ALEXANDRA JACOBS GOES SHOPPING: Ersatz Safari Chain Edition

In this week's Thursday Styles, Critical Shopper Alexandra Jacobs goes to not just any Banana Republic, but the tourist packed flagship in Rockefeller Center. After a cursory history lesson tracing the chain's history from quirky, independent surplus reproduction shop to Gap-owned mega-chain, our shopper admits that she hasn't visited any Banana Republic store in a decade, and proceeds to show how little she has missed in the intervening years. Most pointedly, she is rightly alarmed by the preponderance in the store of short white shorts — at best a tricky fashion choice for most women even at the height of Summer,

...white sateen Bermuda shorts, white dry-clean-only eyelet shorts, white sailor shorts, white shorts cheekily embroidered with tiny crabs, like some late-1970s venereal disease ... wait, no, those were palm trees."

Not tempted by a deeply discounted leftover from L'Wren Scott's Holiday collaboration with the chain, Jacobs chooses to wait for newly appointed creative director Marissa Webb to have some some, hopefully rejuvenating, effect on the chain's offerings, or at least until the upcoming Roland Mouret collaboration hits stores. We get the sense that, aside from the tourists keeping the registers ringing at Rockefeller Center, she is not alone.

Critical Shopper: Is There a Coup Underway? By Alexandra Jacobs (NYTimes)
Banana Republic 626 Fifth Avenue at 50th Street, and at malls everywhere