Forever 21’s demise reflects retail shift

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This article was published 04/10/2019 (2553 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Much like its clothing, Forever 21 didn’t age well. And now, the fast-fashion retailer is closing all 44 of its Canadian stores, including the grocery-store-sized location at Polo Park shopping centre.

The chain, which was founded in 1984, joins a growing list of cheap and trendy retailers that capitalized on pre-internet mall culture. Millennial and gen-Z shoppers are nostalgic for just about everything else from that era — except, it would seem, the mall.

Remember when the mall was great? The most recent season of Stranger Things, the hugely popular 1980s-set Netflix series, was both a love letter to mall culture and a cautionary tale about suburban sprawl. Starcourt Mall, the shiny new shopping complex in Hawkins, Ind., served as a new home base for the town’s kids. Bathed in Starcourt’s pastel neon glow, they worked minimum-wage jobs, went on Orange Julius-fuelled shopping sprees and, you know, battled demonic monsters from the Upside Down. (The town’s grown-ups, meanwhile, bemoaned the arrival of the mall and the shuttering of the town’s Main Street mom-and-pops.)

Setting the supernatural element of the show aside, Stranger Things captured how the mall was its own teenage world unto itself. For generations of young people, it was a safe meeting place.

You didn’t need to be legal drinking age, and you didn’t need a lot of money to hang out at the mall — just what you made babysitting the neighbour’s kid on Saturday night. You could visit your friends at their first jobs and see popular kids get taken down a peg by their dorky uniforms.

When I was a teen in the late ’90s and early 2000s, every other weekend was spent at Polo Park. We’d spritz ourselves with Gap Dream testers, buy satsuma body wash from the Body Shop and wobble around like baby giraffes in velvet platform sandals at Le Château. Maybe we’d buy a CD from HMV if we’d saved enough money. We were lured by the intermingling scents of food-court deep fryers and the department-store perfume counter, indulgent and expensive. Shopping, we learned, could be fun.

Now, I generally avoid the mall in the same way one avoids an active volcano. But every so often, I’m seduced by that Pretty Woman promise baked into the very act of shopping: a new wardrobe, a new you, a new life. The stuff of makeover montages that so often begin at the mall.

Times change, though. Just as group chats have replaced the mall as centralized hangouts for North American teenagers, retail has moved online. That shopping itch can be scratched with a click of “add to cart.” Scrolling and shopping aren’t dissimilar activities. It’s all browsing, searching, wanting, chasing something new. We don’t need to go to the mall because Instagram is a mall.

But social norms are shifting, too. The past few years have seen a spate of eye-opening books and documentaries exposing the true cost of that $9.99 Shopping Is My Cardio crop top made by an overworked woman being paid cents an hour an ocean away. Trend pieces on capsule wardrobes, uniform dressing and shopping diets proliferated. “Curated” became a buzzword. People started to think about where those trendy one-wear tops actually ended up after they KonMaried their closets.

Fast fashion became synonymous with unethical and unsustainable, with retailers frequently making the news for spurious business practices, plagiarized designs and choking landfills with polyblends.

Mall culture started looking less like a utopian teenage dream and more like a consumerist nightmare.

Of course, it always hurts when jobs are lost.

But maybe the death knell of Forever 21 means the world no longer wants fast fashion. Like mall culture, we’ve outgrown it.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti