What Le Bon Marché is known for
The Left Bank’s cathedral of taste — the world’s first department store, 1852, now LVMH’s most curated address. Émile Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames was inspired by the store's story.
Founded in 1852 and transformed by Aristide Boucicaut, Le Bon Marché is generally credited as the world's first true department store — fixed prices, returns, browsing without obligation: the innovations that created modern retail, memorialized in Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames, which took the store as its model. Gustave Eiffel's firm contributed to the airy iron structure. Now the LVMH group's most refined store, it serves the Left Bank with a curation notably calmer than the Boulevard Haussmann giants: measured designer floors, a serious book and stationery department, and across the street La Grande Épicerie, one of Paris's great food halls. The escalator crossing under the skylights is the architectural moment. Visit for the atmosphere the tourist stores have lost — Parisians still actually shop here — and leave through La Grande Épicerie with provisions.
Cross to La Grande Épicerie even on a short visit; the food hall is the store's most Parisian half, and its house-label goods make superior edible souvenirs.
In the press
- Vogue 2015
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Refined Paris department store
Global
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Where next
- Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche — Paris
- Forte Forte — Paris
- Jiyugaoka Department Store — Tokyo
In the Journal
Hand-curated for ORBIS · no paid placement