An Ode to the 2010s Mall
Will the kids ever know the joys of eating Auntie Anne's in a Wet Seal?
It’s 2011, you’ve just logged on to AIM and changed your status from “dinner brb:)” and you see that your crush and your BFF are online. You frantically message said BFF to update them, and plan out an elaborate ice breaker for the crush: “hii”. But this story is not about the crush. So you go back and forth with your friend for a while, and eventually decide that you’ll both ask your moms if you can meet at the mall at 11 on Saturday. It is going to be the event of the week. You’ll hit the trifecta: Abercrombie, Charlotte Russe, and Forever21. Wet Seal and PacSun if you have time. After lots and lots of bargaining, your mom finally agrees that she’ll drop you off at your friends house on Saturday morning for a ride, and will be back at the mall by 4 to pick you both up. This is going to be awesome. Friday night you plan out your best mall outfit: probably a variation of the skinniest, lowest rise jeans you can find, Converse or Uggs, depending on the season, and two, maybe even three, skin tight layered tank tops. Bonus points if at least one of them has the Abercrombie moose featured. And for warmth, you ask? One of your thirteen (yes, I counted.) Juicy Couture velour zip ups. You count out $200 from the envelope in your drawer. That was 20 hours of hard earned babysitting money. And it’s going to be put to work.
Now, back to today. I honestly don’t remember how I saw the clip, but the oh-so-debated show ‘Ginny & Georgia’, while questionable in its acting and script writing, is pretty accurate in terms of its pop culture references. So when I saw a clip of Ginny and her friend ask, “What the heck is Hot Topic?” I gasped, shuddered, and immediately wondered if I am now considered old? Am I, a 27 year old, that far gone?
The clip in question:
And so I got to thinking: do the kids even hang out anymore? Or is their version of a mall hangout scrolling TikTok together? Do they even make embarrassing music videos on their grainy desktop computers, complete with terrible wigs and neon colored fishnet gloves? The mall was a formative experience for me. We’d gossip over lemonade that would make your lips pucker and Auntie Anne’s cinnamon pretzels. We’d battle headaches through the haunted house that was Abercrombie - dimly lit lights, enough cologne piped through the vents to last even a high school boy well into his twenties, and potentially damaging levels of pop music. I guarantee if we had Apple watches back then we would have gotten alerts for dangerously high noise levels. My grandmother would join us on our back to school shopping pilgrimage, four envelopes, each labeled with my and my sisters’ names tucked into her handbag with two crisp $100 bills in each. She was happy to be involved, just as we were happy to sit for 30 minutes totaling how much we could spend at one store if we knew we really wanted that one shirt from another. But there was an unspoken rule: upon the Abercrombie final approach, she would park herself a bench nearby and we would brave the foggy darkness alone.
As for our fashion inspirations? Tigerbeat, Seventeen, and J14. I’d collect them year round to bring to summer camp, a stack of them packed into my sticker-covered milkcrate. In the days before social media shopping was a journey, not a destination. We went into the mall bright eyed and bushy tailed, and came out warriors. A true trial of perseverance for a teenage girl.
If you too were shocked that the kids don’t know Hot Topic anymore, imagine how I felt when I saw my first “Rare Vintage Charlotte Russe Y2K” listing on Depop. This story went viral after a Depop seller sold Forever21 booty shorts for $298. The description describes them as “identical to Charlotte Russe!”, referring to a pair of Charlotte Russe shorts that went viral. One Poshmark seller is going to be very confused if she ever logs back into her account - the TikTok girls have discovered these shorts and if I wasn’t amused I would be a bit terrified.
Back in my middle and high school days there was no such thing as a “core”, and what you bought during back to school shopping was what you wore. We didn’t have TikTok telling us our closets were out of date. Things didn’t go viral, so while yes, thirteen year old girls love to dress up no matter the decade, there was less pressure to wear certain things. We had more of a chance to express ourselves because trends were so overarching. Skater skirts may have been in, but that was pretty much it. It wasn’t a particular style from a particular store. It was whatever you liked that happened to also fit the general description. We didn’t film fit checks between classes. The best way to show you knew what you were doing? Yearbook superlatives.
There were no constant wardrobe updates, no online trends to keep up with. Sure, there were trends within the school, like the Solow yoga pants/rolled over Ugg combo that I begged and pleaded for. These foldover top pants were peak fashion, and if you paired it with a Juicy zip-up you were the best of the best. (I tried to find a photo, but you will have to conjure up this image in your mind instead.) I’d usually have the $200 a year for back to school shopping, and then anything else was either a birthday present or Christmas/Hanukkah gift. If I wanted anything else, I’d have to use my own hard-earned money. But if the store sold out before you could get it? That was it. We didn’t have online shopping, at least not in the capacity that we do now, and so people wore clothing that actually reflected their lives and interests.
My high school didn’t really have cliques, but the popular girls all wore Jack Roger flip flops and Lilly Pulitzer. The cool jocks wore baggy baseball shorts and mid-calf Nike socks. The theater girls wore skater skirts and knit knee high socks. The edgy kids wore fingerless gloves and fishnets. It wasn’t weird to see groups overlap, but you could tell a lot about a person by what they wore.
Kids don’t have these defining elements as much anymore. Their hobbies have become synonymous with shopping and spending money. They spend less time finding out what they like and more time trying to become the next internet sensation. And I know it’s all about the monetary bottom line these days, but the kids need mall culture! They’ve lost the embarrassing phase of style self discovery. It was a monumental day when we graduated from LimitedToo to Charlotte Russe; A right of passage for any teenage girl. But ask any kid if they’ve even heard of LimitedToo and I’ll guarantee they will look at you with blank stares and raised eyebrows. Those awful outfits built character. It took a lot of balls to go outside in patchwork shorts, a neon polo shirt, and chunky plastic jewelry. But we had fun with our outfits. And I want the kids to be able to have that sense of freedom and play without wondering if their shirt is too last season. The fashion girls should love fashion for fashion, not because of pressure. And there’s not much we can do about it now, but I hope thrift stores are giving them a sense of this at least.
My youngest sister is sixteen now. I have three younger sisters who have always asked my fashion advice. And as someone who has since pivoted from her fast fashion mall days to vintage sourcing and digging through thrift warehouses, I encourage them to shop secondhand. I think this is a huge way for them to find their style - they can’t just pick the first thing they see on the rack (unless they’re really lucky). So if you have a teenager in your life, I encourage you to in turn encourage them to brave the musky smells of vintage in the hopes that they can discover how they really want to dress. It’s come full circle - from the overwhelming smells of Abercrombie to the overwhelming smells of mothballs. So support your local thrifts, because it is truly a bonding experience to go into a thrift store with your best friend and live out that movie montage in real time, trying on awful terrible hats and coats just because you can. And while its not the same as emerging from the mall after 6 hours, dazed and confused and exhausted, I’m hoping it creates the same character building experience.