Forever 2020

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The Forever 21 in Times Square stays open until two in the morning. When one enters the store, she is nearly immured by light: rows of stage lights and white crystal chandeliers suspend overhead. The white tile floors are embedded with sparkles. A DJ spins radio-pop next to the massive glass doors. Among the blasting remixed beats of Calvin Harris, this instant of arrival becomes extraterrestrial. The stage lights radiate a prismatic sheen across the ground level. When one steps in through the massive glass doors and looks ahead, she finds a gaping mouth of webbed escalators beckoning descent into four floors thick with fashion on an infinity loop. 

I love the Times Square Forever 21. I go alone so I can take my time examining each rack, usually around midnight or so. It’s less crowded then. I scrutinize price tags and drift between arrangements of faceless mannequins, layering my left arm with a growing stack of flashy layers that are just cheap enough. The wooden hangers weigh my arm down, and this weight becomes my sole impediment from grabbing more and more and more. God, I love how shiny everything is there. For about a year now, many items have been covered in silvery paillette sequins. When the sequins fall off, inevitably, they leave ugly, empty holes along the fabric and the piece gets marked down even more. $8.95 is the tag I keep an eye out for.

The Times Square Forever 21 restyles each mannequin every day. A floor is entirely transformed between even two consecutive visits with daily shipments from, mostly, China. But amidst perpetual makeover, I have noticed, among the layouts of sparkles and patent leather, a tendency to revel in what once was rare: a crude materialization of fantasy. For example, the faux fur coat which finds itself draped across every blasé floor model after September. Historically, fur coats were reserved for survival — early hominids under capes made from wolverine — then for the elite: Hollywood starlets, and before them, Egyptian pharaohs who ruled in yellow leopard skins. I met a friend in Bed-Stuy last week after finally leaving Forever 21 and on my way there, I saw a small herd of leopards perched on the M train. I was one of them. Five separate girls shivering in a printed fur coat, each sitting alone, eyes feasted on the line map as we moved toward Brooklyn.

Two of the leopards had hunks of glue dried around the heels of their clunky black boots. That’s the problem with thrift store shoes. They are always too good to be true, with soles that snap in half when you need them most. The average 2019 girl who is wearing faux fur on the way to Brooklyn at 1 am probably has a couple thrift store-finds tucked away beneath her pelt. But she’s definitely also wearing at least one item from Forever 21. Or Zara. Or H&M. The H&M in Times Square is also open until two in the morning. H&M also churns out nonstop products from dangerous factories in Bangladesh and sells jeans for $11. Their floor plan is decisively classier than Forever 21’s, but the mannequins are exactly the same: lustrous, faceless, bald white bodies under polyester, perfect pageboy wigs. The angular bobs are razored horizontally at the bangs with the cut widening into a triangle inches above the mannequin shoulders. On the train, most girls display a shaggied version of their own. Many of the bobs are bleached and then dyed impossible colors.

Impossibly colored hair no longer carries a connotation of even remotely anti-establishment values. A pink pixie-cut reveals nothing about one’s music taste or adolescent angst. In fact, the colors which a 2019 girl dyes her hair derive from an entirely different and lighter spectrum than the typical range of, say, Manic Panic. Pastels reign now, with, perhaps, a off-jewel tone here and there only to distinguish from a sea of lilac. Think Leloo in The Fifth Element with her flaming strands and white roots. These shades are called, quite literally, fantasy colors. Mint green, mauve, baby pink, neon yellow, and Hi-C Lavaburst orange. Fantasy colors are semi-permanent by nature. There is no such thing as lavender hair which stays lavender. It requires bleaching and then stripping and then toning and then weekly re-ups on dye from brands with names like Unicorn Hair. But you will look like a fairy! Most 2019 girls begin this process on a whim, but eventually run out of steam or funds — whichever comes first — and let the dark roots seep in. 

Hair divorced from flesh and blood is an apt accessory to the casual bondage gear and fake gold chains pushed ahead by fast fashion. Mariette, a Nexus-8 replicant in the recent Blade Runner 2049, closely reflects the tedious trend. An android with superhuman ability, Mariette was genetically engineered from entirely organic material. She is also a prostitute. Her dirty, limp hair is peach-colored. She wears a raspberry-hue shag coat with an extravagantly fuzzy black cap. Of course, it is standard that streetwalker aesthetics would appropriate certain traditions of wealth. But the wet faux fur which dominates Mariette’s body did not place me into the foggy year of 2049 as I watched the new Blade Runner. It just looked like a night out in Brooklyn. 

2019 girls take the train at 1 AM to Bed-Stuy sheathed in leopard coats. Maybe they live around there, at least one or two of them must. They fill the car on their way home from work, most likely, boutique retail or food service. At least one of them is always meeting up with a friend who goes to art school full-time. Other girls on the train probably go to college too. At least another one has dropped out because it was too expensive and she doesn’t really know what she wants to do yet. Maybe one of the 2019 girls has lived in New York all her life. My friend who moved to Bed-Stuy recently is a fashion student. My friend excels in her classes because, unlike most of her peers, she is a talented seamstress. The pieces which she creates are sturdy and embroidered. Last year she watched The True Cost, a Netflix documentary about the factory collapse in Bangladesh which killed 1,134 workers, so she stopped shopping at Forever 21, H&M, and the like. She works odd jobs at marked-up consignment shops all over town, so she always gets discounts. Cutting out fast fashion wasn’t really an issue until she won a competition through her school, which had been organized by Zara to detect new design talent. What a great opportunity. When I went to meet her last week, she told me all about it as we strolled to Bushwick through a light drizzle. Be proud, I told her. As we walked, my telltale Forever bag swung beside me, bright as a canary. She asked, curiously, about my finds and I showed her eagerly, opening the thick yellow plastic. She approved. We walked for a long time. My coat like a damp cat. And my friend, so sleek in her long black leather jacket from a vintage store. Matrix-style. 

That night in Bushwick, I saw lots of little rectangular sunglasses sliding down the tips of girls’ noses or clipped to their shirts. It was a more techno crowd where we went, all the people bobbing up and down to music blaring without words. The music played from a laptop connected to monstrous speakers. Sometimes I’m convinced the leather jackets and little sunglasses in the dark are what make any of it interesting at all. To feel transformed a bit, like a heroine thrust into the netherworld. Poor girls and the rich girls all ape Keanu in fresh pleather pants. And what poor girl doesn’t want to play rich when the clothes are this cheap? Styles written in the stars. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway writes that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” When I see Forever 21 mannequins donning silver go-go boots and red latex onesies, I think we are make-believing the utopia out of expectation and boredom. Then I turn my head sideways and squint. Suddenly a rave where chains hang and jangle from every cargo pocket becomes an arrogant dance through dystopia. Clanging, Look at me, look at me, I’m the last generation. 

Why else would dogeared Dickies catalogs litter the coffee tables of wealthy college students? Or, I should say, the coffee tables of the learning children of wealthy people? (The coffee tables are wide planks balanced on plastic crates or stacks of books of street photography.) Expensive workwear emerges as the opposite of fast fashion — a slow burn. It’s Orwellian! If the world is ending, then have some fun with it. No stiff canvas jumpsuits, please. No navy blue coveralls. Navy blue coveralls camouflage new shame in 2019. They externalize a perverse fear of their wearers, a fear that the disordered world which the wearer has rightly inherited is disintegrating. In response, a thick and supposedly inoffensive uniform. The fearful wearer is educated and probably knowledgeable about the history of socialism. Perhaps the wearer has studied, or stood before, realist murals where factory workers and farmers churn through the day and upturn land. If you can afford the cool distance, thick coveralls are cozy and oh-so-safe.  But sometimes, I want to say to the lit major concealed in Carhartt, a little skin is in order. A little skin is dire even.

Burning Man, absurd as it is, takes a celebratory page from the Mad Max reboot. And how delightful. Attendees mix glinting pewter statements into their seductive choice of rags and combat boots. The week-long festival and nonstop party has grown into a competitive experiment in excess. Think chrome bikini. Last year Burning Man cost roughly $425 per person in addition to $80 for vehicle admission and it lasted nine days. Once inside, attendees must supply their own water and collectively survive off a barter system. Last year several private parties at Burning Man displayed colossal art installations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some were made of wood and some were made of dented metal, but most resembled the human form in some way. At the end of the week, as is tradition, it all burned to dust. Burning Man’s motto: Leave no trace. Last year’s theme: I-Robot. Uniquely, this fabulous desert adventure sets the scene for a shallow hybrid between essential utility, the gaudiness of fast fashion, and downright vacation.

Haraway calls a cyborg “a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” I don’t want to call 2019 girls cyborgs. But I think they do condense. Those girls in leopard coats who clutch opalescent fanny packs to their chests all collapse at some point. Stumbling toward one another on the dance floor, they become a string of plastic pearls: rich enough to go anywhere as long as you don’t care where you came from. 2019 girls would absolutely love to be called cyborgs. The prophecy of the youth is now and it’s an oracle that’s neon pink with zippers. Most of us will never be able to afford to go to Burning Man, but the Ulta in the stripmall sells knock-off illuminating highlighter for just $10 and when we spread it on our cheekbones we look positively fictional. 

When I left Forever 21 last week, it was just about closing time. I did a final run-through to make sure I wasn’t missing any good deal. What stood out was all the iridescence. Iridescent hair clips and clear plastic chokers and iridescent threads entwined through fuzzy white sweaters and snotty lip gloss and the fat, iridescent sequins cluttering a pile of bodycon dresses. On the basement level, there were even busted caps of iridescent glitter spilled all over the ground next to broken earrings which had fallen from the steel rack. I assume you know it’s all made of crap. And I noticed then, when I looked up, that the mannequin lounging near the jewelry was dressed differently than she was when I had arrived only an hour before. You’ve changed, I said to the plaster cast. Now she wore a beanie. And I was glad I had noticed, because I had always wondered if clothes were restyled during the day or during the night. I had always wondered because in Times Square there is no telling between day and night. Emerging from the basement level three floors below, floating really, on a conveyor toward the exit by escalator, the view through the massive glass doors is always the same: hot brightness which flashes, even in winter and in the rain. 

If one stays at the Forever until closing time, she will have outlasted the DJ. And when she finally steps outside, if it’s a weeknight, she will find Times Square damn near empty. Really. After a certain hour, even in this notorious epicenter, nobody remains in the road except armed police who mill around between concrete sidewalk blockades. Since everybody hates Time Square, most people never witness this brief window of space. It’s even quiet. (A muting which lasts until almost 4 AM.) And for just a second, a girl in 2019 might forget the store she came from and look up through the mist and think that all of those huge, scientific, expensive, pulsing holograms were meant just for her. How unironic.

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