girlshop

the girlies are posting

originally posted: 2023

Ad for a jewelry line sold via the online clothing retailer girlshop.com; date unknown, but no earlier than 1997, no later than 2007. This particular brand is mentioned in quite a bit of advertising and blogging about the shop around 2003; maybe around then? (Recently I picked up an old fashion-forecasting textbook at a rummage sale; I guessed the publishing date (2010) correctly within one year based solely on its section on Web 2.0 book The Long Tail and how style websites were the new coolness, rather than something that'd existed for years. How 2000-and-late.)

The site itself was a now-defunct online retailer founded by designer/entrepreneur/former iVillage person Laura Eisman. Wikipedia, perhaps commandeered by a brand rep here, calls it "the first website for indie-designer, trend making style." Even as far back as 1998, the site had social-networking feints, like an email share feature and gift registry, and perks like a Xennial version of the so-called "millennial lifestyle subsidy" -- same-day delivery service! If you happened to live in Manhattan, that is.

A month after Eisman started the site, the New York Times JUST SO HAPPENED to write it up. What sudden serendipity! Eisman called the shop like "making a trip to SoHo without leaving your office," a quote designed to be defictionalized, and indeed, Girlshop launched a physical flagship NYC store in the mid-2000s. This store -- think Club Libby Lu meets TheRealReal -- mildly disappointed The Village Voice:

"While the Girlshop website excels at presentation—featuring a vivid, colorful layout that facilitates quick browsing by designer, sale, or clothing category—the retail shop is a different story. Next door to custom-jeans maker An Earnest Cut & Sew, it looks distinctly out of place in the Meatpacking District, marked by a cutesy baby-blue sign more appropriate for a tween shop in Carroll Gardens than a store that stocks a $304 dress. The changing stalls are floor-to-ceiling swaths of silver lame (perfect for a Patricia Field boutique, bad when it clashes with exposed-brick walls), and inside Girlshop, it’s a game of how much can be crammed onto a rack or table. Like a breakdown in Display 101, an elegant, vintage-inspired lace cocktail dress from Dana Foley of Foley & Corinna is squeezed in next to a casual, beaded knit tunic dress from LaROK (a brand whose popularity we’ve never understood—can’t you buy similar, cheaper garb at Forever 21 or Rampage?)." - Corina Zappia, The Village Voice,

As for this particular ad, it was designed by Seventeen/Teen magazine illustrator Sara Schwartz, whose retro website is still extant and is a phenomenal time capsule of the era. Specifically, it marks the point in the era when this zine-y aesthetic, already mainstreamed somewhat by Sassy magazine, had diffused even further, into the even-more-mildly-political world of huge fashion ads in huge teen magazines. The kind of magazines marketed to girls who read their teen magazines via getting them in the grocery-store checkout line, Borders, and/or the hair salon, to sell them body glitter and future girlbossing. (People like me. I did all these things, although I was much better at the glitter than the girlbossing.)

I mention all this not to shit on it -- I wouldn't collect these if I didn't have a (guilty, nostalgic) love for the design and wasn't fascinated by the somewhat-forgotten history. But this, like most such postcards, is ultimately an ad, selling you something. Need a new twin o' cherries pin?

POSTSCRIPT

Part of what fascinates me about old Web advertising is how actual '90s (or whatever) media differs from the #rememberthe90s nostalgiabait, which excises from its remembered decade anything no longer deemed cool. So:

SIGNS THIS IS ACTUALLY A 2000-ISH WEBSITE AND NOT A MODERN RECREATION:

• This is kind of cheating, but the source code mentions Microsoft FrontPage 3.0 and JavaScript 1.2, both circa the late '90s.
• The whole "faves" page. Like most lists of its nature -- see also Kesha's favorite artists from her old MySpace profile -- it is a hyper-curated but also ephemeral thing: a time capsule of what was considered cool at a very exact point in time. The first listed band "fave" is "Coldplay!!!!!!!" (This would have been around the time "Yellow" came out.) Other favorite bands: Tricky; Filter; Luscious Jackson; Eve; Ofra Haza; "'THE' Willaim Orbit"; "Dance Club Remixes!!!"
• Various parts of the portfolio pieces: the peak of celebrity being Minnie Driver; the peak of pop culture being PaRappa the Rapper with a speech bubble mentioning Snoop Doggy Dogg (by that name); the peak of fragrance being Tommy Girl; the circa-2000 ad campaign for Japanese label Trans Continents with doodle people exclaiming "Femme!" and "Homme!" at the pink-and-blue Trans Cafe. I'm genuinely unsure whther the ad was intentional.
• The mention of Norman Vincent Peale gets its own bullet point, both for the "this fucking guy" factor and also for his being mentioned in any aspirational, hip context.
• Another separate bullet point goes to the "equal billing" Spice Girls counterpart: Mark Wahlberg as Sporty Spice, Tyson Beckford as Posh Spice, Busta Rhymes as Ginger Spice, Marilyn Manson (another "this fucking guy," ugh) as Scary Spice, and Zac Hanson (at least I assume it's Zac and not the Spindrift drummer)
• I'm not saying a modern writer doing an "omg Y2K" bit couldn't produce something as utterly of-its-era as this sentence, but they'd have to be preternaturally good at the job to channel all the vibe specificities here: "these wacky illos. spring to life with the gift of gab and are on the pulse of our popular culture. sara's work is, no doubt, hot, fresh, fly and insightful just in time for the millennium."
• See also: describing another writer as "the koolest NYC gen-X'er." Anyone writing that nowadays would reflexively bury it under three layers of Hipster Runoff. (Maybe it was buried then too.)
• The autoplaying MIDI is not actually a useful sign here, since putting MIDIs on sites is absolutely standard, if not cliched, in the web design arsenal of the average ironic 2020s memester. (Present surroundings excepted. I resisted the temptation.) But I nevertheless want to point out its existence, if only because it will be downloaded onto your phone. Did you get Peanuts or Buffy???

Again, I mention all this not to shit on the design; I kind of love all of this and am genuinely surprised that at no point in the decade of Rookie Magazine was it rediscovered or reappreciated in all this specificity. I mention it despite the feeling that I'm being successfully marketed to from beyond the brands' grave. Look at that red dress and those boots. I would wear them every day. The wrap dress too. I would wear the shit out of that green jacket and have been looking for a comparable one for MONTHS.