One exception to the dearth of tech in the mall is Amazon Style, which chose Caruso’s The Americana at Brand for its first foray into brick-and-mortar apparel retail. It would seem a no-brainer to have a rotating YouTube store curated by the biggest creators, for example, or a TikTok pop-up with influencer-designed or curated product. is the capital of social media influencers, but they were not evident in malls, as one would expect. Until then, it’s a wonder why social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok aren’t making their way to the store floor, with rapid-fire trend spotlights, or as a means of curation and discovery of goods brought from screen to rack. malls are meeting teens’ interests by clustering teen retail tenants like Forever 21, Zara and H&M in close proximity, serving up bubble tea and cupcake vending machines, eyebrow threading and K-pop emporiums - and sometimes offering something extra.ĭigital is looming, and in the not-too-distant future, the metaverse could be the new mall, or the old mall could be a hybrid of the metaverse and the physical, where you buy an NFT to pick up the corresponding IRL sneaker. Malls have historically played a key role in teen socialization and discovering a sense of style, Lange notes in her book. Many malls already have gyms as tenants, why not add a quiet room for studying or a conference room that can be reserved for meetings? Mall operators could brand their own membership lifestyle centers, with outdoor, fitness, medical and working spaces - or brands could do it themselves - say, the Universal Studios City and Office Walk, or the Apple or Louis Vuitton Life Work Centers. could use some of its vacant retail acreage to develop a more accessibly-priced coworking space? Which begs the question that instead of building more elitist private clubs, maybe L.A. Except, at Westfield Century City over the last week, more than one young worker escaped the COVID-19-era work-from-home doldrums by posting up with earbuds and a laptop in the attractive outdoor lounge areas. malls, from the oldster coffee klatches in multiple languages at the Farmers’ Market at the Grove to the teen sneakerheads high-five-ing each other in line for the latest drop at Foot Locker in the Beverly Center, to the preteen beauty junkies dipping in and out of Sephora at The Americana for try-ons, then sitting outside and posting their photos on social media. It’s not like that part of humanity has died.” But if you can get the kind of communitarian, experiential, fun social part of shopping working again, people do want to do that. “There are larger issues in retail, some of which are dragging them down. “It’s not the mall that’s the problem,” said Alexandra Lange, author of the new book “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall” (Bloomsbury Publishing). They are going wearing trendy crop tops and bike shorts, and they are going because there is a need for somewhere to go that’s not home. The teen scene was bleak, with few teens hanging out - they might rather shop Shein online or get style ideas from TikTok.īut they are going for Din Tai Fung dumplings, to see “Top Gun: Maverick,” and to score at sneaker drops.
area over the last couple of months, I can report that people are still going, though not in droves (there’s plenty of parking), and not always for shopping. Still, visiting about a dozen malls in the L.A. In a glaring sign of the dominance of online search and shopping, The Westside Pavilion is now One Westside, a $180 million adaptive reuse project that turned 240,000 square feet of the Hudson Pacific- and Macerich-owned mall’s retail space into a leafy creative office campus for Google, Amazon, Netflix, Square and more.
has not been immune to the mall’s struggles. The Sherman Oaks Galleria was the establishing shot for youth culture in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) and “Valley Girl” (1983), while Fashion Square was Cher Horowitz’s respite in “Clueless” (1995).īaldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza and Slauson Supermall were both in Tupac Shakur’s 1996 “To Live and Die in L.A” video lovefest to his hometown, and getting lost at Del Amo Fashion Center in the South Bay drove Robert De Niro to murder in the 1997 film “Jackie Brown.” “Clueless,” Alicia Silverstone, 1995, (c) Paramount/courtesy Everett Collection.
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