Fashion Corner: Boutiques Are Back, Baby!
Voluspa, Voluspa, Voluspa!
Is it a gurly-gurl boutique party on a Saturday afternoon without those heady candle smells? I start with the darker colors, the muskier scents like Baltic Amber, and work my way to deranged lightness — maybe their macaron trio! Have you noticed every American Woman boutique has Voluspa? Chic little mountain-town boutiques, Boise med spas with a retail component, gift shops in Park Slope, Austin souvenir emporiums. Voluspa’s presence is rivaled only by Lollia, the pretty French lotions! Sometimes a girl can have nice things.
I’ve been sustained — and thrilled — by the presence of boutiques lately, a reliable physical structure and set of sensory experiences that make sense to me. Sometimes they are named after their owners, or maybe they’re named just one elegant word (“Plum”) and sometimes two (“Elizabeth’s Embellishments”). The candle-smelling commences as a sort of warm-up lap. Candles are often the first section that’s presented as you say hello to the shop person. This activity serves as a chance to linger as you survey the boutique, its foot paths, and whether it’s worth it to try something on or whether you’ll simply end up feeling like a warm-skinned bother.
Feel free to keep to the right as you pick up a coaster with a local photographer’s work, apply two spritzes of perfume samples, look at three matte prints, and glance over the Blue Q towels (going with a general boutique brand sampling here). Three-fourths of the way through, pick up something a teensy bit fragile that nearly slips out of your hands. A chill comes over you as you smile nervously and place it carefully back. Obviously each boutique has its own ambiance, and some are unexpectedly intense. One of the last boutiques I stopped in was filled to the brim with cowhide furniture, tons and tons of material from Louis Vuitton bags that had been repurposed into western-wear clutches with bolts and zebra print, and a $20,000 life-sized horse tiled with tiny disco mirrors. My sister bought a hat that read “Mommy Juice” in Christian font.
Few things beat the sensory pleasure — and sometimes ennui — of walking into a boutique on an aimless afternoon. There is often a little bit of weird energy! For instance, my sister and I walked around a store in a Colorado mountain town where the older matriarch of the business growled “Where are you from?” and, startled, my sister asked her to repeat herself. Growling once again, my sister answered fearfully and the woman responded nonchalantly that they would be at a rodeo in Houston soon. It’s just that sort of tight, mysterious give-and-take that rules in boutique world.
Anyhow, boutiques are back! That’s what I’m getting at here. I had a suspicion this was happening, then Matt and Viviana of THNK1994 museum fame started sharing TikToks from Rita Ellen’s Boutique down in Marietta, Georgia. In these videos, Rita Ellen struts up to mirrors and out the door of her store as “Roses (Imanbek Remix)” and Olivia Rodrigo plays. She models various flowy, Monet-flowered tops and capris, standing in one video next to a bucket of lemons and a sign reading, “When life hands you lemons…BUY the TOP”
“The second we saw Rita Ellen on TikTok we knew boutiques were back,” Viviana texts me. “Her brilliant slogan ‘shop the top’ spoke to us. One pair of nice pants and mix it up with different tops. Essential in this day and age. Outfits are great but are they sustainable? Boutiques have different items from different places. You’re not shopping what a board of CEOs have picked out for you, you’re shopping what Rita Ellen has picked out for you. It’s intimate, it’s needed.”
@ritaellensboutique #whenlifegivesyoulemons #buythetop #keepsmiling #shopon #boutique #getitgirl #nevertoooldtohavefun
After Matt and Viviana introduced me to Rita Ellen, I came across a headline that moved me emotionally — and also corroborated this bit of Very Famous trend forecasting. “People Liked Malls” read Amanda Mull’s article for The Atlantic. She wrote about big, bad Amazon and how, like a friend who encouraged you to break up with your ex only to start dating them, they’re opening up stores in the very malls they killed.
The Wall Street Journal reported on August 19 that Amazon was planning on building several locations of a new retail concept that would focus on clothes, housewares and electronics aka A DEPARTMENT STORE! Like total demons, they’ve also experimented with bookstores and convenience stores. After describing the dilemmas that online retailers have faced, Mull writes:
What solves all of these problems—the high return rates, the cost-prohibitive last-mile freight, the logistics nightmares, the buyer frustration, and the monumental volume of consumer waste it all sends to landfills—on some level? Stores. Going to a store. In America especially, this notion was obvious for more than a century. Department stores were actually such a good idea, something that people like so much and that works so well, that the Gilded Age barons who invented them used their stores to create middle-class identity from near whole cloth and keep it going for generations.
There will be a return to pretty things and pretty experiences. Marcia Williams, a Philadelphia hair and makeup artist, was interviewed by Fortune about how excited she was to return to the mall once she was vaccinated. She does, however, miss the champagne served at Tiffany’s. “Those are the experiences I missed,” she said. Retail analyst Morning Consult found in a survey that shoppers are more comfortable shopping in boutiques and department stores over malls.
Boutiques rule pretty experiences, which obviously we are not entirely in the clear to return to. But plates of small cookies and plastic flutes will be set out again, and if you do a search for “new boutique opens,” one is opening nearly every day somewhere. Stevens Point, Wisconsin just today, Caroline’s Bridal Boutique “added some love to the heart of downtown.” On the 24th, Beautifully Blessed opened in Ripley, West Virginia, and on the 13th, Beautiful Chaos boutique opened in downtown Greenfield, Oregon. Earlier this month on August 4th, Jazzy’s Boutique opened in Freeport, Illinois. It was the success story of a 30-year-old entrepreneur who had been raising her daughter since the age of 14.
“I opened the storefront location to better serve my current online customers and also to provide a place to shop local in my small community,” Beautiful Chaos owner Ashley Karnes told The Highland County Press. “I love helping others and actually work full time as a nurse, but this is a way for me to help women feel beautiful and confident, as we all should.”
When life hands you lemons, head to the boutique nearest you!
