6 November 2024 |
From clever collaborations to classic designs, our favorite American mall brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap are back in vogue.
When I was a 16-year-old living in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, there was only one job of which I dreamed: working at Gap. It was the highest form of fashion available at the local mall. I got the job, but my career was short-lived. I called in sick one night to go to a Dave Matthews Band concert, where I ran into a fellow Gap employee. He tattled.
This all transpired in the mid to late Nineties, when Gap’s marketing was a cultural phenomenon under the leadership of Mickey Drexler and creative direction of Carl Byrd. The brand’s commercials of the era left an indelible mark. They were the reason I had to work at Gap. The lyrics “I’m just mad about Saffron” from Donovan’s Mellow Yellow are still seared into my synapses 25 years after Gap’s 1999 Everybody in Cords ads. It was part of a series of advertising home runs that included Khaki Swing and a cover of Madonna’s Dress You Up for a collection of vests.
Abercrombie & Fitch, J.Crew, Banana Republic, and Gap were unavoidable for a broad swath of Gen X and Millennials. Part of a surge of American mall brands that rode a heady late-Nineties wave, they morphed and swelled with momentum before inevitably crashing at different points for different reasons. Abercrombie was plagued with discrimination scandals and an oversexualized image. In May 2020, J.Crew, saddled with debt, a middling image, and a surplus of outlet stores, filed for Chapter 11 protection. Gap and Banana lost their luster once more agile fast fashion titans—H&M, Uniqlo, Zara, Cos—began delivering high fashion trends to the masses at a weekly clip. The pandemic decimated things on another level as people stopped shopping for work clothes and retail was gutted. While never fully disappearing, the kings of the mall became an afterthought for years.
USA Swimming x J.Crew
“Everyone dressed in those jeans from Hollister and wore the fragrance from Abercrombie & Fitch,” he says. “I just hated that.” Twenty years later, he found himself browsing Abercrombie’s website after seeing a Bode-esque shirt recommended by The Washington Post fashion writer Rachel Tashjian in her newsletter Opulent Tips. “It got my attention,” Maza says. “I was like, ‘What is Abercrombie doing here?’” The shirt was sold out, but Maza ended up buying other styles that were a fraction of the price of designer brands and were appealingly anonymous.
The mall brands’ strategies have varied. There’s new leadership. The former Mattel chief Richard Dickson is now at Gap Inc, where he brought in Zac Posen as creative director. Gap has also done buzzy collaborations over the past couple of years with Palace and Dôen, and before that, Yeezy, in a partnership that lasted from 2020 to 2022 and ended in spectacular disaster, although it brought Gap to the fore in a way it hadn’t been in decades. In 2020, the former Madewell CEO Libby Wadle assumed the same role at J.Crew and installed Olympia Gayot to oversee womenswear and Brendon Babenzien, who earned fashion/hype bona fides at Supreme and with his own men’s brand, Noah, to inject men’s with a cool factor. J.Crew has reinvested in art direction and store design, showing off a new uber-designed space in New York’s Soho. Banana Republic has expanded its home offering, drawing comparisons to Restoration Hardware.
Vintage J.Crew Advertisement from 1995
Vintage Gap advertisement from 1993
It’s too early to see how Posen’s vision will shape Gap, where his main purview is Old Navy, but recent outings dressing Da’Vine Joy Randolph for the Met Gala and a hit shirtdress worn by Anne Hathaway goosed the brand’s profile. Even before that, Gap’s marketing, helmed by Calvin Leung, has been on point. In February the brand released a Linen Moves campaign starring the British music group Jungle and South African singer-songwriter Tyla in a dance video that was a direct descendant of Gap’s Nineties hits.
Then there’s the actual product. All of these brands dwell in an all-American look defined by classics, T-shirts, denim, tailoring, and a bit of prep, even if they have complicated feelings toward that word. They’ve recalibrated the unsexy side of the business—supply chain, fabrics, merchandising—to suit highly targeted demographics. Abercrombie started chasing twentysomethings and Millennial customers with its own take on understated quiet luxury and saw its stock go up 285 percent in 2023. “A lot of these brands are leaning into their identity,” the stylist and writer Becky Malinsky, of the popular newsletter 5 Things You Should Buy, says. “Gap did a huge linen story of just the white linen and the chambray, and those are the things that you want from these brands.”
Vintage Banana Republic Advertisement from the Nineties
Vintage Gap Advertisement from 1993
Prices are appealing, especially with the designer market trending stratospherically in terms of costs. A three-pack of Gap men’s cotton crewneck T-shirts is $39.95. A three-pack of Prada men’s cotton crewneck T-shirts is $895. A Banana Republic women’s poplin trench is $230. A women’s poplin trench from The Row is $4,250. “One of the more obvious points about these brands is that you can actually afford to buy them,” the fashion writer Emilia Petrarca says. “As luxury prices have gotten so insane, I’ve been turning to these mall brands because I simply cannot buy the Khaites or The Rows.” When Petrarca wanted a polo, she went to J.Crew and spent $50. “I want to take part in this trend, but I don’t want to invest too much money into it. God knows how long it’ll last.”
The anonymous, unplaceable nature of many of the designs from Abercrombie, J.Crew, Gap, and Banana Republic also offers an antidote to the excessive logos and immediately recognizable runway designs of luxury. “There is something about an anti-fashion statement,” Alex Badia, WWD’s style director, says. “This idea of going after the trend psychotically—there is still a lot of that and we work on that, but I think there is something about the truth of a garment that it feels really much like what you want now.” Badia found a years-old black Polo windbreaker in his closet a few months ago and has been wearing it almost every day since. “I bought it at Macy’s in Fort Lauderdale,” he says.
As for me, I hadn’t bought anything from Gap since I used my employee discount circa 1998. In the course of reporting this story, someone mentioned that the T-shirts from the Yeezy Gap debacle are still widely available on the secondary market and look pretty good. I bought a three-quarter gray style with a small Gap logo on the chest on StockX for $80 and am awaiting its arrival.
Gap x Dôen campaign
Da’vine Joy Randolph wearing Gap at the 2024 Met Gala
Anne Hathaway wearing a custom Gap dress
Abercrombie & Fitch Journal, 2001
