“Is it ever sad when fast fashion bites the dust?” Kim France, the founding editor of the seminal Condé Nast shopper Lucky and producer of the popular newsletter “Girls of a Certain Age” said on Tuesday, reacting to news that Forever 21 had filed for bankruptcy. The answer depends on how passionate a consumer is about both bricks and mortar and the hunt.
Anyone who ever formed a search party to stalk low-rise jeans, fringed crop tops, mesh flats or whatever else happened to be trending that very instant is familiar with the chain, which tracked fashion minutely and churned out the latest iteration of its whims at rock-bottom prices. At its peak, Forever 21 employed more than 43,000 people worldwide and brought in more than $4 billion in annual sales. As the chain’s name implied, the target consumer base skewed young.
Back in the early aughts, when Ms. France was first editing Lucky, she and her fashion editors made weekly scouting trips to a Forever 21 outpost in Union Square in Manhattan to track trending styles. Often enough, the styles turned up on sales floors before magazines had a chance to report on them. “You could compare it to Zara, although Zara is a little more sophisticated,” Ms. France said, referring to the Spanish mass-market retailer. “Or maybe Topshop.”
Forever 21 may have lacked the curated cool of competitors like Topshop, the British high-street retailer, whose Kate Moss collection proved so popular when it debuted in 2007 that crowd control was put into place outside London stores. (Those same clothes are now hotly traded online as vintage.) And it was never likely to inspire Instagram tags or art-directed haul videos.
In terms of sheer volume, however, the retailer was without rival.
Part of its appeal was a level of excitement impossible to replicate online — that adrenaline rush that comes from sifting through stacks of dross to find, if not the exact right thing, something close.
In its earliest days, Forever 21 also attained cult status among those like Antoinette Isama, 32, who, while growing up in Silver Springs, Md., made a beeline for The Mall in Columbia to find “age-appropriate, good quality” clothes that met her budget and closely followed fashion trends. “The lighting, the music, the atmosphere all tracked whatever was trending at the time,” said Ms. Isama, the Brooklyn-based founder of Fourtwo, a creative agency.
Trendiness is just a small part of Forever 21 chain’s appeal for Safiyyah Burns, 19, a pre-law student at Loyola University New Orleans. “Especially since Covid, my friends don’t really want to to go into stores anymore and deal with people or talk to cashiers,” she said. While many from her age cohort may view the entirety of the shopping experience as “see a pic online and press buy,” Ms. Burns remains a holdout for doing it in real life.
In part, what draws her to bricks-and-mortar shopping is the dispiriting shoddiness of so many things sold online. “Thin clothes and jewelry that turns green in three days,” she said. In an actual store, by contrast, buyers have the opportunity to appraise quality upfront, bypassing the inevitable trip to the post office with a return envelope (or, just as often, to the Goodwill bin).
Last weekend, Ms. Burns went shopping with her boyfriend, Jake Tentler, 20, a nursing student at Loyola. “We’re not so attached to our phones and so we actually want to talk to people and see what’s out there in a store,” Ms. Burns said. Scouring the clearance racks at Forever 21, the couple came upon a particularly cool men’s shirt with a Miller beer logo printed on the front. They bought it for $11, down from $15.
Tuesday’s announcement may have sounded a death knell for the company — whose husband-and-wife founders, the Korean American immigrants Do Won and Jin Sook Chang, made their Christian faith so core to the business that a reference to the biblical verse John 3:16 is printed on the bottom of every bright yellow Forever 21 bag — but it was not the first time the company has appeared on its last legs.
Forever 21 previously filed for bankruptcy in 2019, closing down more than 30 percent of its stores in the United States, and was then bought out of bankruptcy by Sparc Group, a joint venture between Authentic Brands Group and Simon Property Group, a mall operator.
In 2023, Sparc signed an agreement with Shein, the Chinese e-commerce site known for underpricing even Forever 21 (and one cited in court documents for being part of the reason for Forever 21’s current financial difficulties). That agreement allows Shein to operate stores-within-stores at Forever 21 outlets. With this latest news, however, Forever 21 is proceeding as if all its retail locations will eventually close, a wind-down of operations and a seeming capitulation to the irresistible power of digital commerce.
