Tacoma’s Gap store closes for good this week. Pour one out for the ’90s suburban dream
The sign was blue and iconic, featuring an understated logo that became ubiquitous in 1990s America — announcing a physical destination and the upper-middle-class aspiration it came to represent.
The walls were white — much like so many of the shoppers who embraced the store as a brand and a lifestyle, three letters capable of transforming a kid from the suburbs into something timeless and cool.
The GAP — RIP.
As The News Tribune’s Debbie Cockrell reported earlier this month, the Gap at the Tacoma Mall will close its doors for good Aug. 24. And while the news is hardly shocking given the well-documented struggles of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers in a world increasingly dominated by online commerce, the demise of Tacoma’s Gap store can’t help but inspire a nostalgic (and reflective) trip down memory lane, at least for some.
For suburban white kids of a certain vintage, recalling a time when local malls were the place to be and the Gap was the brand to be seen in — often literally, with a hoodie bearing the company’s name, as if becoming a walking billboard was the height of cul de sac fashion — isn’t hard.
The Gap’s heyday may have been 30 years ago, but I remember it well, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. In a way, it almost seem quaint, given the blatant racism and sexual exploitation of the frat-bro retail mall giant that followed it to prominence, Abercrombie and Fitch.
Back in 2020, the San Francisco-based retailer formally known as Gap Inc. announced plans to close more than 200 stores across the country by early 2024. Originally launched in 1969 as a place where a generation of idealistic young people set on changing the world could buy a decent pair of jeans, the Gap exploded in the early 1990s. By the end of the decade, there were nearly 2,000 stores in the U.S. and the company was recording more than $10 billion in annual sales.
The Gap’s 2020 “restructuring” plan, as these things are described in corporate lingo, also included the planned closure of more than 100 Banana Republic stores across the country, a brand the company acquired in 1983.
In addition to shuttering hundreds of stores in the U.S. in recent years, the Gap ended its retail operations in the United Kingdom and Ireland in 2021.
With the closing of Tacoma’s Gap store this week, the company will have just eight physical locations left in Washington, a total that includes at least three Gap Factory outlet stores like ones in Auburn and Centralia.
Asked about the Gap’s retail presence in Washington beyond this week’s closure of the Tacoma Mall location, a spokesperson for the company told The News Tribune on Tuesday that “We don’t have any other news to share.”
Statements provided to The News Tribune also indicated that the company’s latest earnings will be announced later this week, including “updates on our real estate strategy.”
Previously, the Gap has described the closures as part of an effort to foster “a smaller and healthier fleet of stores.”
As a child of the ‘90s, coming clean about my history with the Gap is complicated. I’m not necessarily ashamed of it, since expecting a teenager from the burbs to see through slick marketing and the trappings of pop culture consumerism — not to mention the socioeconomic and racial dynamics at play in mainstream marketing of the time — feels like a lot to ask. But there’s also a reason the Gap, for all of its market dominance and variations on khaki pants, became a Saturday Night Live punchline. I wish I’d been savvy enough to realize it at the time.
But, in the early ‘90s, I wasn’t savvy. That’s the thing. I was just hopelessly awkward and desperate to fit in with the popular kids at school. And shopping at the Gap — with its pocket T-shirts and button-down shirts and cologne that smelled like fresh cut grass mixed with a splash of household cleaner — was an easy way to do it.
The illusion of exclusivity, via a mass-produced label and brand.
It was a simpler time, for better and worse — a distinction that, at least in hindsight, often boiled down to how much money your family had for school clothes.
Thirty years later, of course, all of this seems so naive and dumb. I changed and the world changed, too, hopefully for the better. While looking back on the Gap’s ad campaigns from the ‘90s reveals no shortage of diverse models — from cultural fixtures like Whoopi Goldberg and Spike Lee to omnipresent fashion icons like Naomi Campbell — the fact remains: Even if the company was ahead of its time in some regards, what the Gap was selling, more than anything, was membership to a club, and a lot of kids like me bought in, with a little help from their parents.
Has the emergence of online shopping been an equalizing force, even as it has doomed the storefronts and food courts of our youth? Maybe, but it seems unlikely, given the history of style and U.S. culture. If anything, it’s probably even trickier now.
The thing is, I wouldn’t know.
Today, I’m just an old guy looking for a decent pair of jeans — something that feels increasingly hard to find.
Seems like there must be a market for that.
