Shrinking the Gap: how the clothing brand lost its way

theguardian.com:

Bring to mind, if you will, Gap’s classic logo hoodie. You know the one: three bold letters arranged in an arch across the chest. It was everywhere in the 1990s and 00s, sold in a rainbow of saturated colours. This sweatshirt didn’t signal a taste for fashion so much as a desire for comfort at a reasonable price. It was like the air we breathed, or the muzak floating around as we prowled the mall, ever-present and hardly worth remarking upon.

Over the years, the sweatshirt faded out of view, until, in 2020, an odd thing happened: it suddenly became a hot fashion item at the hands of gen Z. On Instagram and TikTok, stylish young influencers started posting photos and videos of themselves wearing Gap hoodies. Suddenly these hoodies looked rather hip and cool. The YouTube star Emma Chamberlain posted a series of photos of herself on Instagram, her expression oscillating between detached, sleepy, and slightly mournful, as she stood next to a pool wearing white bikini bottoms and a navy Gap logo hoodie. The post received more than 2.4 million likes.

Over the next few months, numerous influencers incorporated the sweatshirt into their outfits on social media. Barbara Kristoffersen, a Danish influencer with almost 748,000 followers on Instagram, wore abrown Gap hoodie with wide-leg brown pants and a matching Louis Vuitton handbag. The UK-based Lucy Page, with 12,400 followers on Instagram, wore it with cow-print pants and chunky sneakers. “I wish I could tell my younger self that she’ll be back to wearing GAP hoodies in the future,” Page wrote on Instagram.

Soon enough, TikTok’s amateur fashion commentators were declaring the Gap logo hoodie a full-on trend. What happens on fashion TikTok tends to be fleeting, but sometimes these