In the 2010s, Fridays really began in my suburban hometown around 6 p.m., when hordes of tweens spilled out of their mothers’ minivans, $20 of allowance money tucked into microscopic skinny jeans pockets, and stampeded past the pretzel stands and power walkers into Forever 21. We’d fill our arms with as much merchandise as we could carry — fringed jean jackets, pleather miniskirts, neon jumpsuits — with Flo Rida songs pounding overhead and vinyl flooring twinkling underfoot.

It was a playground for those of us who had recently outgrown them. A bastion of fast fashion where we could spend our own extremely limited dollars on whatever crap our hearts desired.

But playtime is over. The company filed for bankruptcy Sunday for the second time in about six years, and it has plans to shutter its some 350 U.S. stores by May 1, according to regulatory filings. Hundreds of positions will be eliminated as the business winds down operations. It’s a sad end for a store that — despite a litany of controversies, countless shirts that fell apart after a single wash, and legendarily inconsistent sizing — still inspires intense nostalgia, even among women who haven’t set foot in there since 2015.

First called Fashion 21, the retailer was founded in 1984 by married South Korean immigrants Do Won and Jin Sook Chang in Los Angeles. Within a few decades, it was a trendy powerhouse. In 2005, it acquired teen fashion precursor Gadzooks and spent the next two years doubling its storefront presence to some 400, often capitalizing on the closures of Mervyn’s department stores.

As the aughts neared their end, consumer trends collided with the Forever 21 model: turning runway fashion into cheap dupes and selling them at affordable prices within weeks of their debut. While other retailers tended toward a data-centric approach focused on history and performance, Forever 21 turned instead to buyers and merchants from the fashionable L.A. scene.

“That was really what our job was: to predict what the customers wanted before they knew they wanted it,” said Danielle Testa, an Arizona State University professor of fashion and brand management and Forever 21’s former international merchandising manager.

The company’s strategy put the trend cycle in turbo drive. Instead of evergreen niches — this section for the punks, this one for the girly-girls — stores were organized by individual trends, a sort of forefather to the cottagecore and goblincore of TikTok yore.

“Forever 21 is known as a treasure hunt of a store where you can find a lot of different goods, but it was still very curated to have clear trend moments where you could walk in and see something that excited you, that felt super fresh,” Testa said. “Today, it would be like walking into a TikTok where you’re seeing this moment, and you’re able to grasp it right then and there.”

For millennials, whose college and early-career years collided with the company’s peak, it was the spot to score a going-out top for a keg party or a blazer for an internship onboarding. For us Gen Zers, the chaotic range of fashion on display was the primary appeal. Unlike other mall stores, where the point was to come out looking like everyone else, Forever 21 let us try out different visions of womanhood in various synthetic fabrics. Are you a combat boots girl, or is this Easter-tinged floral sundress more your vibe? Do you want a necklace with a pendant shaped like a mustache?

Plus, the thrill was right there in the branding on those highlighter-yellow bags. The prospect of being Forever 21 was, for those of us who were 12 through 20, exhilarating. Do Won Chang said he chose the store’s name because 21 is “the most enviable age” — and the clothes reflected it.

“Looking at them now, as a woman in my 30s, they were always very childish,” said virtual stylist Lakyn Carlton. “But some of it was a little sexy, a little risqué. They had a lot of mesh shirts and very mini skirts, like, ‘This is how I’m dressing like a grown-up.’ It gave you that taste of freedom.”

The store itself was a destination, wide and white-walled and littered with the discarded Starbucks cups, still sticky with whipped cream, that fueled our three-hour visits (which, incidentally, is how long it took to find anything in Forever 21). We were used to shopping in crammed Charlotte Russes and Wet Seals. Forever 21 was different.

“It felt more like the department store that my mom would make me shop at, where it was just so big and vast,” Carlton said. “But it was like: ‘I like everything in here. Or I could potentially like everything in here. Everything in here is more for me, not my mom.’”

Of course, the “everything” in question was mostly hideous garbage. The roulette-like experience of browsing Forever 21 extended to the clothes, whose wear life was unguessable. A camisole may have disintegrated after a week, or it might still be shoved in the back of your shirt drawer.

What I loved about Forever 21 is that I never knew what I was going to get in terms of quality. I owned tops that disintegrated after two washes, and yet I have leggings from there that have stood the test of time for ten years. Complete and utter chaos.

I’ll miss it. https://t.co/6rCSLOtvSv

— Ashley Elizabeth (@AshleyDeLarge) March 17, 2025

As Forever 21’s customers grew up, the brand’s controversies mounted. In 2011, the Center for Environmental Health found that some retailers, including Forever 21, had been selling jewelry containing toxic levels of cadmium; that same year, shirts with phrases such as “Allergic to Algebra” drew outrage online. The environmental and labor practice concerns of the fast-fashion business model that flew over the heads of 15-year-olds were harder to ignore at age 25.

Though Forever 21 cited Shein and Temu in its bankruptcy filing, the answer is more complicated than “online retailers.” There’s still a demand among consumers for in-person shopping, according to Testa. But Forever 21’s challenge was drawing them in.

“You’re no longer getting this super experiential store because what counts as an experiential store has really elevated,” Testa said. “It’s no longer just about having trendy moments. Now you need Instagrammable moments. You need to feel like you’re at an event or a destination to really enjoy an in-store experience.”

The company has also shifted its focus in recent years from reactive microtrends to evergreen styles, chasing more subculture and niche group trends, according to Testa. It also refocused its customer target from late teens and 20-somethings to early teens and preteens. That’s why a stroll through Forever 21’s liquidation sale might bag you more Hello Kitty and anime merch than a store visit would have 10 years ago.

The change posed another challenge to the brand: Because the new approach lacked a clear product identity, a gap opened in the fast-fashion market. Shein and Temu moved in. And they dominated both ends of the microtrend-evergreen staple spectrum.

In a way, Forever 21 precipitated its own downfall by creating a trend cycle that spun faster and faster until the company couldn’t keep up.

“Forever 21 was a leader in fast fashion and really showed how the mass market can respond to trends, can be on-trend easily, affordably, quickly,” Testa said. “I don’t think companies like Shein or Temu would exist without a brand like Forever 21.”

Crucially, tweens abandoned the brand. They might still browse in person, but they’ve become less likely to purchase in store. What they find for $20 in a Forever 21, they can get for $5 on the website of a fast-fashion giant, Testa said.

For Carlton, the embrace of online retail signals for youth culture a loss of something crucial: the unencumbered, no-one’s-watching glee of just hanging out.

“Shopping online is just not the same,” she said. “We lost a lot by losing so many things that are tactile. We don’t touch a lot of things anymore, except our phones.”

The last time I visited Forever 21 was the day after my father died in February. I hadn’t been to a mall in years, but a childhood stomping ground felt like the perfect place to start pacing off the grief.

The shopping mall in my hometown felt, as many do these days, slightly eerie, the ghosts of shoppers lost to online retailers haunting barren storefronts. My legs carried me to Forever 21, where “STORE CLOSING” signs hung underneath the recessed fluorescent lights.

There I was, picking through cheetah-print pants and denim bathing suits, standing on a new precipice of a new adulthood, wondering what life would now look like and who I would now be. And as I exited the store empty-handed at 6 p.m. on that Friday, against all odds, the tweens rushed in.