Tweens
IT is 11:15 a.m. The kids have the day off from school and I’m mall crawling The Westchester in White Plains, with my posse: my 11-year-old daughter, Lake, and two of her friends, Annabelle Kirk, 11, and Eve Wulf, 12.
They are identically (though they would say individually) decked out in the suburban tween girl uniform, almost head-to-toe Abercrombie: skin-tight jeans and layered T-shirts, as well as ballet flats, Uggs, or Michael Kors boots. Eve wears a Juicy Couture bracelet with a $60 charm that her mother bought for her for Valentine’s Day, which the others fawn over longingly.
Shortly after we enter the mall, my perfectly coiffed and lip-glossed group of girls step into Louis Vuitton and gaze at a white mink stole covered with colorful logos in a plastic case. “I have to have this!” exclaims Lake.”
That will take your babysitting money,” replies a surprisingly playful saleswoman, “for-ever!”
“Oh!” Lake says. “I didn’t know it was real!”
Back in the main hall, the girls spot a man carrying two giant pink Juicy Couture bags, and they start hissing like snakes, cheering, “Ju-i-ccc-y! Ju-i-ccc-y!” as if the brand was their favorite member of the Mamaroneck High School football team.
When we pull up in front of Abercrombie, the preteen version of Abercrombie & Fitch, silence falls over my crowd. With its cloying overspritzed air, loud thumping music, blowup posters of young girls and boys, this is ground zero for tween fashion worship: collared shirts in sorbet colors, tanks so thin they often come with holes already in them and skin-tight jeans that curvier teenagers can’t squeeze into.
It’s a place where I have been held hostage so often that I have coined a name for that vacant look of resignation women get when setting foot inside the store: Dead mom walking.
But on this day I’ve come not to bury Abercrombie. I am here to observe my daughter and her two friends make their way around a suburban mall to help me understand why shopping seems to have become an acceptable hobby, even an obsession, among some young girls. And to see how stores like Abercrombie and American Eagle Outfitters, as well as luxury brands, successfully court these young girls and turn them into customers.
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