girls clothes

Yard sales October 5 - WECT
Forever 21 Underestimated Young Women - The Atlantic
Man arrested in 1991 cold case killing of 16-year-old girl - ABC News
Colorado sixth-grader inspires major clothing company to create diabetes-friendly design - The Denver Channel

Posted: 05 Oct 2019 02:04 AM PDT

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Forever 21 Underestimated Young Women - The Atlantic

Posted: 03 Oct 2019 07:33 AM PDT

Delia's was the canary in the coal mine of teen-girl retail. The iconic 1990s clothing brand first flourished through its ubiquitous catalogs, which put inexpensive, of-the-moment clothes such as babydoll dresses and baggy jeans into the wardrobes of American adolescents. Then, in the 2000s, Delia's became a physical place: The company opened more than 100 stores in suburban shopping malls, eventually reaching 33 states. By the end of 2014, however, Delia's was done—bankrupt, with its stores closed and its catalog out of print.

Many of Delia's mall competitors soon succumbed to similar fates. Wet Seal, Quiksilver, Pacific Sunwear, Aéropostale, The Limited, Rue21, Papaya, Claire's, and Charlotte Russe have all since filed for bankruptcy protection. Many other retailers have closed stores, changed strategies, or restructured businesses. Earlier this week, after months of speculation, one of teen apparel's biggest power players joined that ignominious club: Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy. The store plans to close hundreds of locations and cease operations in dozens of countries in an effort to save the business.

There's no single reason that so many stalwarts of the American mall have fallen on such hard times. Shopping-center foot traffic has been on the decline. Internet commerce is ballooning in popularity. Some mall retailers expanded too quickly and have real-estate and inventory albatrosses around their necks. Some just make stuff people don't really want. But for teen-focused retailers like Forever 21, whose businesses have sputtered in a time when kids are primed to shop from the first moment they clutch their mother's smartphone, one miscalculation looms large. Those mall stores helped seal their own fates by underestimating the sophistication and resourcefulness of young people.

Since its rapid expansion in the early 2000s, Forever 21 has been among the quickest and dirtiest participants in the quick and dirty "fast fashion" business that has come to dominate the American apparel market. Fast fashion is what it sounds like: Global behemoths such as Zara and H&M have built massive, highly efficient supply chains in which low-wage garment workers turn cheap textiles into of-the-moment clothing that's distributed around the world as quickly as possible and sold for next to nothing. At Forever 21, a tank top costs as little as $2.90. The brand's average store has grown to nearly 40,000 square fe et—more than 30 percent bigger than the average Best Buy. That's a lot of cheap tank tops.

The constant novelty of Forever 21 proved especially enticing to Millennials, who were in their teens and early 20s in the 2000s. For them, walking into a Forever 21 became the teen-retail equivalent of entering a casino: a cavernous, disorienting chamber of sequins and patterns and forbidden pleasures. Instead of booze and gambling, the vices offered were more kinds of $12 Daisy Dukes than a 15-year-old in 2006 could have imagined. Forever 21, like its fast-fashion compatriots Zara and H&M, succeeded because it gave young people the thrill of personal choice, more so than any other business model in the world. It crippled some of those other models in the process.

Now, Forever 21 is in trouble for exactly the same reason as the stores it out-muscled: It's being beaten at its own game. Unlike Millennials, who were compelled by the abundance of Forever 21 and saw its wares as an opportunity to better adhere to existing trends, Generation Z consumers—kids currently in grade school and college—just see a bunch of cheap stuff that everyone already knows about. The familiar is a hard sell to today's young shoppers, according to Thomai Serdari, a fashion-branding strategist and marketing professor at New York University. "A big difference with Generation Z is that they're not all trying to look the same," she says.

Previous generations of consumers "were not as informed," says Serdari. Gen Z "likes to do research, they have a limited budget, they spend online because they can get better deals." In other words, being large, cheap, and geographically convenient—Forever 21's main selling points—are no longer impressive to a huge proportion of its market, even if Forever 21 believes it has the capacity to clothe the goths, the punks, and the VSCO girls.

As young people have rapidly become more digitally adept and more constantly connected, online-only fast-fashion retailers like FashionNova and ASOS and smaller specialty brands like Brandy Melville have chipped away at Forever 21's consumer base with more sophisticated branding, better use of social media, and a better understanding of design trends. They're also not weighed down by Forever 21's brick-and-mortar leases for more than 700 stores across the globe, which are widely cited as the biggest practical barrier to the company's return to profitability.

Forever 21 declined to comment on its future plans, but in an interview with The New York Times, executives said that in addition to closing some stores, the company would seek to renegotiate other leases with malls, many of which are eager to retain large retailers. Forever 21 also still has excellent name recognition among young shoppers, and the company claims that as much as 40 percent of its clientele is between 25 and 40—a group of people whose shopping habits are better understood by the corporations selling to them. Still, Serdari says that older shoppers tend to follow along with what younger people do, which means many people over 25 are likely adopting Gen Z's tactics as we speak.

A desire for individuality isn't the only thing driving young people away from mall retailers, according to Serdari. "We have a new generation that is more sophisticated in the sense that they are more interested in what they're consuming," she says. "They have strong convictions about what they should be wearing and the ethical and authenticity aspects of it, and transparency in terms of manufacturing—especially the ones that are really concerned about climate change." She pointed to Greta Thunberg and the success of her recent student climate protests as an indicator of what Generation Z is willing to do in order to stand up for their beliefs.

For some young consumers, those beliefs mean eschewing fast fashion—a business shot through with ethical, environmental, and human-rights problems—in favor of buying clothes secondhand. Teens have been gifted thrifters for generations, but start-ups like Depop have turned that facility into something that can be done on a far larger scale. These start-ups allow young people to buy used clothing from each other and scour the internet for weird finds from the backs of strangers' closets. Coming up with a real Guns N' Roses tour shirt is far more of a triumph than buying a reproduction off the rack at the local mall—plus, no one else at school will have it.

Depop has become so popular with young people that the app is now its own social-media ecosystem, complete with its own entrepreneurial success stories and breakout stars. That growth, along with all the other ways that the internet lets teens explore identities and aesthetics for themselves and find things they like, has started to change how fashion trends form in and of themselves. "It's now much more common to see trends growing from the bottom up, and then the press catches on to them, and then they become mass-marketed," says Serdari.

This time, though, the winner isn't a business, but young people themselves, who have outsmarted the very businesses that used to be so good at raiding the paychecks from their summer jobs. Before social media—and particularly before Instagram, which is massively popular among American adolescents—fast-fashion retailers could crib from luxury designers and deposit their own spins on high-end trends in stores before price-conscious consumers could know what was coming. Now, by the time Forever 21 catches on to something, even its quick supply chain might not be enough to satisfy people who have already known about a trend for weeks.

It might be social media, not online shopping itself, that presents the biggest problem for Forever 21 as it moves forward. Young Americans have the most direct window into the lives of others that they've ever had, which means they're acutely aware of how people shop, and any particular marketer's ability to influence their decisions is limited by the fragmented, decentralized way that adolescents learn about the world.

Gen Z isn't brand-loyal, according to Serdari, and why should they be? Forever 21 might have taken choice and affordability to its logical extreme within the confines of a shopping mall, but no one clothing company can compete with the internet itself—and the resourcefulness of the people born into using it.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Man arrested in 1991 cold case killing of 16-year-old girl - ABC News

Posted: 04 Oct 2019 11:28 AM PDT

Twenty-eight years after a 16-year-old girl was found slain outside her Washington state high school, a man is now in custody, linked by DNA to the crime, authorities say.

Patrick Nicholas, now 55, is accused of killing Sarah Yarborough on Dec. 14, 1991, when she arrived at her high school in Federal Way, just outside of Tacoma, on an early Saturday morning to meet her drill team, King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht said.

Yarborough was beaten and strangled to death with her stockings, according to court documents. Nicholas was 27 at the time, according to documents.

A man jogging that morning noticed a girl lying motionless on the ground and a man kneeling over her, according to court documents. But the jogger thought, "they were a couple 'making out' and jogged on," according to documents.

Just after 9 a.m., two 12-year-old boys saw a man emerge from the bushy hillside near the school; after the man walked away, the boys looked by the hillside and saw the teen's body, dressed in a drill team uniform, documents said.

While semen was discovered on the teen's clothes at the crime scene, and the DNA profile was searched regularly in state and national DNA databases, no match was made for decades, according to documents.

Last week, genealogists working on the case zeroed in on two brothers identified through the novel investigative technique known as genetic genealogy, which uses an unknown suspect's DNA to trace his or her family tree.

One of the brothers identified by the genealogists was ruled out, because he had a prior rape conviction and his DNA was in CODIS -- and the DNA wasn't a match, according to court documents.

The second brother was Patrick Nicholas. He had served time in prison for an attempted rape from 1983, but his DNA was never entered into CODIS, according to the court documents.

Patrick Nicholas had also been arrested in 1993 for child molestation for which he pleaded guilty to a fourth-degree charge of gross misdemeanor assault, according to court documents.

This weekend investigators surveilled 55-year-old Nicholas and collected a cigarette that he'd tossed on the ground, court documents said.

The cigarette was sent for testing, and investigators learned Wednesday that the DNA from the cigarette matched the DNA on Yarborough's clothes, documents said.

Nicholas was taken into custody Wednesday night for first-degree murder, authorities said.

Almost 4,000 tips had been submitted in the Yarborough case by the time of the arrest -- but none of the tips identified Nicholas, King County Sheriff's Detective Kathleen Decker said at a Thursday news conference.

There's no apparent connection between Nicholas and Yarborough, Decker said.

The prosecution says Nicholas will have an arraignment hearing on Oct. 17. No defense attorney is assigned to him yet.

Sarah Yarborough's mother, Laura Yarborough, spoke at a news conference on Thursday where the arrest was announced, and she called her slain daughter an excellent student, who always had a book in her hand. The teen was excited for college, with big hopes and dreams for her future, her mother said.

The sheriff said, "few things in law enforcement are more rewarding than telling a parent that you believe you have solved the murder of their child."

Laura Yarborough said even when she gave up at times, the detectives never did.

"If you're going to do something heinous, don't do it here. Because they'll come to get you," Laura Yarborough said.

Colorado sixth-grader inspires major clothing company to create diabetes-friendly design - The Denver Channel

Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:00 AM PDT

GOLDEN, Colo. -- Sometimes the best ideas are are born out of necessity. And in this case, a sixth-grader from Golden decided to do something when she saw a need for more pockets in her clothing. Sabrina Streich was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 8 years old.

She's always been active and she wears a Dexcom G6 continuous glucose monitor to keep tabs on her blood-sugar levels. The monitor sends information to her phone and her parents so they always know how she's doing. She will soon be wearing an insulin pump too and realized it was hard to hide all the devices in her clothing.

"That's why I wrote Athleta telling them I need more pockets because girls just in general don't have pockets in their clothes and we need more pockets, just as much as the boys do," said 11-year-old Streich.

Streich wrote a letter to the Gap-owned active wear brand Athleta. She also included a sketch of a sweatshirt that showed extra pockets. She was shocked when she received a letter back that was signed by several designers at the company.

"And later they talked to me saying they wanted to make my sweatshirt. 'Are you available to come on this conference call to talk about it?' And I was really excited because normally big companies like that don't respond to letters," said Streich.

During her first ever conference call, she said they asked her questions about the design like how big she wanted the pockets to be. They also asked about her favorite colors.

The company had one more question for her, they asked if she would like to fly to San Francisco to model the sweatshirt for an upcoming catalog. Streich flew out to California with her mom and modeled the sweatshirt that she helped create. It was a true dream come true.

"That was really cool because I just wrote this letter and now they want me to model my sweatshirt," said Streich.

Streich was celebrating her 11th birthday when Denver7 interviewed her at school. She plans to continue celebrating on Sept. 15, when a group of friends will join her for a walk to support the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. The inspiring little girl has already raised $5,000 for her team, the Golden Glucose Warriors.

She beams when she thinks about the fact that her letter to a major company made a difference. She hopes the sweatshirt will help other girls with Type 1 diabetes and she hopes her story will show other kids what they can do.

"I think kids, girls, boys — we can do anything," said Streich.

Athleta chose a fitting name for the sweatshirt. It's called "Own Your Power" and surely someone at the company must have been thinking about this sixth-grader when they picked the name.

"I think I owned my power and wrote this company with my power to tell them that girls need pockets," said Streich.