne Drøm (The Golden Dream) is a delightful advertisement by the Nordisk Film Kompagni for the Magasin du Nord, a Danish department store chain with origins in the 1860s as a simple draper’s shop until its move to the Hotel du Nord in Copenhagen, which they rebuilt in 1894 as a glamorous emporium. The emergence of department stores in the Western world in the early 19th century was accompanied by the arrival of mass fashion and beauty goods, prime elements in the revolution in shopping and mass consumption. This development was aimed especially at bourgeois women, transforming consumption into a social event and an opportunity for expressing individual identity in an increasingly fragmented modern world.
After attending a fashion show in the Magasin du Nord, a woman can’t stop thinking about a golden dress she saw and starts pestering her husband, but he refuses to discuss it. Later, when the husband falls asleep in the living room, he is haunted by a surrealist nightmare in which he is physically attacked with clothes hangers by the three female mannequins who model the delicate fashion items at the department store. When he awakes, he’s changed his mind about the dress, but luckily his wife has used his nap to secretly buy the precious garment. Thus, adorned in a golden dream, she fulfills her own dream all by herself.
Den Gyldne Drøm is a powerful story of the self-determined consumerism of the New Woman. The close intersection of several key topics regarding film, commercial industry, and gender are obvious: the early film industry as Traumfabrik (dream factory), the department store as semi-public space of pleasure and (female) consumption, designer fashion (e.g., Paul Poiret, whose designs seem to be the inspiration for the dresses here) as a vehicle of social status and luxury, as well as the notion of female desire. The simultaneous depiction of beautiful fashion and the spectacular female body as visual ornament in movement, typified in the three posing models, are linked to the notion of the gaze and thus share, with regard to content and style, some parallels with the contemporary popular genre of the fashion newsreel, where the female gaze received a new significance and a modern twist.  So the only question remains, what money did she use to satisfy her desire, hers or his?

Olivia Kristina Stutz