dELiA*s

» see delias.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

delias never reached me, and it was never going to. it was a paper catalog mailed to teenage girls in the united states, a whole world of american mall fashion that had no route to a boy on dial-up in turkey. i know it now the way you know any piece of someone else's childhood, secondhand, from reading about it later.

two Yale roommates, Stephen Kahn and Christopher Edgar, started it in new york in 1993. the pitch was simple and, at the time, ignored: almost every catalog was aimed at women thirty and older, so they built one for the college-aged and the teenagers instead. the format they invented, part magazine and part catalog, went out by the tens of millions. by 1998 they were mailing around 55 million copies a year, and the 1999 IPO priced shares as high as sixty-six dollars.

for years delias was the leading name selling to american girls between about ten and twenty-four. it moved onto the web early and kept the same feel, that specific late-90s teen aesthetic that a lot of people now remember with a real ache. the clothes and the fonts, all of it was a mood as much as a store.

~ the dossier ~

~ what really happened ~

the retail expansion is what broke it. delias pushed into physical stores and the economics stopped working, and after losing something like 57 million dollars it filed for chapter 11 in december 2014 and moved to liquidate all 95 of its stores. the website and the shops were shut by march 2015. the name got bought cheaply, relaunched online, licensed out later to a different company, but the delias that mattered ended there.

~ the long tail ~

what survives is mostly nostalgia, and a lot of it. the catalog gets written up in fashion retrospectives, and every few years someone tries to sell the brand back to the people who were the right age for it. i was on the other side of the world and the wrong demographic for all of it, so for me delias is pure history, a thing that shaped a generation of shoppers i never stood next to.

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