Goodbye Urban Outfitters

Age is just a number until the day you randomly decide at age of thirty-eight to pop into your local Urban Outfitters for the first time in a decade. It is there you will realize, “Holy shit. This place looks like a costume shop.”

At first, you’ll wander the shop reminiscing your first experience shopping in an Urban Outfitters. It was the first week of college and the visit is stuck in your mind because you distinctly recall the store itself feeling so much cooler than you in a way you couldn’t articulate because you weren’t even hip enough to understand why. You feel its cool factor most when you stare at the massive display wall of graphic, ‘vintage-style’ t-shirts and quietly vow to find the money to buy each and every one of them. In the end, you will only get one ‘vintage-style’ Denver Broncos shirt. You still have twenty years later even though it’s too small because you got it on sale and x-small was the only size left. It will forever be a reminder, that yes, in your youthful ignorance, you tried to prove to a commercial store that you are cool damnit.

And suddenly, you’re back to being thirty-eight standing next to a pile of plastic brown and purple iridescent cowboy hats wondering who has changed more – you or Urban Outfitters. You make a quick loop noticing that every rack is seemingly one of two things – négligée or a piece of fabric posing as clothing. To be clear, what’s shocking to you is not a lack of modesty. It’s that everything is more fabric than any semblance of actual clothing – hemming, tailoring, signs of any sewing whatsoever. The quality of a seasonal costume store is looking couture compared to this nonsense. Sure, of course, this is the work of fast-fashion in hyperdrive, but there is also something else at play. You are standing in the center of what you once deemed the mecca of cool and you finally see ‘cool’ for what it is and always was – a big iridescent, see-through curtain of shit.