\n<\/p>\n
Mostly, I remember the fluffy pens. When I was in elementary and middle school, nothing could be cooler than a fluffy pen, at least until it got covered in backpack grime and started to look like an exceptionally long-tailed subway rat. And no place had fluffy pens in abundance like Claire\u2019s, a chain that sold accessories and other trinkets and, at the time, seemed to exist in every shopping center in America. Mine had an entire wall of fluffy pens, in every color, usually for some kind of absurd deal that allowed even a child to feel the intoxicating rush of acquisition. This was what Claire\u2019s was for. It was a temple to girlhood, a place where everything was frivolous and where tooth-fairy money could make dreams come true.<\/p>\n
But Claire\u2019s is in trouble. Earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, for the second time in a decade, and began liquidating. Today, it announced that it would be selling the majority of its North American business to the private-equity firm Ames Watson, for $104 million, with the intention of keeping some of its stores open. Claire\u2019s has been saved, at least in the short term, but Ames Watson has its work cut out for it. Claire\u2019s is a mall store, and malls are dying. Inflation, higher interest rates, and rising labor costs have further squeezed profits\u2014true for basically every company, but when your primary customers don\u2019t have jobs, they don\u2019t react well to raising prices. Recently, President Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs have complicated Claire\u2019s business model, which is heavily reliant on imports: From November 2024 to April 2025, 56 percent of its inventory came from China. The company is about half a billion dollars in debt.<\/p>\n
Claire\u2019s started as a wig shop in the 1960s before merging with an accessories retailer in 1973, and then getting into the ear-piercing business and staking its claim on preteen girls. It specialized in cheaply made, kaleidoscopically tacky junk, destined to dye your skin green and then end up in a landfill. It was bad, in the aesthetic sense and the environmental sense. But\u00a0 Claire\u2019s was special to me, because it was for<\/em> me. It wasn\u2019t the checkout aisle at a store for older women or the costume corner of a kids\u2019 store. It wasn\u2019t for impressing boys; it was for impressing girls. It felt like a clubhouse. I can still remember how it smelled, like chemicals and vanilla cookies. I remember the purple walls, covered floor-to-ceiling in all the instruments of tweenage self-expression: charm bracelets, toe rings, impractically small purses, hair clips made to look like gummy bears or butterflies. I remember how easy it was to buy a pair of clear-lensed glasses or a flimsy flower crown and try on a new identity, how Claire\u2019s made figuring out who you were and what you liked feel fun and low-stakes.<\/p>\n I remember getting my ears pierced there, obviously, by someone who couldn\u2019t have been much older than I was, one of my hands clutching my mother\u2019s and the other clutching my best friend\u2019s. Claire\u2019s seemed to exist for precisely that time in one\u2019s life: old enough to get your ears pierced, young enough to be scared; old enough to want a purse, young enough to not have much to fill it with; old enough to have the allowance money to buy a scrunchie, young enough to think it could change you. That moment is sacred, and I know now that it ends quickly. By the time I got my nose pierced, only a few years later, I didn\u2019t even consider going to Claire\u2019s. I wanted to go to the local tattoo place instead.<\/p>\n Two decades later, retail has changed. So, I think, has childhood. When I was shopping at Claire\u2019s, my desires were largely assembled in the self-contained ecosystem of King Middle School. Sometimes a friend\u2019s older sister would give me advice, which I treated with biblical reverence, but for the most part, the people telling me what to like were girls my age, whom I knew in real life. This wasn\u2019t totally logical\u2014in retrospect, I probably should not have allowed Gemma S. and An-Hae C. absolute power over my moods, interests, tastes, and values\u2014but it was at least straightforward. I was a kid who shopped like a kid, because the people I was imitating were kids too.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s young people are learning what\u2019s cool on the context-collapsed, algorithmically driven social web, much of the time from professional influencers who are older than them. Tweens still exist as a market category and a chronological distinction, but in practice, they act a lot like teens or even 20-somethings. To the degree that they are even shopping in person at all, it\u2019s often at grown-up places such as Sephora, where they can obsess over which expensive creams to add to their elaborate anti-aging skin-care routines, and Brandy Melville, which stocks clothes that I, an adult, would be perfectly comfortable wearing: high-necked cardigans, striped tops in tasteful neutrals. Maybe they should go to Claire\u2019s while they still can, though, and get their hands on a fluffy pen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mostly, I remember the fluffy pens. When I was in elementary and middle school, nothing could be cooler than a fluffy pen, at least until it got covered in backpack grime and started to look like an exceptionally long-tailed subway rat. And no place had fluffy pens in abundance like Claire\u2019s, a chain that sold<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[10117,1591,1575,10118],"class_list":{"0":"post-16884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-claires","9":"tag-gave","10":"tag-girls","11":"tag-tween"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}