The year is 2009. You’re a sophomore at a big public high school in northern New Jersey. The seasons are just starting to change, you’ve got babysitting money in your black Longchamp tote, your favorite berry-pink North Face fleece jacket on, and there is a school dance with a DJ on Friday night. It’s “neon safari” themed. You pile into your friend’s navy-blue Jeep Commander — she’s borrowing it from her father — and you head down Route 17 to the Garden State Plaza mall. There is only one place to get the perfect outfit for the school dance: the fast-fashion mecca of Forever 21.
In 2025, things are a bit different. The nation’s first mainstream embrace of fast fashion, Forever 21, is expected to close some 350 U.S. stores by May 1. The embattled brand has filed for bankruptcy twice in the past six years, blaming falling sales on competition from Chinese megabrands like Shein and Temu and their staggering online inventories. According to CNBC, at its peak Forever 21 employed 43,000 people and generated more than $4 billion in annual sales.
I’m morally opposed to fast fashion from an environmental, human rights and consumerism standpoint. And yet, I am nostalgic.
I shouldn’t feel a thing about Forever 21 shutting its sliding glass doors for good. My shopping habits have entirely changed in the last 15 years, favoring fewer, often vintage, higher-quality items over the abundance of low-quality, cheap and trendy wares the retailer has sold for decades. I’m morally opposed to fast fashion from an environmental, human rights and consumerism standpoint. And yet, I am nostalgic. Forever 21, for its woefully disorganized racks, its inconsistent sizing and notoriously shoddy quality, represents a bygone era, a hopeful era. It wasn’t just that I was a teen with a little bit of money, an outfit in mind and a friend with a license. The nation felt like it was coming out of darkness, toward a new light. There’s a reason Gen Z is romanticizing that era: So much felt possible.Although the pejorative “fast fashion” was coined by The New York Times in 1990, it didn’t truly enter the lexicon until the proliferation of Zara some years later. I’m sure many people were critically examining just how Forever 21’s clothes could be so inexpensive, but it certainly wasn’t the retailer’s very young target demographic. Forever 21 burst onto the scene like an apparition out of the 2008 financial crisis. There was a freedom and an independence in the low prices; a parent lamenting that the clothing looked cheap and was poor quality, but which you bought on your own, was nearly a rite of passage. In hindsight, though, Forever 21 was a primer, normalizing the concept of fast fashion for very young shoppers. The expectation became on-trend pieces for very low prices all the time, everywhere. It was well understood that you might get a handful of wears out of a Forever 21 item if you were lucky. Generally, you bought a metallic bodycon skirt or a pair of jeggings with the intention of wearing them once or twice. If your new tank top disintegrated after a single wash, well, that was the price you paid.
Forever 21’s organizational system, which at the time seemed bizarre and illogical to me, paved the way for the aesthetics we see dominating social media and the fashion space today. The clothes we’re not grouped by item, but by trend. In 2009, for example, there would have been an entire corner brimming with fluorescent tank tops, skirts and bandage dresses perfect for the neon-themed school dance. TikTok often categorizes users’ style as a specific aesthetic in a similar way: mob wife, clean girl, balletcore. I’ve written before about how damaging the accelerated fast-fashion trend cycle is to personal style, the fashion world and the environment. And Forever 21 was at the forefront. It was there that trends were first capitalized upon and then churned out again and again, quicker and quicker. Sure, you could try on and shed different styles with no material financial risk, but with only a few looks to choose from, your creativity was already impeded. Your self-expression was limited to what was on the rolling racks spread across Forever 21’s white, high-shine floor.Forever 21 is in a hell of its own making. By creating such a rapid trend cycle, insatiable demand and low price expectations, Forever 21 simply could not keep up with the consumer habits it founded. Shein and Temu — reportedly perpetrating human rights violations against their round-the-clock factory workers and emitting millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution — simply can, for now at least. The last time I stepped foot in a Forever 21 was 2016. I had a friend visiting me in my first New York City apartment and we needed ugly sweaters for a Christmas party. I remember being surprised at the state of the store. It wasn’t that it was kitschier, or quiet, or aimed at younger shoppers. It felt like stepping into a broken time capsule, uncanny and unsettling — even then, a time gone by.
Hannah Holland
Hannah Holland is a producer for MSNBC's "Velshi" and editor for the "Velshi Banned Book Club." She writes for MSNBC Daily. 
