Club Libby Lu For Ultimate American Girls
The girls are missing Club Libby Lu. Last week, Lexi Pro tweeted, “Club Libby Lu is my safe space” and Crybaby Bitch shared, “thinking about club libby lu heart mirrors.” Ana asked if anyone remembered the store and wanted to help bring it back. There was no punctuation because it’s social media, but also maybe because it was more of a feeling than a question.
Club Libby Lu was a chain of mall stores started by former Montgomery Ward and Claire’s executive Mary Drolet. Open from 2000 to 2009, they were pink-and-purple dollhouse paradises built for the young pop star diva in your life. Drolet was, according to business articles from the time, inspired to create Libby Lu by an imaginary childhood friend.
The store’s infrastructure was celebrity. This was demonstrated by heart-shaped mirrors, silver stars, a mall stage, your own personal assistants (employees), and body glitter. Fame used to look a certain way, and Drolet with her Claire’s background knew how to translate that for girls.
“The late 90s and early 2000s were very heavily into this idea of aspirational luxury,” Evan Collins, cofounder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI), tells me over the phone. “It had a lot to do with the time period and what was going on culturally and economically, especially in America.”
Collins and the CARI team — along with their other research group the Y2K Aesthetic Institute — dissect the hyperspecific strains of design that you know on a cellular level but don’t fully recognize until you see it in their research. Take “Global Village Coffeehouse,” for instance, or “Pomo Faux Ruins” — they were all around us in restaurants and grocery stores, but we just never thought much about them.
In March, the Y2K Aesthetic Institute broke down early-2000s aesthetics into subsects like “teenpunk” and “McBling.” Described as a reaction against the “typically restrained and minimalist” style of the ‘90s, McBling looked like Baby Phat’s gold cursive, Paris Hilton’s cellphones and pink rococo wallpaper.
“[People] can have these lush environments where everything’s plush and shiny and glitter,” Collins says. “It’s the kids version of that aspirational luxury you’re seeing with Club Libby Lu.”
For between $25 and $60, girls would be made over by “club counselors” aka employees who sprinkled glitter on them as soon as they walked through the door. They would visit “potion bars” and “pooch parlors” to make their own perfumes, lotions and fairy dust, or pick up a stuffed chihuahua. At the end of the dream day, you’d become a VIP (Very Important Princess) and get a friendship bracelet.
That’s sort of the business pitch though. Let’s read it described for real by Ashley Graves, a 26-year-old whose Twitter bio is currently “take me back to club libby lu.” She wrote this via DM:
the experience was like a daytime slumber party, it was unreal for girls our age, it was like stepping into a glam doll house, there were makeup and changing stations set up- EVERYTHING was pink & purple. you’d be in a group of girls 6-12 or so because that’s the perfect number for a dance routine at the end of your makeover! Duh! i’d be assigned to a girl probably working a summer job before going into her senior year of hs or some shit & she’d put tiny braids in random spots of my hair, spray glitter on it, move to the face and always blue eyeshadow, more glitter, pink lip gloss, more glitter- on to the outfits! okay so my experience with this was gnarlier, i was a chubby girl and they never had any costumes that fit me so i was sausaged into a sequin tube top & tiny black velour bell bottoms, they gave us all fake headsets, taught us 45 seconds of choreo to a Britney Spears song & then shoved us out of the doors of CLL to do the routine for any and all mall patrons that wanted to watch… truly a wild and incredible concept & I’m bummed little girls now have tik tok instead
As you might expect, Libby Lu was generally written about derisively. Back in 2006, Washington Post reporter Lib Copel wrote, “Club Libby Lu sells the particular fantasy of a culture that has given itself over to klieg lights and red carpets, to cheap celebrity and expensive childhoods, to girls who dress like women and women who act like girls.” Remember when everyone was concerned about, like, celebrities and their bad influence and bare stomachs?
A version of the Libby Lu experience today might offer ring lights and, as Collins and I hypothesized, an emptily modern L.A. mansion. He talks about experiential retail in the late 90s and early 2000s as a huge fad when people had money to burn on their wacky ideas. A submarine restaurant is one example, along with concepts like Rainforest Cafe or virtual reality theme parks. “It’s all about treating the customer, giving them a storyline,” he explains. People were less fearful of themes for a while there.
For Sarah, who asked to go by her first name only, Club Libby Lu was her first job in high school. The store was opening at her local mall, and she thought it looked like a lot of fun. A Libby Lu position was a lot of normal retail work during the week, she described to Very Famous via email. Stocking shelves, checking people out, orchestrating the chemistry of lotions, glitter bags and nail polishes. Parties were mostly on the weekends when kids were out of school and parents off work.
“I enjoy working in fun environments (part of the reason I ended up working for the Disney Store for quite a few years also) and being able to let kids pick out how they want their hair, makeup and nails done, picking out goody bags, and doing a fun dance was such a blast,” she wrote. “The kids were always grateful, and it was fun seeing them have such a great time. It also made the longer shifts pass super fast.”
On YouTube, you can find lots of Libby Lu birthday party videos for girls named Taylor, Elisa, Mack, Cameron, Clarissa, and Baylee. There is only one joke video I found titled “welcome to club libby lu, motherfuckers.” featuring some friends messing around in a store, lip-syncing to Samantha Mumba’s 2000 debut hit “Gotta Tell You.” They’re home videos made public with little girls in blonde wigs and sandals stepping gingerly through Hannah Montana choreography. Most of these girls are likely now in their early-to-mid twenties and probably on TikTok, employing some pop star-diva skills learned back when.
Remember the diva? She was marketed big-time to girls and women in the early 2000s, the before or after in a boutique’s name or perhaps suggested more subtly by a stiletto shoe chair. I’ve read many tweets along the lines of, “I grew up going to Club Libby Lu, how could you expect me to not be this extra?”
“Diva was a popular sort of cultural signifier,” Collins says. “You also had this revival of the kitschy, 1960s-chic stuff with feather boas and this idea of minor celebrity. You also had a little bit of this very playful, sort of wacky style. They meet together in this weird melange that I’m still not totally sure where it came from.”
He explains an aesthetic dubbed “Wacky PoMo,” a style popular in retail and marketed to kids with lots of playful, exaggerated forms and styles of architecture. The luxe-hippie combination perplexes Collins, and we reminisce about the tie-dye and smiley faces that tinged our childhoods. For girls, “hippie chick” was one of the fixed Baby-Sitters Club personality archetypes marketed to us.
Mira Hoffmann, a former Libby Lu gurl, tells me a very funny story about a birthday party at Milwaukee’s Mayfair Mall location circa 2002. She writes:
We’d gotten all made up and dressed up and we were putting on ~name tags~ with our REAL NAME (smaller in the corner of the tag) and our POP STAR NAME (in the center). When it was my turn I got mixed up and told them my real name was JLO which they laughed at. Instead of admitting to my mistake I doubled down and insisted that JLO was my given name. Felt ashamed for lying for many years.
Isn’t that just the sort of thing that would haunt you after such a sugar-rush experience? Graves tells me she thinks about Club Libby Lu often “because how could you not?” When she heard this year’s Met Gala theme was American fashion, she says she couldn’t think of anything more American than early-2000s fashion. “If I got an invite to the Met,” she writes, “the first person I’d want doing my hair and makeup is a woman in her 40s who has CLL on her resume.”
Libby Lu’s specter has lingered particularly heavily recently, as we’ve also become nostalgic for conversation pits, cocaine decor and movie-theater carpet. The store and its pink-and-purple funhouse of mirrors and glitter are a natural extension of the dark, mildly crowded spaces we started to crave over the last year and a half. Can you imagine a better place in this world to do a synthetic drug?
In 2008 — the same year America faced its housing crisis — Club Libby Lu’s parent company Saks announced the chain would be closing its 98 locations. Filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield captured both embarrassments of riches with The Queen of Versailles, her 2012 documentary about a billionaire couple’s failed construction of America’s largest home, and a 2007 photo series of girls receiving their Libby Lu makeovers.
Sarah wasn’t surprised when stores closed, especially in light of the recession. “CLL had a large overhead to run the stores with the amount of wasted product from the creations on the walls (fairy glitter, body lotion, nail polish, body shimmer, etc) and replacing of costumes,” she writes. “It also was hard to change with the current trends, it was very much an early 2000’s store and trends were changing.”
Today, she has a daughter of her own who she thinks would “get an absolute joy” out of the Libby Lu experience if it were a more updated, inclusive environment. Graves feels similarly. “I truly wish they would come back, with a tweak or two,” she DMs. “We absolutely should not be putting little girls in tube tops out in the middle of the mall for a show in 2021 lmao BUT makeovers and dancing! Yes! CLL made me confident, social, and no girl forgets her first makeover.”
Somehow I came across a 2017 self-published Amazon book titled, “once libby lu shut down my world fell apart and it’s all been downhill from there.” With a scrapbook-y composition notebook cover, a then-18-year-old named Lillian Santacrose offers dedications to her grandmother (“for telling me art will always be there”), her parents (“sometimes i am surprising”), and Libby Lu’s founder Drolet (“why?”).
In a section of the book called “hi how are you,” she writes:
when i was 8 years old club libby lu shut down and it all went downhill from there so please text me back because the 10 year anniversary is coming up so if you loved me like you said you did you would be here for me in this trying time.
It is what it is! In these trying times, the girls have been thinking about Club Libby Lu.
