When some in-the-know friends were visiting Manhattan from the Heartland recently, they told me that the first thing on their sightseeing list was the new Hollisters store at Houston St. and Broadway.
“What’s that?,” I asked.
They looked at me like I had just fallen off a turnip truck before explaining that the new flagship store of the Abercrombie & Fitch subsidiary was supposed to be setting new standards in retailing as entertainment.
Lower Broadway has become so clogged with stores and shoppers that it’s hard to believe the area was — not all that long ago — a funky haven for artists and art galleries.
I can still remember visiting the neighborhood in the late 1970s and staying in the very primitive loft of a friend’s dancer sister. This was just before a series of New York-based films, starting with “An Unmarried Woman” (1978), made SoHo more widely fashionable.
Before you knew it, the rundown lofts were transformed into expensive condominiums and the ground floor galleries were turned into boutiques.
Lately, the ground-floor boutiques have been replaced with giant stores filling whole buildings.
Kids and their parents who used to come to the city for cultural purposes now spend the day browsing at downtown retail meccas such as the new Topshop (the British version of H&M that features duds by supermodel Kate Moss).
Hollisters is something else entirely — an environment that makes shopping feel like being inside a movie, complete with pounding music and surf sounds and staff who appear to have been “cast” for their physical attributes rather than hired for their expertise at selling clothes.
Hollisters was created in 2000 by A&F as a completely fictional entity with a made-up founder — J.M. Hollister, who supposedly opened his first store in 1922. Actually, the whole thing is just a way of pitching cheaper versions of the A&F style to teens.
The walls in the store play a live video feed from Huntington Beach, California, to provide customers with a flavor of the place where old J.M. opened his first non-existant store.
The greeters at the door are flip-flop-wearing pseudo-lifeguards and everywhere you go inside the store there are beach boys and beach babes who appear to be there simply for local color.
The whole scene felt surreal to me — why go to New York to pretend to be in Southern California? — but kids in the 14 to 18 demo targeted by Hollisters/A&F looked like they were having a great time spending lots of money on standard-looking casual wear.
