Mall Culture

December 1999 | From Milan to the Mall of America

Jan 11, 2025

THE POST YOU RECEIVED THIS MORNING HAD A TECHNICAL ERROR THAT PREVENTED VIDEO FROM UPLOADING

WE ARE RESENDING YOU NOW SO YOU CAN SEE THIS CRAZY VIDEO!!

(Creator/Writer/Reporter: Amy Atkins. Recorded for a news segment for a local TV station.)

Last week I received the wildest DM from someone I used to know in the late eighties and early nineties named Amy Atkins. She was a TV news reporter who specialized in “style” and she used to interview me a lot in the olden days. I almost died when I watched the crazy video segment she sent of me (above) being interviewed in 1991 for her prime-time channel five news show segment about how much I hated shopping malls.

The reason for this story back then was because the enormous American invention (the “shopping mall”) was a fairly recent phenomenon. Suddenly, these gigantic, newly constructed structures that could contain ten football fields and were designed to replicate some demented version of being “outdoors” (in a Disney sort of way) began sprouting up everywhere. So, Amy did this piece, schlepping me to Paramus, New Jersey where one of the biggest malls had just been completed, and interviewed me as the antagonist.

The piece made me laugh hard when I saw that 35 years ago, there I was— ranting about shit much the same way as I still do today!! (Same shit different day) Plus, how about my 1991 lewk????? OMG, it still holds up! My tortoise cat eyeglasses, my Ted Muehling earrings, my psychedelic op-art Yohji Yamamoto skirt, my favorite Claudia Skoda sweater with a big white cross in the front. And those red suede Gucci loafers! Not bad for 35 years ago. I love every single second of this video as I watch a young me struggle to describe what drug being in one of these houses of horrors felt like. And why it was a terrible thing.

Watching this video also suddenly reminded me of one of the columns I wrote 26 years ago after I visited the then-biggest mall in the world: the “Mall of America” in Minnesota. Malls always made me feel like such an alien, being a hardcore nonconforming downtown New Yorker, so I went there as a sort of middle-American social experiment, roaming around this crazy structure as big as an amusement park with Cinnabon food courts, bad musak soundtracks, a jogging lane, and a working Roller Coaster inside. So I asked my patient, wonderful assistant Hannah to rifle through the graveyard of my monthly rants from PAPER years gone by, and BINGO she found this jewel below that fit like Cinderella’s slipper. I wrote it in 1999, eight years after that crazy video was made! Read it! I think you’ll like it.

Oh and watch the video (above) too. It’ll make you laugh and maybe realize how dead shopping malls and department stores feel these days. These vintage zombie-like shopping environments emulating fake outdoors that defined America have been replaced by something a hundred times sicker—THE COMPUTER SCREEN, where you don’t even have to walk around at all. And you can buy anything you want at two in the morning.

It makes me realize that it’s no wonder the young kids are so intrigued these days by analog elderly relics/ OGs like me who still pay for shit with cash or credit cards, not Zelle or phone tap. I feel like many of these kids coming up that I know and love are curious to hear from us elders what it was like to dial a telephone, make a magazine with a matt knife and wax machine, or develop film in a can. Who knows what in God’s name the next shopping paradigm will be after the Bezo’s Amazon model becomes tired, but I’m sure good old American ingenuity will further add insult to injury and push us into some new kind of dystopian shopping scenario before the world actually ends. I just hope it has nothing to do with Greenland. K.H.

(Cover of D’Angelo)

December 1999 | Style Search

I’VE BEEN TRAVELING LIKE MAD LATELY. Just this past month I swept through Milan for the collections, then Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Miami, and Baltimore flogging our new book, From Abfab to Zen. In many places that I visit, I often feel like an alien misfit. Perhaps it's because I've grown accustomed to living in a city where the streets are full of diverse, electrified, culture-saturated, style-savvy freaks. To keep me from feeling like I'm on Mars, I've kind of made a game of searching for style and someplace that feels like home in each city. Now this is tricky, especially when you go someplace where you know nothing and no one—and especially when your home is New York City. My partner David and I have found that a safe bet is to stay close to the underdogs—immigrants, artists, gays, and other minorities—and you will find the best, most creative stuff in each city. With only hours to see Minneapolis, we put ourselves in the hands of a sixty-something taxi driver, telling her to "take us where the artists live." (That was all we could think of saying to her, as we knew nothing of the neighborhoods in that big city.) Although she thought we were nuts, she ended up taking us to the red light district, where we found the best army surplus store we had ever seen. In Chicago, we found ourselves in Lakeview, the gay section (aka Boystown), wandering through an enormous, fantastic vintage clothing store called Flashy Trash. Although we were in Baltimore for only six hours, a friend told us to meet her at the American Visionary Art Museum, a fantastic museum of the insane. Now that made us feel at home.

Last week, I caught myself rejoicing at a pair of bad glittery platform shoes in the window of a Steve Madden shop in the midst of the gargantuan Mall of America, just minutes from the Minneapolis airport. Seeing those eccentric shoes in that frightening mallified environment immediately made me feel less like an alien, giving me a strange sense of relief and familiarity.

Just minutes before, as if in a dream, I had floated through shops like All-About-Purple, Successories, and Magnetic Attractions (sounds like Mr. Mickey's wet dream) into a boutique filled with Jesse "The Rock" Ventura dolls and "I Love Shopping" sweatsuits just as a roller coaster filled with screaming 10-year-old blond girls—all wearing tight-fitting pastels and heavy makeup—whizzed directly overhead. In the atrium one tier below, hundreds more of these girls were screeching as they ogled models in the Miss Teen Magazine fashion show. Like zombies, David and I were negotiating our way through a 4.2-million-square-foot nightmare—a shopping mall so large you could fit 28 Statue of Liberties inside it if they were lying down. Although this mall-o-sphere induced nausea the moment we arrived, we felt compelled to see it as an unnatural wonder of the world and a pop phenomenon. Let's put it this way: when we gratefully returned to the airport waiting lounge three hours later to catch our flight home, we felt like we had arrived at the lobby of the Pierre Hotel. Thinking back, it's pretty funny that in the midst of what was to me the horror of American mediocrity, it took an ugly pair of platform shoes to make me feel safe.

Now, we New Yorkers have always been snobs about our style. Not our fashion, mind you, but our style. Remember, fashion and style are two completely different entities. Whenever I'm in the bourgeois city of Milan, I see fashion with a capital F everywhere I look. Everybody and their mother (and their grandmother) is running around with Fendi baguettes, Armani suits, Miu Miu shoes, Helmut Lang pants, and Gucci bags up the wazoo. The natives always look great in this town… but everyone always looks the same. This monochromatic upper-class society lacks as much diversity of style as the middle classes of Midwestern mall culture. And being a native New Yorker, this type of conformity and conservatism makes me uncomfortable, whether it's in the Mall of America or Milan.

No matter how long I have lived in New York, every time that airplane brings me home from wherever I've been, my senses wake up and this eclectic, crazy city overwhelms me with its diversity of people, cultures, ideas, and self-expression (i.e., style). So after "Midwest-ing" for a week, I retrieved my luggage and got in line for a cab back to Manhattan. As I loaded the logo-covered Gucci overnight bag I snared in Milan into the cab, the homegirl taxi dispatcher screamed to me, "Hey girlfriend, nice bag. How much did that cost you? $800, right? Where are you going to, Manhattan?” Boy, do I love New York.

MAKES ME FEEL SCARED/LIKE AN ALIEN

Mall of America
Any mall anywhere
Milan
Boston
Beverly Hills
Silicon Valley
Switzerland
Colorado
The South

MAKES ME FEEL AT HOME/HAPPY

Scary neighborhoods/red-light districts anywhere
New York City
London
Baltimore
Downtown Los Angeles
The Mission in San Francisco
Naples
Seattle

POSTSCRIPT

We New Yorkers are heartbroken watching the tragic fires unfold in LA. Please if you can help our Los Angeles brothers and sisters with donations at this terrible time. It’s all about community.

American Red Cross

California Fire Foundation Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund

Wildfire Recovery Fund

Mutual Aid LA Network

LA Regional Food Bank

Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund

California Fire Foundation

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles

Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation

World Central Kitchen

How to volunteer:

Canine Rescue Club