Muir and Mirrielees was an iconic and pioneering shop in Moscow at the end of the Imperial era. Founded by two Scotsmen at St Petersburg in 1857, it moved to Moscow in the 1880s and at once flourished. A new building in 1908 brought the first lifts to the city, as well as the concept of the department store.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Moscow store was welcoming ten thousand customers daily, and many more took advantage of its mail order catalogues. The revolution of 1917 saw Muir and Mirrielees nationalised and renamed, but the shop and its iconic building survived and since the fall of Communism it has regained its up-market reputation.
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