Abercrombie Glitch
I went to the mall the other day, for the first time in a long time, and walked into Abercrombie and Fitch more or less out of force of habit.
I looked around at the clothes for a bit and before long I had a few items in my hands and was walking to the dressing rooms.
I tried on a few different color polos: ash, pea, mustard and navy. I also tried on a pair of low-rize, boot-cut, semi-destroyed, light-wash jeans.
Once I was done slipping out of my clothes and into the ones I had picked out, I lifted my head and took a look in the mirror.
It hit me pretty quick… I looked ridiculous. It’s not so much that the clothes looked bad, or even that they looked bad on me. They just looked wrong. They looked tragic. They were a symbol of failed attempts to look a part. More over, a part that was obviously not me.
The image staring back at me, with it’s slouchy denim and tweaked-just-so collar, wasn’t me at all it seemed. It couldn’t have been. I felt like one of those refrigerator dolls that come with different magnetized outfits that look humorously out of place. It felt like the clothes were wearing me.
Now, all of this is not to bash on the clothing at Abercrombie, which I’m sure is of a high quality and no doubt portrays a certain aesthetic. But the whole affair was certainly disconcerting enough to make me question everything from the definition of youth and maturity, and the strange mechanisms with which people form their identities to my ideal waistline.
The disconcertion was exacerbated later by the realization that I had just had an existential moment inspired by an end of summer sale.