Riyadh looks set to loosen alcohol prohibitions for select foreign residents in the kingdom. The discreet change widens access to booze in the country’s only liquor store amid suggestions that additional outlets will soon be opened, including one rumoured for state-owned oil company Aramco’s compound in Dhahran. The tightly controlled current shop, which opened in early 2024 inside Riyadh’s Diplomatic Quarter, was initially limited to use by foreign non-Muslim diplomats. Now, Premium Residency holders – a small, affluent cohort of people who pay about €173,000 for long-term status – have been permitted entry. Inside, phones are banned and the rules are rigid. Though the move might seem like a conservative procedural alteration, it’s a major step in the country’s modern history.
 
Ask Saudis about it and you’ll hear a mix of pragmatism and caution. Many say that private drinking has long been a feature of social life for some residents – “There’s drink everywhere anyway,” as one put it – and authorities have rarely shown interest in enforcement behind closed doors. Yet the politics remain delicate. Several locals warned that allowing foreigners but not Saudis to drink alcohol risks provoking a backlash. “It could cause outrage,” one told Monocle. There’s also a sizeable group that is uneasy with the country’s rapid social shifts. Booze, more than cinemas or concerts, touches a nerve. And while some welcome a regulated system that might shrink the black market, others, including many Muslim expats, appreciate the dry environment and are worried that it will be eroded.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s other social reforms, such as allowing women to drive and the reopening of cinemas, have happened quickly and with fanfare. But alcohol is treated differently: not as a headline-grabber but as a pressure valve.
Officials know that visible liberalisation risks undermining conservative support, while moving too slowly could temper the very economic transformation that they are trying to engineer. Hence the incrementalism: a small shop here, a narrow rule change there, each calibrated to avoid sparking wider debate.
 
Still, insiders expect more movement. In Riyadh’s business circles, there’s a growing belief that a handful of hotels – particularly along the Red Sea, where nightly rates rival global luxury benchmarks – will secure alcohol licences in the next couple of years. The logic is commercial rather than ideological. If Saudi Arabia wants guests from Europe or East Asia to pay international prices, it will need to offer an international standard of hospitality. Architecture and turquoise lagoons might draw in travellers but beverages help to keep them at the table.
 
A similar calculation applies to Riyadh Air, the soon-to-launch national carrier that is currently intended to operate as a dry airline. Competing with Emirates, Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways, each renowned for polished service, without comparable onboard offerings will be challenging. If Saudi Arabia is loosening its rules on the ground, a modest shift in the skies seems conceivable.
 
So where will Riyadh be in five years? It won’t be a Saudi version of Dubai and certainly no Ibiza. But perhaps it’ll be a capital guided by conservative norms dotted with carefully controlled exceptions, such as a few licensed hotels, and have a slightly more flexible airline – small pockets of international-style hospitality kept deliberately discreet. Saudi Arabia’s approach is incremental and opaque by design. Change will come but only on the country’s own terms: quiet, measured and always with an eye on the kingdom’s social contract.
 
Inzamam Rashid is Monocle’s Gulf correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, also known as Vhils, is among 10 international artists chosen to showcase work for the fifth edition of Forever is Now, an open-air exhibition of monumental contemporary art staged on the Giza Plateau. In the shadow of ancient pyramids, Vhils brings his signature practice of layered storytelling to the desert with “Doors of Cairo”, a large-scale installation made specifically for the occasion. 

Running from 11 November to 6 December 2025, the annual show invites leading contemporary artists to create works in dialogue with the Unesco World Heritage site, encouraging the reinterpretation of endurance and legacy. For his piece, Vhils gathered 65 doors from various demolition and renovation sites in Cairo and beyond, tracing invisible links between civilisations past and present. Mounted and intricately carved, the doorways invite visitors to open new perspectives.

Vhils joined Monocle Radio’s ‘The Monocle Daily’ to discuss the stories, symbolism and logistics behind the installation.

The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full conversation on ‘The Monocle Daily’ from Monocle Radio.

Your work often excavates history from everyday surfaces. What made doors feel like the right portal into a conversation with the pyramids?
We began with doors that were collected around Cairo. Then I decided to include doors from around the world, to carve those histories into a collective installation. Cities are a construct that we all participate in, shaping them as we live within them. The pyramids are a monument to that collaboration: a distant memory of a civilisation that once existed. I wanted to create something that spoke to that legacy – a dialogue between ancient landmarks and contemporary structures. Doors carry so much meaning. They separate the private from the public, while also connecting them. This piece is a homage to how we build things together, even when we aren’t conscious of it.

To bring a project like this to life requires a lot of people. How big was the cast behind this production?
We began working on it more than a year ago. My studio has 25 people but we collaborated with many external partners along with a local team in Cairo. Many think of art installations as a solo endeavour but something of this scale involves quite a lot of logistics. In total, about 100 to 150 individuals contributed to bringing “Doors of Cairo” to life.

How was it installing a gallery experience in the desert?
It’s a very inhospitable place but at the same time it offers a serenity and peace that changes how you relate to art. In a city, artists rely on the surprise factor: your work catches someone off guard and sparks an instant connection. In the desert, visitors come with time to contemplate, to meditate. The landscape invites introspection. That’s why I wanted to create doors that hold different stories and depths, so that people can gradually engage with them.

How do you hope that people will react to your work?
Once an artwork is finished, it no longer belongs to the artist but to its audience. That’s the beauty of it. Everyone takes their own journey with the piece. What I hope is that the installation builds an inner connection – a reminder that we are all part of the same civilisation – and we can open doors to one another despite the challenges of today’s polarised world.

Listen to the full interview on ‘The Monocle Daily’ from Monocle Radio.

With the Christmas season in full swing, I’ve been visited by the ghost of interviewees past. After a lovely reunion with New York-based architect Elizabeth Diller in Turin a few weeks back, I was lucky enough to sit down again with Mexican academic and architect Tatiana Bilbao, who I first met in Mexico City, shortly after she’d finished giving a masterful lecture for the opening of this year’s Shaping The City conference in Venice, organised by the European Cultural Centre Italy. 

Chatting in an echoey room of the Palazzo Michiel, I asked Bilbao what made her repeatedly return to housing (she often focuses on social and community-based projects for the many rather than homes for the few). She immediately shot back that it wasn’t so much housing that interested her but people – and their right to dwell in dignity. She thinks we’re still getting it wrong. Her answer? “Resist” the status quo by continuing to push the boundaries of what a home could and should be.

We’re all sold a dream of home ownership. Ask any child around the world to draw a house and they’ll probably design a standard two-up, two-down with a triangular roof. For Bilbao that’s part of the problem: housing has got away from the core of what it should be – a place of sanctuary allowing us to thrive – and become a carbon-copy product. Designed to be what she calls “an engine that serves the industry”, we’re all told that we need the bed and the washing machine and the cooker, while many of us are sold identikit houses on numbered lots that feel more like boxes to contain us than places to improve our quality of life. 

When you delve deep into housing in Mexico, for example, you get more of an idea. Why does a community need to sleep in beds rather than hammocks if the latter provides natural ventilation and protection from the bites of nasties, Bilbao asks? Or why have an indoor kitchen with all the mod-cons when your culture’s tradition is to cook outside? But beyond the fact that housing can discriminate and reinforce gender roles, it’s also clear that it’s not sufficiently malleable for the way our lives wax and wane over the years. 

Bilbao has to strike a careful balance between agitating for change and working within a system – something that, if anything, only fuels her energy. The architect has been working on a new housing project (and “fighting many fights”) in San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City. Though it is still awaiting approval after several years, she has an owner who’s on board and determined to see it through. A housing block that rethinks shared spaces, including collective laundries and kitchens, it’s built on a modular design that allows tenants to add or subtract rooms depending on their evolving needs. “None of our lives are the same,” she told me. “None of us lives the same.” Isn’t it time our homes reflected that?

The seaplane terminal at Malé in the Maldives is a ballet of improbable logistics. Workers shuffle onto De Havilland Twin Otters bound for far-flung atolls. Honeymooners board aircraft branded with Soneva livery or Four Seasons tail markings. On final approach, these pontoon planes skim across the lagoon, bringing slightly sunburnt vacationers back to connect home on the likes of British Airways, Emirates and Qatar Airways. It’s an organised hum: part ferry dock, part regional airport, part sorting facility for an entire nation’s comings and goings.

This is Trans Maldivian Airways (TMA) – the world’s largest seaplane operator and the switchboard that turns a scattered archipelago into a functioning luxury ecosystem. Every year, its fleet ferries more than a million people across a nation that has no highways and precious few runways. Without TMA, the Maldives simply wouldn’t work. 

The Republic of Maldives consists of 1,192 islands spread over 90,000 square kilometres, most of which are too small for traditional airports. Running a seaplane network at this scale is maritime aviation: weather windows move hourly, lagoons deepen and shallow with tides, and resort demand expands and contracts.

Inthikab Ahmed, TMA’s head of ground operations, oversees what amounts to a daily exercise in controlled improvisation. His role includes playing the diplomat, hosting VIPs as they transfer but also acting as a savvy operator of the sea-spray ballet. His captains, clad in white shirts and knee-length shorts, are bush pilots crossed with mariners. Dispatch teams track cloud build-ups on instinct and radar. Maintenance schedules have to account for saltwater corrosion. Fuel logistics involve barges and reef-side depots. Everything must work because nothing can stop – the Maldives hosted a record two million tourists last year.

TMA is owned by a consortium led by the Carlyle Group, a US-based private equity firm, which is not the obvious option for what is effectively a national utility. But the private-equity logic does check out: control the essential infrastructure and you control the value chain. None of the villa glitz matters if guests can’t reach the island with reliability and a sense of occasion. 

High-end tourism thrives on removing friction and TMA has made one of the world’s most complicated geographies a navigable one. The genius stems from it turning necessary infrastructure into a higher-end experience. In a moment where expeditionary luxury is ascendant, the seaplane becomes more than transfer, it is part of the package and the appeal. The whir of the Pratt & Whitney engines, pilots’ bare feet on rudder pedals, climbing into a well-worn cabin or disembarking on a dock is what makes a holiday distinctly Maldivian. 

Naturally, sustainability advances are coming too, including hybrid propulsion, quieter engines and improved lagoon infrastructure. But the core magic resists change and is, in some ways, defiantly old school. TMA still feels genuinely analogue and, in an age where extra-leg flight logistics are becoming luxury’s final frontier, the Maldives’ most vivid experience might not be the overwater villa but the journey that gets you there.

Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based journalist and frequent Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Finland claiming the top spot in the Open Society Foundations’ annual Media Literacy Index has become an inevitability. The Nordic nation has placed first every year since 2017, when the list – which compares 41 countries based on things such as resistance to fake news and trust in media institutions – was launched. As with its stellar performances in other indexes (most famously the World Happiness Report), Finland’s media-literacy success is the subject of hand-wringing enquiry on the part of less happy and more distrustful countries. 

Some of the qualities that Finland possesses are impossible to replicate elsewhere. Its small, culturally homogeneous population fosters a great sense of unity, while the complex Finnish language (which even other Nordic peoples often struggle to understand) makes it difficult for foreign actors to spread false information. The country’s modern history – which has involved two wars against its former colonial master, Russia, followed by decades of Moscow-approved neutrality – has also engendered a deep appreciation of democracy, coupled with a heightened awareness of the threats posed to it. 

Still, there are other things that Finland does that can and should be imitated. Among these is education. Finns are taught media literacy almost as soon as they begin formal learning. These lessons come not through a media-studies course but a cross-curriculum effort that involves, for example, looking at the manipulation of statistics in mathematics, images in art, propaganda in history and language in Finnish.

The government has funded media-literacy programmes since the 1950s but the current model was only implemented in 2016, following elections in which there was an increase in Russian-led destabilisation efforts. Much of the country’s institutional bulwark against false information is also relatively new – including Faktabaari, a fact-checking NGO launched in 2014 that confirms or dispels stories that go viral. In 2023 it exposed false claims made in Arabic that social services were abducting children to sell them for profit across Nordic countries. 

The work of Faktabaari and similar organisations is helped by the fact that Finns maintain high or moderately high levels of trust in both their government (47 per cent, according to an OECD report, against an average of 39 per cent) and traditional media. The country has managed to avoid the obliteration of its regional press and its public broadcaster, Yle, reaches 94 per cent of Finns a week across TV, radio and online. This trust comes not only from those natural advantages mentioned above but as a self-fulfilling consequence of continuous and open debate. 

Then there’s the other half of the puzzle: literacy. Finland’s 5.5-million-strong population borrows close to 68 million books per year from its network of well-funded libraries. It is in these buildings, found in every decently sized settlement across the land, that older citizens are also taught classes geared towards things such as how to identify social-media bots and deepfakes. By contrast, about 40 public libraries in the UK are closing per year, while many of those that remain resemble the final scene of a particularly depressing Samuel Beckett play. 

Maybe the Finns’ greatest asset in the fight against false information is a philosophical one. At a time of growing polarisation, Finland is a society that knows what it stands for, which means that it doesn’t have to define itself by who or what it stands against. The promotion of the rule of law, gender equality and media literacy comes not just in the form of clear rhetoric (which is important) but also through well-funded, creative policies. 

In recent years, other countries have been trying to catch up. Germany has passed a law that fines social-media platforms that fail to remove hate speech, while France has sought to enforce greater content moderation during election campaigns. But the protean nature of fake news requires a level of urgency that is mostly absent elsewhere. The Anglophone world, for example, seems hopelessly adrift in a sea of mis- and disinformation. Much is made of Big Tech’s responsibility to police the misuse of its platforms but these companies have been neutered since Donald Trump’s re-election and, anyway, can such a powerful industry be trusted to properly regulate itself? While we all approach an uncertain future, the Finns, at least, have faith that their leaders and media companies will protect them and tell the truth. 

Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Monocle’s December/January issue is out now. With handy insights from the past year and a view of what’s to come in 2026, our bumper winter edition is packed with reports, ideas and long reads to savour. We head to Beirut to hear about how the city is bouncing back, step behind the curtains at the Royal Danish Ballet, pick up presents in our festive gift guides and sit down for culinary treats at a few of Paris’s best bistros. Plus: dip into our Japan survey, which has plenty of lessons in mobility and retail for the year ahead.

When asked a tricky question related to the US cost-of-living crisis by a reporter earlier this month, Donald Trump knew exactly who to turn to: his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who happily obliged with a full-throttle defence of the president’s economic record. So devoted did she seem to her boss’s cause that Trump’s visiting dignitary that day – Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán – quipped that he would like to hire her.

With Maga-blonde locks and an angelic face that can instantly transform into the glare of a loyal attack dog, Leavitt has become one of the most recognisable figures of Trump’s second administration. Utterly committed to the Make America Great Again cause, the 28-year-old is the youngest person in US history to step up to the White House press podium – and is arguably one of its best. She is quick-witted with a pitch-perfect grasp of her commander-in-chief’s messaging and appears to share his deep disdain for many of the reporters who she goes into daily battle with. 

White House press secretaries have always held a higher profile than their counterparts in other countries, which is unsurprising given the fact that their boss is often considered the most powerful person on the planet. But there is also something uniquely American about the performative nature of the job, with telegenic personalities relishing combative back-and-forths with an equally ego-heavy press corps. Try to name any other press secretary in the world and you might be able to conjure up Alastair Campbell – the spokesperson and communications chief of former British prime minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003 – who took a similarly combative approach. After which, you would likely be stumped. 

I was a member of the Brussels press corps for five years, and the EU had a host of spokespeople, all of whom were picked for their blandness and inability to create anything resembling news. In the many other countries where I have reported as a journalist, press secretaries exist as conduits for public statements, regurgitating sound bites while keeping the media at arm’s length from those in positions of power. Trump’s approach is different. He speaks to the press regularly, whether it be in the back of Air Force One for an informal chat with travelling media or fielding questions during Oval Office sit-downs. Leavitt’s job is not so much to act as a gatekeeper for the president but as an amplifier of his message. And for that, she is the perfect pick. 

A lifelong conservative, Leavitt began writing pro-Trump op-eds for a student newspaper in 2016 when she was 19, already laying into the “unjust” and “unfair” liberal media. As a university student pursuing a degree in communications and political science, she interned at Fox News and then at the White House, before joining Trump’s press team as a full-time staff member in 2019. After Trump lost the 2020 election, she unsuccessfully ran for US Congress – but her stardom in the Maga world continued to rise.

In January 2024, she was appointed as Trump’s campaign press secretary and landed the government’s top communications perch soon after his re-election. Now she has crafted an image as a highly effective operator – albeit a deeply divisive one. To conservatives, she is an icon: a whip-smart, beautiful Christian woman who is both a devoted wife and mother. (Leavitt gave birth to her first child in July 2024, three days after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. She often brings her child to work.) To liberals, she embodies the worst of the Trump regime, spouting propaganda and parroting the president’s many false claims while bad-mouthing journalists. And Trump? He appears smitten. During his first term, the president went through five press secretaries: the most famous of whom, Anthony Scaramucci, lasted only 10 days. But now, with a press secretary who seems to relish forging herself in his own image, it looks like he has found his perfect match. 

Like Louvre jewellery or DB Cooper, the US president provokes headlines even in his absence. His recent nonappearance at three seminal events has drawn particular attention: the funeral of former vice-president Dick Cheney, the Cop30 climate talks in Belém and the G20 summit in Johannesburg. The first two of these were to be expected but the latter was more surprising. The reason for this decision was ostensibly over allegations that South Africa is mistreating its white population. It’s a choice that he might yet come to regret.

The G20 summit has convened annually since 2008, a year in which Washington hosted during one of then-president George W Bush’s last major appearances in office. That summit, which I covered as a young reporter in the US capital, was a coming-out party for the economic bloc. Remarkably, it was held just weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the meeting of nations to resolve a global emergency felt palpably optimistic. It marked the height of multilateralism and a turning point in the financial crisis, as investors became convinced that governments would serve as a backstop to prevent the worst economic calamity.

This is how multilateralism is supposed to work. It might not always function in the good times but nations should at least be able to come together in the bad. What’s also special about 2008 is that Bush was brave enough to call on world leaders for support – helping the US get out of a mess of its own making. A sort of mea culpa from the world’s superpower. Would Trump ever do the same?

Now the world is hurtling towards another possible bubble: an inflationary one brought on in part by US tariffs, a financial one brought on by AI and a governmental one caused by too much debt. Andrew Ross Sorkin, the acclaimed financial columnist, CNBC host and author of Too Big To Fail, tells Monocle that he’s convinced another bubble is building. “How could it not?”, given our history, he asks. And it’s the last of the three causes that is most concerning to him. Government debt levels are unsustainable, with investors operating under the assumption that the debt of major nations such as the US and France will continue to be bought, merely because they have been in the past. What if confidence simply evaporates? It can happen quickly, as it did in 2008 and 1929, arguably the first financial crisis of a globalised economy and the subject of Sorkin’s latest book.

This brings us back to the G20: this economic bloc of the world’s most powerful nations was elevated to its current status for precisely these moments. In 2008, they co-ordinated after the fact but the whole point of the G20 was to prevent the next crisis. If and when the next bubble bursts, president Trump might yet have to call on the world’s largest economies to come to his rescue. But if he can’t do them the service of attending, will the nation’s other leaders heed that call when it comes?

Chris Cermak is Monocle’s senior news editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

It’s just before dawn on a chilly Friday when Monocle arrives to witness the secret delivery and installation of the window decorations. The precious cargo arrives in a huge truck at about 07.00. Nicolas Tillet, the project’s technical lead, is among the dozen workers unloading the pallets and positioning them in the department-store lobby. Tillet is clean shaven but with his grey hair, happy face and spectacles, he resembles an undercover Father Christmas in cargo pants. “Today’s the day!” he says as he greets us, electric drill in hand. Like a dance troupe that has rehearsed for months before its big premiere, Tillet and his coworkers skillfully manoeuvre their pallet jacks through the department store’s main entrance. Not unlike Santa’s elves, the dozen big men take tiny steps to glide past glass cases where customers will soon be browsing jewellery or fine leather gloves. Under Tillet’s exacting guidance, the technicians contort to slide into the narrow window spaces and wriggle the dressing in, all through concealed doors that the public will never see open. 

There are myriad festive gifts, fuzzy toys, shiny wrapping paper and boxes of artisanal chocolate that will be sprinkled around the shop’s 50 street-facing windows. The four most prominent frames will also play host to playful animations, from a makeshift chocolate factory to larger-than-life dentures being polished by toy rabbits – anything goes when it comes to imagining festive themes.

“It’s the busiest time of the year, so we have to get this right,” says Le Bon Marché’s creative director, Frédéric Bodenes, whose aim is to present a concept that will delight the shop’s youngest visitors and entice parents to embrace their inner child. Here on the ground floor, they will find 1,000 sq m dedicated to Christmas shopping, including a set designed to resemble an Alsatian Christmas market, complete with rows of chalets and cobblestoned streets.

This is the 29th year that the broad-shouldered creative director has worked on the windows. Across the decades he has experimented with numerous themes and protagonists, from lobsters to flamingos. “Once, I even did Christmas windows that were inspired by contemporary art – a total flop,” he says, wincing playfully. Since Le Bon Marché does not rent out its window space to brands (unlike most of its competitors around the world), Bodenes and his team can let their imaginations run wild.

“The windows have to be magical and joyful but also a little transgressive to get the parents into that playful space of Christmas cheer,” adds Bodenes. The windows become an attraction in and of themselves, he says with a sense of pride. “Each year, the unveiling draws a crowd – people even travel from outside of Paris to see them.”  

Balancing the need to show something fresh while respecting the sacrosanct boundaries of Nöel is a delicate mission. It’s why the planning phase begins months in advance, in a secret workshop outside Paris. Here, Bodenes and his crew present initial sketches and mock-ups to their teams, kicking off a flurry of discussions around the technical feasibility of each concept. Tillet, who is a specialist in electronics and mechanisation, is the first to be given the brief in early summer. Technicians and lighting designers then follow suit and the creative back-and-forth begins to make what seems technically impossible possible.

Bodenes describes Tillet as the shop’s very own “Gyro Gearloose,” a reference to the infinitely resourceful inventor from the DuckTales comic series, ubiquitous in France. “The first time we worked together I asked him to make me a dancing Christmas tree,” he says, while attempting a ballet pirouette. “He pulled it off, so naturally it was the start of a long partnership.” 

For this year’s storyline, the choice of protagonists comes as a surprise: a group of soft, toy rabbits. The idea came up during a visit to the Nuremberg International Toy Fair. “I saw this big mural of bunnies in all different colours and I immediately fell for them,” says Bodenes. “We had already decided on a traditional Christmas market theme for this year and I thought that they’d be perfect for the window show.” 

The team’s ambition goes well beyond token animation. There is lighting, music and choreography involved, making each window a standalone performance that plays in a loop for onlookers on Rue de Sèvres. “It has to be a real spectacle. The team spends hours mechanising and wiring each toy,” adds Bodenes while Tillet, who leads the mechanisation of the windows, is carefully undoing the seams, removing the stuffing and adding articulated frames and wires to the inside of each toy.

Making it all worthwhile 
Every team member is well aware that this is a high-stakes project – Le Bon Marché’s well-heeled customers feel strongly about Christmas. “One year, we installed the Christmas tree on the earlier side and many customers complained vociferously that it was inappropriate to put it up so early,” says Pierre Dromson, Le Bon Marché’s communications director. That, of course, goes for the windows as well: lifelong regulars feel a sense of ownership over the shop and let their displeasure be known if they feel that the window design misses the mark. 

The pressure is also on because the holiday season makes up a disproportionate number of annual sales for the retailer: the months of November and December alone are responsible for up to a quarter of annual sales. During that period, close to 1.5 million customers walk through the doors. To cope with the surge in foot traffic, executives from every department sign up for shop-floor shifts to assist overwhelmed sales associates or to man the gift-wrapping station – it’s all hands on deck for the most wonderful, lucrative time of the year. “One year I made the mistake of wearing a Christmas sweater on my gift-wrapping shift,” says Dromson. “It got way too hot. You won’t catch me gift wrapping in a cable knit again.”

It might come as a surprise that for a department store known for its fashion and beauty offering, Le Bon Marché’s festive windows deliberately omit traditional luxury goods. Instead, both the street-facing windows and the vast Christmas market focus on the art of gifting: clever knickknacks and trinkets, artisanal chocolates, knitted accessories and even carrot juice are merchandised throughout the space, alongside a selection of own-label products. “We offer gift ideas in dedicated spaces throughout the year, with a natural high point at Christmas time, when there is a strong emphasis on customisation,” says Elodie Abrial, the company’s commercial director. 

By looking beyond its core offer of designer handbags and high-end ready-to-wear items, Le Bon Marché is differentiating itself in an age of online shopping and stiff price competition. But it’s not so much a case of rethinking its role as a department store, than leaning into its long history of hosting cultural happenings. These date as far back as the 19th century, when the shop would host reading salons to entertain men while their female companions had dresses fitted. Since then, they have evolved into a rich, year-round agenda of art installations, performing arts happenings and shopping events featuring exclusive collaborations with designers and artists. 

The holiday season is the most extravagant manifestation of this retail strategy. “We go all out to put on a show that takes over the entire store,” adds Françoise Dilasser, Le Bon Marché’s lead scenographer. As the sun comes up, Tillet and his team continue their work. Several crew members glance at their wristwatches between tasks: every trace of the delivery must be gone by the time Le Bon Marché opens at 10.00.

Inside, the Christmas market is lit up, Le Bon Marché’s instantly recognisable escalators are clad in special, chalet-like decorations. The shop’s four Christmas trees, covered in hundreds of ornaments, stretch up towards the Gustave Eiffel-designed roof. Soon, crowds of passersby will flock to Rue de Sèvres to take in all of the team’s hard work and perhaps drop in to pick up a gift or two.

“It’s the most complex exercise of the year,” says Bodenes. “But when you ride the escalator, you hear customers laughing and you can tell that you’ve put them in the holiday mood – it makes it all worth it.”

I touched down in Toronto this week to meet some clients, scope out some potential business, do a little retail tour, say hello to my new colleague, Sally, at our College Street outpost and watch Prime Minister Mark Carney squeak his budget through parliament. On Wednesday, over drinks at a heaving Ritz-Carlton, I also met with a gentleman hailing from Winnipeg – the city of my birth. I no longer have much connection to the city, so it was like meeting a centuries-ago trader from the Hudson’s Bay Company (more on this in a moment) after his return from years trapping and trading in the Canadian wilderness. 

I wanted to know everything about the city and how it was developing. Had they managed to sort out the Downtown core? Where were the interesting pockets for better dining and shopping? What was the best hotel in the city? And where did he see opportunities? While the gentleman was damning in his assessment of Winnipeg’s Downtown, he was nevertheless hopeful that new initiatives and a group of passionate, patriotic locals were going to turn things around. As the conversation carried on and the hotel bar filled with more Torontonians in search of very early Christmas cheer, it turned out that I, too, was being recruited to be part of Winnipeg’s turnaround. 

As he discussed new developments on the horizon and the success of the city’s arena, my mind drifted to those early years in Winnipeg, when the city boasted a functioning and vibrant Downtown, three department stores on Portage Avenue and not a single vacant storefront along its main shopping strip. The Winnipeg of my childhood was a gateway to western Canada, a transit hub for grain and minerals bound for distant shores via Thunder Bay and even had its own ballet with a royal appointment. On Saturdays, I would go Downtown with my parents to visit the fashion and furniture floors of Eaton’s and The Bay (the retail brand of the Hudson’s Bay Company for several decades), plus a spin through Holt Renfrew for fancier gear. 

At this time of year, department store windows were filled with elaborate Christmas displays and I would jostle with other children to catch a glimpse of what Eaton’s visual merchandising team had created for passing traffic. Inside, I would make my way to the toy department and, for a couple of years, pay a visit to Santa. Eaton’s always had the best Christmas catalogue and I would flip back and forth across the pages looking at new trucks, tanks, planes, Playmobil police sets and scale-model collections of naval ships and armoured vehicles. Down the street, The Bay was housed in a more impressive building and was every bit what one would expect from a big-city department store in the early 1970s. There was a well staffed information desk, a buzzy cosmetics and fragrance hall and across its multiple floors The Bay could look after pretty much all household needs – from fur storage and full dining sets to the latest looks from New York and London. Paris, in most stores, was a bit of a stretch. 

Earlier this year the Hudson’s Bay Company went bankrupt after more than 350 years of business. Like so many North American department stores it shifted strategies on multiple occasions, went through endless management changes, ventured into markets where it didn’t belong and drifted away from its core of being a solid retailer for Canada’s middle classes. Today, Canada’s downtowns and malls are marked by scores of Hudson’s Bay shops that are permanently shuttered and the nation is poorer for it both economically and culturally. 

This week, Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House put some of the store’s art collection on the block, including fine pieces of Canada’s history that traded hands for quite reasonable prices. I grew up in a Canada that had about 10 national and regional department stores (Woodward’s, Ogilvy’s, Simpsons and more). Today there are two – Holt Renfrew and Simons. I walked past an empty Hudson’s Bay store at Yorkdale Mall (one of the most successful shopping centres in North America) and had to wonder whether, in the right hands, it could have turned itself around and made a case not just for the relevance of department stores in today’s retail landscape but for a thoroughly more pleasant and modern way to consume – and not only during the run-up to Christmas.

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