I became acquainted with Forever 21 one summer in the early aughts when I was “living” on my own for the first time while doing a pre-college summer program. Its store in the Providence Place Mall was bright and welcoming, and I was immediately taken with it: there was an explosion of basics with plenty of trickle-down runway trends in the mix that felt cool to a fifteen-year-old. And the prices were accessible enough that my group of friends were all willing to make the mile-long trek from campus twice a week to shop there.
For someone whose wardrobe at the time was majority J.Crew from the catalog or Abercrombie from the mall, Forever 21 felt so… grown-up, if a bit jejune and lacking in curation, which fit my state of mind perfectly at that age.
Time would tell that I found Forever 21 at an inflection point: store openings and sales grew exponentially through the rest of that decade–the 2010 opening of a cavernous Times Square flagship store marked a milestone–and beyond, setting a high watermark in 2015 with $4.4 billion in sales, before a precipitous decline in 2018-2019 which forced its first bankruptcy filing. But things felt comparably more hopeful in 2020 as its consortium of buyers had what looked like a turnaround plan.
40 years and two Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings later, Forever 21 might be staring down the barrel of the undead. After failing to adapt to the changing mall landscape, and capitulating to ultrafast fashion brands Shein and Temu, Forever 21 currently has liabilities ten times in excess of its assets, which makes finding non-vulture investors a near-impossible task. It’s now in the process of closing down all 350 remaining US locations.
Authentic Brands Group, the firm that owns Forever 21’s intellectual property and trademarks, will likely continue to license out the Forever 21 name on Shein, so Forever 21 may live on like other zombie brands in ABG’s portfolio; but in death, as in life, it will smell like polyester.
As a recession looms, I wonder: Who’s next (to fall)?
