And Now For Something Completely Different...

A friend recently asked me if I wanted to get together for lunch and to check out the new H&M that had just opened up. H&M is a bit of a joke amongst the balcony members--Wally went to Prague and all her traveling companion wanted to do was go H&M. Prague is Czech for H&M after all! Having never been to H&M, my knowledge was limited to a vague memory that it is Swedish, that Madonna designed a collection for them, and that apparently there are a lot of them in Prague. I HAD to experience it for myself, and happily went along with my friend to embark on a journey into the belly of the beast.

Walking up to the store, it seemed benign enough. Once we crossed the alarmed threshold, we looked at each other with fear in our eyes. This store was big. Egregiously huge. And so white. White flooring, white racks, white lights...it was almost blinding. I was having flashbacks to Forever 21, a store so big and so packed with garish garments it's enough to make anyone have a panic attack. But we quickly realized the store was divided into 3 sections: Women's, Men's, and Baby Hipsters. Whew! It also helped that we had cocktails at lunch, and I was a little...day buzzed, and therefore slightly numbed from the stimulus overload. We separated and began to peruse the racks.

I found myself wondering if perhaps we had entered some sort of time warp, as everything had a 80's/early 90's vibe to it. Think leggings, shirts screen printed with images of an 80's era Minnie Mouse and stills from the movie Flashdance, as well as ditsy floral patterns, acid wash, and plaid, plaid and more plaid at every turn. There were also quite a bit of Hello Kitty screen printed tees. Oh, Hello Kitty. As a kid I liked her and her motley crew. Anthropomorphic critters--what's not to love when you're 7 and in need of stickers or lip gloss? But now I fear Miss Kitty is a sellout. She's EVERYWHERE. On toasters in Bed Bath and Beyond. On a headband at Hot Topic. On a crappy tee at H&M. Oh Kitty, how I miss the days when I only saw you at random Hallmarks or the Sanrio store...wait, ARE THOSE JEGGINGS?!

Yes. We encountered the elusive Jeggings, the half-jean, half-legging hybrid of wonder. The pant of the fashionista in need of comfort, thereby rejecting the cumbersome skinny jean with it's buttons and zippers and rivets. If I hadn't seen them with my own blurry eyes in it's natural habitat I wouldn't have believed it! I'm still not sure I believe it. I think they might have been a crappy-well vodka-lemon drop induced hallucination. Like Bigfoot or pink elephants. THEY HAD AN ELASTIC WAISTBAND! Amazing.

After the Jeggings spotting, we threw our pelts of plaid over our shoulders and weaved a path through the crowd towards the dressing room. As we approached, a teenager and her mother were standing in the way of the line, involved in a heated discussion. It was a classic mother-daughter standoff: daughter was set on buying a dress her mother disapproved of. The daughter, all teen angsty and indignant hissed, "Whatever, MOM. You're you and you're not me, and you don't wear the clothes I wear! I'll buy it with my own money!" My 14 year old self sympathized while my adult self chuckled.

Once the daughter left to pay for her dress, we queued up with other adults, teens, tweens, and moms waiting for a dressing room. It was there that we experienced the "ugly American shopper," who likes to snark on those already admitted to the inner sanctum. In front of us were two girlfriends, one dressed in a strapless dress with a bikini top on underneath, the other in a pair of yellow gym shorts. Bikini top took notice of a woman coming out of the dressing room in a snug fitting shirt dress. "Uh, does she even know how tight that is? It's cute though...I want it! Hold my spot!" she croaked to her friend. Upon returning to the line, bikini top noted that the dress was a size smaller than she'd wear because, "I want it to be like, tight. It'll look good that way."

A couple came up behind us. "You need a haircut" said the boyfriend. "Ugh, I know," replied his mate. A middle aged mother walked out of the dressing room, carrying a itty-bitty bikini bottom. "Oh. My. God" said boyfriend. "I know. Like she could even get a leg in there. I think some things should DEFINITELY only come in certain sizes" replied girlfriend. A few minutes later, he mother walked back to the dressing room, bigger bikini bottom in hand.

Eventually some dressing rooms freed up and we began to try on our clothes. Oh, the clothes. They all came with those little hanger ribbons sewn into the seams. You know the ones--those little loops of fabric or plastic that are meant to keep a blouse or dress on a hanger, but just end up being itchy and wiggling their way out of the top until you break down and cut them out with scissors. Each and every piece of clothing had these loops wrapped around the hanger multiple times, requiring one to untwist them and serving to slow down the process. Once I had finally freed the clothes from their hangers and tried them on, I noticed that they would occasionally fit true to size, but more often than not it would be too big or too small. It was almost as if we had stumbled into a clothing wonderland, where small was large and large was small and nothing made sense anymore. That being said, I did end up buying a floral top and a dress. In plaid.

We found ourselves walking back towards the alarmed border of the store relatively unscathed. As we tumbled out into the dimmed mall lighting, wares in hand, I thought to myself that wasn't so bad. H&M: a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.