It’s that time of year again! Mark your calendars, ladies—for at least the thirtieth year in a row, it’s time to hurl yourself toward any permanent or semi-permanent structure advertising something—anything!—you can wear for 50% off! Now that you’re over 35, your Black Friday shopping strategy is simple: work your way through the mall of your choice, store by store, until you come to the slow but certain conclusion that you can’t have nice things anymore. Easy peezy!
Start with American Eagle. You might like to admire the button-fly jeans in the window, which if you squint could be something adjacent to age-appropriate, until you catch a whiff of the scent you knew as Curve for Men wafting through the doorway (it’s since been renamed Wander or Drift or something else that fits the nomad-core aesthetic you’re a decade too old to embrace). This smell will bring you back to a linear sense of time and the swift certitude that spaghetti straps are no longer your ally. Keep walking down the concourse.
Soon you’ll notice an Urban Outfitters. You will want to make cautious movements toward what appears to be the Pigeon Lady from Home Alone 2, until you realize that she is in fact a mannequin draped in dozens of hot girl shackets and festival pants. At that point, it’s a good idea to swerve around the tartan Clueless skirt you wore in 1996 and try another store.
Enter Ann Taylor LOFT. Here you should bow your head and try on 15 to 20 faded-print tops shaped like Amazon packages. Go ahead and look too hard at the one with puff sleeves; its seams will disintegrate under the pressure of your stare. Exit this store, too, allowing the remaining tops to vaporize in your arms as you go.
You’re now ready to resign yourself to a life of athleisure. Go on, stride resolutely into a Lululemon! Check out the price tags, then consider the possibility that if you’re going to pay $200 for a pair of leggings, you probably ought to engage in some sort of exercise. Consider the alternate possibility of paying $40 to own the same black belt bag as every other woman living aboveground in the Western hemisphere. Back slowly out the main entrance.
The only place left to turn is nihilism, so you’d better go ahead and enter a Chico’s. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to find you are a size -0000001²! Take your haul into the dressing room, where you’ll be unpleasantly surprised to find those molecularly-sized pants still contain enough pleats to smuggle several cantaloupes through airport security. Exeunt.
At this point, plan to stumble blindly into an Evereve, mistaking its cryptic logo for an interesting local boutique or Celtic crystal shop. Before your third step, you’ll be overtaken by an advancing swarm of saleswomen, but don’t worry. You’ll regain consciousness sometime later in the dressing room, buried under thousands of dollars’ worth of velvet jeans. It’s easy to stage an escape by throwing money at the cash register; from there, you can crawl toward the exit under cover of shredded bills and flying clumps of highlighted hair.
So ends your Black Friday fashion-hunting adventure! Time to go home empty-handed and climb into a large coffin. Set an alarm to emerge in thirty years, or whenever you have enough clout to wear purple windsuits to other people’s weddings. Happy holidays!
