It’s finally the end for Lord & Taylor. After limping along since its Fifth Avenue flagship closed in 2019, the nearly 200-year-old department store chain announced last week that it will close all its locations. The store meant different things to different people: jobs for its workers, dignified clothing for those who passed through its doors to get a special item, glamour for those who bought luxuries there and elitism for those who couldn’t afford it.
It also represented a defunct way of shopping, and a way of life that went far beyond buying clothes. As a New Yorker from birth, I feel the same heartbreak I felt over the shuttering of other homelike, treasured local hangouts that were a tad less elegant — places like Big Nick’s Burger & Pizza Joint, P&G Bar, the Lincoln Square Barnes & Noble and even the old gem room at the Natural History Museum, where generations toddled on the carpeted stairs.
This is not just nostalgia for me. These closures signify how the relentless march of capitalism, now accelerated by the pandemic, has robbed us of spaces to be together and to pass time slowly. And that deeper shift explains why, as store after store shutters, former customers of one retail chain or another may find themselves like me, surprised to be eulogizing a place we stopped patronizing years ago.
I don’t ever recall going into Lord & Taylor alone; the point was to make an outing of it. When I was little, my parents took my twin brother and me there for its annual sales. It was perfect for us: less trendy than Bloomingdale’s, less snooty than Saks, and smaller than Macy’s. You knew what to find on each floor.
During our family shopping missions, I would inevitably get tired and hide under a rack of dresses, or the dark tent of grown-up coats, sitting there unbothered until it was time to go. When I was older, and marginally more interested in material items, my mom and I, often with my grandma, would eat tomato soup in the in-house restaurant before getting a pair of “grown-up” party shoes, or Estée Lauder’s “Free Gift for You” at the lobby makeup counter.
Those trips made me feel adored and included, while also giving me a chance to observe my mom and grandma. They were teaching me how to turn a necessity, like shoes for a cousin’s wedding, into a nice — my grandma always italicized the word when speaking — day together, a lesson I’d apply to excursions with friends, and later my own family. Add lunch, or a snack. Linger, gossip and enjoy, and by the end it won’t matter so much if you find the shoes you wanted.
When I was a teenager rambling the city with girlfriends, the preference was to shop in thrift stores downtown. But the couches and cavernous “ladies’ lounges” of midtown department stores were on a sacred list of places where we could sit and talk without being scolded, a list that also included dingier spots: the sticky vinyl booths of diners, coffee shops with armchairs, and the carpeted aisles of chain bookstores. Today all those places where we lingered might as well be from another world, they seem so inefficient and wonderful.
Shopping has since become digital, slick and quick. As a customer it’s felt as though stores, trying to stave off the “retail apocalypse,” shifted their designs in order to keep us moving. Those couches began disappearing. Full-time, steady retail jobs that provided a decent wage got scarcer. “Fast fashion” — cheap, trendy, sweatshop-reliant and disposable — ruled. Video screens popped up as mirrors grew sparse, to discourage trying items on in the aisles. Lord & Taylor, like its fellow relics, couldn’t keep pace.
My routines changed, too. The last time I went to Lord & Taylor with my mother was almost six years ago, before either of my kids were born. It was my birthday. My mom had just retired and I had an unexpected day off from work. In some ways, our roles had reversed: I was the busier one with an office to look nice for. I was dictating how we should spend the afternoon, and my mom came along for the ride.
But we both remembered my grandma’s rule. Have a nice time. Get something nice. Lord & Taylor made it easy. We had lunch nearby, bought a lipstick each at the Estée Lauder counter and went ice skating in Bryant Park. There was snow on the ground. It was a perfect New York day. I never went back.
Department stores were the slick behemoths of their time, replacing tailors and specialty shops. Now we look back at them as homey and personal — and remember the way they enabled a lost American ideal of middle-class consumerism.
A similar fate befell the country’s bookstores: Outcry met the giant Barnes & Noble stores in the 1990s, when they were seen as threatening smaller local rivals. But then those same megastores were displaced and undercut by Amazon, and their disappearance hurt for the same reason Lord & Taylor’s does: no more open bathrooms and cafes. No more freedom to browse for hours. No more indifference that felt like welcome.
The pandemic has only underscored this loss. There is no such thing, in 2020, as a place to spend the kind of intimate hours department stores facilitated. We can’t gather spontaneously, certainly not inside, and certainly not for an entire day.
Today, I purchase my family’s clothing with a click on my phone in a minute-long break between work, child care and worrying about the news. Only once in half a year have I shopped in person: I bought my kids’ summer sandals by standing on a curb outside our shoe store, telling the proprietor their ages and letting him guess their sizes. I left delighted because it felt so personal and warm compared to almost any other interaction I’d had in weeks.
Of course, the demise of any retail brand is a minuscule dot in 2020’s landscape of horror — and all this nostalgia shouldn’t obscure the fact that online shopping has also enabled more ethical and inclusive fashion, if you know where to look for it.
The internet enables people from all backgrounds, especially Black shoppers, gender nonconforming and trans shoppers and those with different body types, to find clothes that make them feel great without worrying about the judgment or the profiling they might encounter at retail stores. This is no small benefit: It’s a huge step forward.
So yes, the era of department stores has passed. But I wish the best aspects of Lord & Taylor could have persisted into our new world. I would have liked to usher my kids or my niece there someday, maybe for their first suits or shoes for a big party, the kinds of big, in-person events that they may not experience for a long time. We’d start with a bowl of tomato soup and I’d learn about their lives.
Then when we were done, we’d sit on a soft couch somewhere in the store, not worrying about germs, arms around each other and a paper bag with that script logo at our feet, resting before we went home.
Sarah M. Seltzer (@sarahmseltzer) is an editor at Lilith Magazine.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
"used" - Google News
September 03, 2020 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/2Zb11us
Goodbye to Lord & Taylor, and the Way We Used to Shop - The New York Times
"used" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ypoNIZ
https://ift.tt/3aVpWFD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Goodbye to Lord & Taylor, and the Way We Used to Shop - The New York Times"
Post a Comment