Panic! At The Urban Outfitters

Nostalgia is a knife.

"Hey guys, welcome to your nightmare, we are your new sleep demons!!"

Any time I walk into an Urban Outfitters, I have no idea what year it is supposed to be.

You know the feeling? The one where you’re greeted at the door by a squad of headless, limbless mannequins dressed like you in university?

“Come with us,” they beckon, not so much with their mouths (no heads!) as with their collective presence. You do a quick, over-the-shoulder glance to make sure they’re actually talking to you, and not some other much cooler person behind you. Nope, this is clearly about you. And suddenly you’re completely destabilized, like you’ve stepped through a portal.

Can we even fully trust these cool, hot mannequins? Unclear. All we know for sure is that just beyond them lie the precise conditions to automatically excavate every last little sense memory you thought you’d suppressed, blocked out, exercised. And not just from one teensy little inconsequential blip in time, no. We’re talking middle school, high school, university, all of it.

But you keep coming back here anyway.

And every time you pass through the portal, cellular memories from all of the most emotionally chaotic chunks of life spontaneously spew forth, one violent, Severance-style flashback at a time.

Then, once you’re sufficiently reeling and disoriented, you look up and notice this strange, familiar place has managed to take whatever it is you’re feeling and reimagine it into a giant display of mini kilts.

What. Is. Happening?

All at once the scent of smudged mascara and Bath & Body Works bubbles to the surface, threatening to spill over onto the uncoated concrete floor.

Suddenly, I’m traipsing across campus in a kilt overtop a pair of slightly-too-long jeans, bottoms frayed within an inch of their life, lips emergency-flare-level reflective with freshly applied Juicy Tubes.

Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for A 17-Year-Old-Girl” may as well be my autobiography. I am dressing exclusively for boys, my personality so porous and permeable I can shapeshift into whatever’s being projected onto me at the time. I feel a twinge in my chest and suddenly I’m waiting for someone to throw rocks at my window.

I blink away tears and I’m back at the Urban Outfitters. I brush my hand across a rack of pants, none of which have pockets anymore, by the way. I thought we decided women get pockets now? Back in high school we didn’t have phones, but still, a pocket or two would have been nice.

I wince, and I can’t help but wonder, much in the manner of an inexplicably boa-clad Carrie Bradshaw, likely gazing out the window of her surprisingly fabulous flat:

Is it possible we are just… out of ideas? Like for fashion, but also in general? Is that why we keep cycling back a couple of decades here and there, as if the people who barely survived them won’t notice?

Is our mental bandwidth (along with our material resources) dwindling so profoundly that we’ve simply declared:

“Announcement, everyone! There will be no more newly formed experiences!”

“Nothing to see here, just slightly refreshed pieces of the past that may or may not still live in the back of your mind, or closet.”

“Remember that one off-the-shoulder shirt, black with the hot pink something-or-other? You were wearing it the first time you were stood up by a boy, remember? You were slumped over your bed crying as your parents looked helplessly on, wishing they could fix it, but you were just wishing they’d leave so you could dissolve into a salty puddle in peace? Yes, that shirt! We have recreated it, it is 80 bucks now, enjoy!”

I just really need to know: Are we being forced to unwittingly relive a handful of our worst, most emotionally charged teenage memories, simply because we currently don’t have any more space in the world for new ones?

What if I don’t want to go backwards? I’ve never wanted to. I can’t even fathom attending a high school reunion, for example, to willingly go back and feel the exact same thing for a second, third, fourth time.

And anyway, what if a little forgetting is actually good for us? Clearing out our neural pathways and such, to make space for new memories. Sloughing away all of the unsightly details and painful little logistics, retaining just enough so we can learn and move forward.

I quite like this concept. But then why does this place invoke such a deeply visceral reaction in me, and why do I keep coming back?

I’m not her anymore. I’m me now.

Or, OR! Am I actually Jennifer Love Hewitt in I Know What You Did Last Summer, spinning around wildly in the darkness, arms flailing towards the night sky, imploring the heavens or whoever’s in charge to JUST PICK A DECADE ALREADY! And then keep moving forward, in a respectable, chronological order! 

(Haven’t seen the film in decades, pretty sure that’s the gist).

It’s all just becoming so painfully transparent. Enough with the trickery, the trinkets from our past dangled coaxingly before us. Placing sneaky little (low carb) breadcrumbs back to a time I really don’t need to revisit. Maybe I’ll want to one day, but on my own terms. Just to see just how far I’ve come.

All I know right now is that I no longer wish to toggle back and forth between high-rise and low-rise jeans forever until the end of time. For what?

For whom? Some boy? Gen Z and their judgy middle parts?

A gaggle of impossibly cool mannequins?

Nope. No thank you. I only dress for me these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go purchase a very triggering mini kilt.