I’m reading Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange and feeling very nostalgic for the shopping malls of my Midwestern youth and adolescence. The rusty smell of coins in the fountain, the stern lady from the perfume counter who would scold you for trying to run down the up escalator, the free samples of sweet and sour chicken… But most of all, I miss how the mall existed as a physical place where I was introduced to new trends in fashion, it all felt so fun and vividly real.

This week for STAR⟡MAIL, writer McKinzie Smith tells us all about the grailed fashion item she just had to buy as a child at the mall.

Culture writer McKinzie Smith, who publishes the Substack american in peril, takes us back to her youthful memories of coveting fashion and visiting the mall.

Wallet

By McKinzie Smith

It’s 2008 and I am ten years old. My favorite thing in the world is the celebrity gossip mag. I read them all at the Target checkout: Us Weekly, Tiger Beat, People, Teen Vogue, Bop. I am especially enthralled by girls only a few years older than I am, because I am still a child and therefore have a hard time visualizing what my life will look like past high school. As it happens, I am too obsessed with the idea of high school to care about anything else. I still want to be a cheerleader, to have lots of friends, to be as cool as the girls in these magazines. It has already become clear to me that I am missing one crucial thing in my quest to reach these goals.

I need a Juicy Couture tracksuit.

Juicy Couture, hereby referred to as Juicy, was created in 1997 by two entertainment biz wives looking to craft fashionable options for comfort-wear that aligned with the Los Angeles lifestyle. As co-founder Pamela Skaist-Levy put it to Vogue in 2021: “We sort of made athleisure fashion.” Of course, Juicy came to prominence well before athleisure was widely adopted as a descriptor for luxury loungewear. A forebear of LuLuLemon’s explosive popularity in the 2010s, Juicy made sweatpants desirable, neon and terry cloth as it was, not exactly for working out in but not not for working out in, either. This was the era of yoga, pilates, PinkBerry, juice cleanses. It was living well within the limits of what was trending, which happened to be workout classes and low-fat dairy. Juicy fit right into this West Coast-led moment; it was created to mesh with this burgeoning consumer category.

In hindsight, though, Juicy was nothing if not a mall brand. It peaked at around one hundred brick-and-mortar stores (with sales reaching over $500 million during the fiscal year of, wouldn’t you believe it, 2008), reaching a significant portion of US states and growing internationally. Though it carried an air of exclusivity and was beloved by fashion icons like Karl Lagerfeld and John Galliano, Juicy was always more attainable than the big LVMH brands of the same era, which contributed to its popularity. Tracksuits cost about $155 as a full set. Adjusted for inflation, this runs under $250. The standard cost of high-quality athleisure has remained static, but even Skims hasn’t achieved the same aura of wealth and luxury, of hyper-feminine fashion that transcends exercise. The brand remained popular with celebrities and civilians alike throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s. For many, the cost was worth it.

Two such women: My mom and my grandma. After months of watching me go on and on about how much I wanted one of these stupid tracksuits, one of them cracked. I remember them taking me into the Pioneer Place mall, the singular Juicy Couture storefront I ever entered, to let me pick out an accessory. I believe that this was some sort of test of fashion endurance. If I liked this thing enough to genuinely use it, if I proved this wasn’t just a passing trend for me, maybe I could get a tracksuit at some point down the road. In the back corner of this pink-and-brown boudoir of a store were the purse shelves. My request for a purse was denied. My secondary pick, a chunky black wallet with the iconic Juicy crest embroidered on the back, was not. I walked out of there that day with not only my first wallet, but a mission: If I use this wallet, I will finally be cool.

I was definitely not cool. Maybe I had it better than some of my peers, but this was only though sheer effort. Fashion was my saving grace, the one thing that did grant me some level of popularity, that branded me as somehow “in the know” despite being a strange-looking girl. I might have been rocking Abercrombie and Limited Too, but I had a crazy overbite, choppy bangs, and big frizzy brown hair. The face was busted. Of course, I grew into it, got braces, wore the headgear, and learned how to use mousse, but these few years of awkward puberty did help me to understand the true importance of fashion. It was always about expression for me, regardless of whether that expression was focused on fitting in or standing out. For these years, it was about fitting into a certain kind of trendy milieu. That made it no less fun for me. If anything, I became more obsessed with it because it provided me with social opportunities I felt I wouldn’t have otherwise had. I may not have naturally fit in with certain crowds, but I could signal to them that I understood them, and most people don’t pick up on the difference.

Certainly, there is a level of privilege inherent in being able to play this game. Not everyone has family willing or able to fund their inferiority complex with fashion. Still, the wallet was a game changer for me, one I truly did appreciate. I carried it with me everywhere. When I did finally get a big beautiful purse (a Juicy knockoff, obviously), the wallet went in the big beautiful purse. Slowly, items began accruing inside the wallet. My middle school ID, movie tickets, a library card, quarters and dollar bills. I still had the wallet when I got the tracksuit in turquoise and then a separate pair of track pants in gray and also a pair of platform flip-flips with a hefty J-emblazoned charm between the toes. I was spoiled, clearly, but I continued to love my wallet.

All of this fell out of fashion shortly thereafter. By 2011, I had moved on to a more twee look; big square glasses, necklaces with little clocks on them, multiple pairs of Keds. My wallet began to feel like a relic, a fad that I was almost embarrassed by. When I was thirteen, I placed the wallet on my closet shelf. It remained there for five years.

In those five years, my grandmother passed away from leukemia, I went through all of high school in a markedly uncool way but the kind of uncool way I’m still quite aligned with and even proud of, I started wearing a lot of black and heavy boots and eyeliner and leather, I gave my tracksuits away to Goodwill. Juicy was a trend, nothing more; I wouldn’t argue differently. It’s now sold in Kohl’s and JC Penny, the retirement homes of the formerly splashy. The tracksuits are usually on sale and cost less than $155. Such is the fate of all trends, even the especially iconic ones.

However, I lost my second wallet, a huge ugly plastic one with a technicolor owl on it from Fuego (a forgotten mall brand that capitalized on the post-hipster era… certainly less iconic) during my first few weeks at university. My license, my credit cards, and what little cash I carried were all gone, dropped somewhere on Clark Street between the City Target and the Printer’s Row dorm room I lived in. My mom, being the saint that she is, helped me request new cards and promised to bring me another wallet when she came to visit for Thanksgiving. I assumed it would be a new, even cheaper and uglier wallet, but no. It was my Juicy Couture wallet from 2008.

I held it in my hands, felt the clunky weight of it, swung it from its leather zipper pull. The fabric on the outside reminded me of carpet, the course kind that makes me shudder if I touch it for too long. I didn’t remember it being this big and bulky, but I was charmed by it all over again. Just opening it and seeing the coin pouch with its corny emblazoned MAD MONEY slogan in shiny silver transported me right back to holding it for the first time; not only the excitement of getting something I’d really wanted, but of having two women with me who loved me and who wanted me to be happy, even if the thing I wanted was silly. With one of those women now gone, I was drawn to the wallet as a reminder of her. It’s my own little Proustian madeleine, with the memory trigger being the sound of the loud, unruly zipper. It brings me back to that stupid, gaudy store every single time.

The wallet has been in continual use since 2016. It now carries more important things: My license, my health insurance card, and photos of friends I don’t get to see very often. The inside leather has flaked off in multiple places, revealing the scratchy gray fabric underneath. I can no longer see the pattern stitched on the outside; though it once displayed some kind of fleur-de-lis, it’s now just a black wallet made of matted terry cloth. I have no plans to replace it. I figure that it will eventually split in half. In the event of this wallet death, I will be heartbroken, but I will understand how we got there. Still, I intend to use it for as long as possible.

I don’t necessarily grieve the death of the mall, but I do grieve the potential loss of shopping as a matrilineal bonding experience. Shopping was how my grandmother expressed care. I guess you could say that gifting was her love language, but that feels imprecise. It was specifically the act of taking her loved ones to the mall and shopping with them that she relished. I am fully confident that clicking “Add to Cart” on Amazon would not have had the same appeal for her. It was the bodily sensation of being inside the store, hearing the sound of shoes clicking on marbled floors, and skimming the fabrics with her long red nails. There are smells and songs and snacks that we are no longer in touch with, collectively, due to the cultural death of the mall. There are entire emotional landscapes forgotten in those corridors we inhabited so frequently only twenty years ago.

During the writing process of this essay, I walked to Pioneer Place. The Juicy Couture storefront has been gone for years, well over a decade. The location is currently inhabited by Saint Laurent. Most of the mall is a gutted wasteland of empty rooms; only the big brands have made it, while the boutiques and small designers were pushed out and shuttered. Despite the feeling of having walked into desolation, I did notice one thing: The only groups there were mothers and daughters. It was the middle of the day on a Sunday, most of the stores were gone, but they were still wandering the halls like nothing had changed. Two girls chased each other around the ground floor fountain with no security left to stop them. Their mom held an H&M bag as she watched them play, her eyes eventually wandering to mine. We shared a smile.

I went home without buying anything.

Always a nice time to revisit this phenomenal piece on perfume:

David Byrne discusses the the True Stories (1986) mall fashion show:

A review of Meet Me by the Fountain:

And, lastly, a guilty pleasure of mine: dead mall tour videos.