Dressing Room

The Store Fitting Room: Privacy, Mirrors and a Count at the Door

A store dressing room is a small, controlled space built around a single transaction: a shopper deciding whether a garment deserves to be bought. The room itself is a small enclosure with mirrors where one can try on clothing privately, and both features matter. The enclosure gives privacy, so a patron can undress and dress without an audience, and the mirrors give the information the visit exists for, a view of the garment on the body from more than one angle. The purpose of a dressing room is for patrons to ensure that articles of clothing fit properly, and look good on them, before committing to a purchase. Fit cannot be judged on a hanger: waistbands sit differently standing and sitting, hems fall differently in motion, and colors read differently against skin than against a rail, so the fitting room is where a garment either becomes a purchase or goes back.

Because clothing leaves the sales floor and disappears behind a closed door, the fitting room is also a security point, and its customs follow from that risk. Generally dressing rooms have security measures to prevent patrons from stealing clothes by wearing them out of the store. The most common method is to have each patron register the number of clothes that he or she is trying on with a clerk outside of the dressing room; that clerk will then check to ensure that the number of clothes being taken out matches the number taken in. Most dressing room clerks also offer to take and queue for restocking any clothing which the patron does not wish to purchase after trying it on, which keeps rejected garments moving back to the floor in an orderly flow. Outside the dressing room there are often chairs for spouses to wait, and there are typically mirrors outside as well for joint decisions, so the social part of shopping, a second opinion, happens in shared space while the changing itself stays private.

One Name, Three Kinds of Room

The same name covers two other kinds of room, and keeping them apart prevents confusion. In architectural parlance, and in the larger houses, a dressing room is a small room next to a bedroom, used by the occupants to give privacy during dressing and undressing. That domestic dressing room is a piece of household planning rather than retail equipment: clothes, dressing table and mirror are gathered into their own space so the bedroom itself stays a room for sleeping, and in grander houses the dressing room historically separated the routines of husband and wife or of a lady and her maid. It is the ancestor in name of the modern walk-in wardrobe room, and it shares with the store fitting room only its core idea, a private place set aside for the act of dressing.

In a theatre and a concert hall, dressing rooms are provided for the performers to assume their costumes and makeup. The theatre dressing room is a workplace backstage, equipped for transformation under time pressure, with mirrors lit for makeup, rails for costumes and room for dressers to work. Within it there is a hierarchy the vocabulary preserves: the star dressing room is used by the principal actor and/or actress, placed closest to the stage and fitted best, while the company shares larger rooms farther away. So one term, dressing room, names a retail fitting enclosure, a bedroom's private annex, and a performer's backstage base. What unites them is not their furniture or their users but their function: each is a bounded private space whose entire purpose is the changing of clothes, set apart from the public or shared space it serves.