Highlights of the Decade
By Staff -- Gifts & Decorative Accessories, 4/1/2007
In 1947, the gift industry was recovering from World War II — regaining mart space requisitioned by the Treasury Department, advertising playing cards that stood up to Japanese interment camps and shipments recovered from occupied Paris, reopening import relationships with Japan and watching Europe pull its exports together.
Nor was the toll of world events entirely over: In 1948, J.M. Ali Allison of Far Eastern Imports Inc. lost family members in Sikh/Muslim fighting in Kapurthala State, and called on Indians living elsewhere in the world to "bring moral suasion to bear on their brethren at home for a peaceful solution of the issues between Pakistan and Hindustan," in the pages of The Gift and Art Buyer.
Soon the focus shifted to returning G.I.s' new family homes, with Hearn's Department Store even opening replicas of New York's new Stuyvesant Town apartments on its furniture floors. The burgeoning growth of suburban shopping centers and the deterioration of downtowns walked hand-in-hand through the early '50s, with retailers eager to take advantage of the first while stemming the tide of the second.
New technologies were another preoccupation of the time, including one "future-that-wasn't," a metallic head that took orders through the window when the store was closed! The decade also saw a "showroom-on-wheels" trailer hit the road, as well as the first gift shop in the world to have a customer arrive by helicopter. And, of course, the most popular new technology of all: "Many additional thousands of homes will be facing that newest of problems — adjustment to a television set," reported the magazine.
Noteworthy moments included the National Stationery Show's launch in 1947, the first annual Gift and Art Buyer awards, 1952, and the Queen Mother's New York gift shopping trip in 1954.
