Forever 21 Was Just a Phase

Yahoo

18-03-2025

Forever 21 opened in my hometown when I was in middle school, when the opening of a new store at the mall was still a big deal. When the sign first went up, nobody knew what 'Forever 21' was. I remember thinking that it would be a store marketed to retirement-age women who felt young at heart—Forever 21! This was wrong, but not so far off: Do Won Chang, one of its founders, has said he chose the name because 21 is 'the most enviable age.' And it is, especially if you are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, or 20, which are the ages at which I bought most of my clothes there. I can still smell the polyester and hear the White Rabbits on the sound system.
The clothes were, in theory, inexpensive versions of the latest trends. In practice, they were usually inexpensive versions of recently passed trends, and sometimes they were items so odd that they seemed to have been imported from a different reality (crop top with suspenders; Cheetos bathing suit). But for a suburban teenager with a little bit of cash, the store still felt like a place of possibilities. Yes, Forever 21 was always a disaster: Its racks and racks of cheap merchandise were 'arranged' according to surrealist organizing principles that were impossible for the amateur to comprehend, and much of what was for sale was hideous. But I did not have taste—what I had was an after-school job in the mall food court that paid $7.25 an hour. I received paychecks every other week of about $150 that I could 'save for college,' or that I could spend on statement necklaces and bubble skirts.
[Read: Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?]
I think of that store fondly, and now it is closing. All of the Forever 21 stores remaining in the U.S. are expected to close as well. The company filed for bankruptcy this week—not for the first time, although this one is truly the end. 'We have been unable to find a sustainable path forward, given competition from foreign fast fashion companies,' Brad Sell, the company's CFO, said in a statement. He also mentioned 'rising costs, economic challenges impacting our core customers, and evolving consumer trends.'
Forever 21 grew rapidly in the 2010s, opening hundreds of stores—many of them in enormous spaces—and reporting billions in annual sales. For a solid decade, Forever 21 was a common feature of the American landscape. At that time, finding a Forever 21 seemed as easy as finding a library. The highlighter-yellow shopping bags were an indelible symbol of the accessibly cool Millennial lifestyle. Some Forever 21 locations even became true destinations. For myself and many of my classmates, the four-story Forever 21 in Times Square was the most exciting part of our senior-class trip to New York City—not joking!
Now the 20- and 30-somethings who learned to shop by wading through their local Forever 21 locations are mourning the brand and marking the 'end of an era.' You can find many 'RIP' comment threads right now in regional Reddit forums, where people often discuss their local malls. Most are lighthearted ('I guess they turned 22'). Nobody is in a state of shock, because there is obviously not a place in the culture anymore for something like Forever 21.
Today's young people still like in-person shopping, but they like to do it in secondhand and thrift shops or, at the other end of the spectrum, in gorgeous stores that make shopping feel like an Instagrammable excursion. They still like fast fashion too, but they like it faster than Forever 21 does it—online-only brands such as Shein, Fashion Nova, and ASOS can turn out hundreds or even thousands of new styles every week and sell them at unbelievably low prices.
[Read: The mysterious, meteoric rise of Shein]
In the past several years, cultural awareness has grown about the reality of the fast-fashion business model, which relies on paying factory workers shockingly low wages and takes a multifaceted approach to furthering the ruination of the planet. (Barely used clothes pile up in landfills; synthetic fabrics shed microplastics into the water supply; the manufacturing of polyester drives greenhouse-gas emissions up and up.)
Today, young people shop fast fashion in spite of themselves. They know it's bad, but they're accustomed to convenience and limitless choice, so they do it anyway. Maybe the difference is that now they can buy it from their phone, which is less uncomfortable than looking at it all piled up around them in one physical place. When Forever 21 declared bankruptcy for the first time, six years ago, a retail consultant suggested something like this to The New York Times. 'The emotional and physical aesthetic of it is not something that the current shopper wants as much,' WSL Strategic Retail's Wendy Liebmann told the paper. You can't go home again, and it can't be 2010 again.
As an adult, I now realize that the items I impulse-bought at Forever 21 on my 15-minute breaks were (1) contributing to human misery and (2) not worth even the paltry sums I paid for them. I almost never got substantial use out of anything, either because the items were poorly made and fell apart or because I quickly realized that they were ugly and unflattering. The only purchase I remember clearly is a dress I picked out to wear as a bridesmaid in a high-school friend's wedding, for which I paid $12. I thought it was genuinely chic; I couldn't believe my luck, and I was impressed with myself for pulling a needle from a galaxy-size hayfield.
But I wore it only once, and I suppose it is in a landfill now. There, it will last a long, long time. Not forever, but much longer than Forever 21 did.
Article originally published at The Atlantic