“Is it ever sad if fast fashion bites the dust?” Kim France, the founder of the groundbreaking Condé Nast Shopper Lucky and producer of the popular newsletter 'Girls of A Preside Age', said Tuesday and responded to the news that Forever 21 had applied for bankruptcy. The answer depends on how passionate a consumer is about both bricks and mortar and hunting.
Everyone who has ever formed a search party to stalk low jeans, crop tops with fringes, mesh flats or whatever happens to be trending that was exactly familiar with the chain, which followed fashion meticulously and has pronounced the latest iteration of his whims at rock bottom prices. At its peak, Forever 21 employed more than 43,000 people worldwide and brought more than $ 4 billion in annual turnover. As the name of the chain implied, the intended consumer base is young.
Back in the early Aughts, when Mrs. France first edited Lucky, she and her fashion -editors made weekly scouting trips to a Forever 21 outside post in Union Square in Manhattan to follow trending styles. Often enough, the styles on sales floors came before magazines had the chance to report on it. “You could compare it to Zara, although Zara is a bit more advanced,” said Mrs. France, referring to the Spanish mass market shop. “Or maybe Topshop.”
Forever 21 perhaps had the composite cool of competitors such as Topshop, the British High-Street Retailer, whose Kate Moss collection had so popular when it debuted in 2007 that Crowd Control was placed outside of London stores. (The same clothing is now being traded heavily online as vintage.) And it was never probably Instagram tags or art-oriented migratory videos.
In terms of pure volume, however, the retailer was without a rival.
Part of its attraction was a level of excitement impossible to replicate online – the adrenaline stroke that comes from searching stacks from Dross to find, if not exactly the right one, something close.
In the earliest days, Forever 21 also reached cult status among those such as Antoinette Isama, 32, who, while grew up in Silver Spring, MD., Made a Beelijn for the shopping center in Columbia to find “age -matching, good quality” clothing that met her budget and followed the fashion trends accurately. “The lighting, the music, the atmosphere followed what trending was at the time,” said Mrs. Isama, the founder of Fourtwo, a creative agency.
Trendiness is only a small part of Forever 21 Chain's Appeal for Safiyyah Burns, 19, a pre-laaw student at Loyola University New Orleans. “Especially since Covid, my friends don't really want to go in stores and deal with people or talk to cashiers,” she said. Although many of her age cohort can regard the whole of the shopping experience as “See a photo online and press buy”, Mrs. Burns remains a hold -out to do it in real life.
In part, what pulls her to bricks and Mortar shopping is the discouraging carelessness of so many things that are sold online. “Thin clothing and jewelry that turn green in three days,” she said. In a real store, on the other hand, buyers have the opportunity to assess the quality in advance and to bypass the inevitable journey to the post office with a returnom hulling (or, just as often, at the Goodwill -Bin).
Last weekend Mrs. Burns went shopping with her friend, Jake Tentler, 20, a nurse student at Loyola. “We are not so attached to our phones and so we actually want to talk to people and see what is in a store,” said Mrs. Burns. By searching the clean -up racks on Forever 21, the couple came across a particularly cool men's shirt with a Miller -Bierlogo on the front. They bought it for $ 11, against $ 15.
Tuesday's announcement may have a death knife for the company Klinkon-Wiens founders of husband and wife, the Korean American immigrants won and Jin Sook Chang, have made their Christian faith so well for the company that a reference to the Biblical Vers Johannes 3:16 on the bottom of every bright-yellow was not the first time that the company is on its last.
Forever 21 applied for a bankruptcy earlier in 2019, which closed more than 30 percent of its stores in the United States and then purchased from bankruptcy by Sparc Group, a joint venture between authentic brand group and Simon Property Group, a shopping center, a shopping center.
In 2023, SPARC signed an agreement with Shein, the Chinese e-commerce site that is known to lay, even forever 21 (and a cited in judicial documents because they were part of the reason for the current financial problems of Forever 21). Shein enables that agreement to operate stores-inside stores at Forever 21 Outlets. With this latest news, however, Forever 21 continues as if all his store locations will eventually close, a wind to the operations and an apparent capitulation for the irresistible power of digital trade.
