It allows you to go to a meeting without looking like the wallpaper, but also without having your outfit upstage your PowerPoint. I’m not exactly a stranger to myself, but I like to look professional, not special. Yes, I’m coming out of the fitting room: Almost everything I own is from Ann Taylor or Loft. As the weather turns nicer and women across the country commence “updating” their wardrobes, I have a confession to make.
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But why is it this cultural punch line?” (I’ve reached out to Ann Taylor’s parent company, Ann Inc., with a request for comment and will update this story if someone gets back to me.)īut there are so few blazers with just the right amount of give, and so many networking lunches to attend.
Or, as Cintra Wilson wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, “The Ann Taylor ethos rubs me the wrong way for the same reason I don’t like white women singing ‘Summertime’ or winos drinking cooking extract: Too much vanilla will make you go blind.” That such a popular brand would garner so many sneers has even prompted some confusion, such as on this D.C. To some women, Ann Taylor is like kale salad or sensible heels or practical underwear: We know we must have it, but we don’t necessarily want to have it. Crew.” Indeed, Ann Taylor’s parent company, at the end of 2017, admitted to having made “fashion missteps.” It’s not for preppy fashionistas (with money to burn) like J. As the retail reporter Mallory Schlossberg wrote in Business Insider, Ann Taylor is “not as cheap as a Forever 21 or H&M.
In the world of mall retailers, it’s in a slightly awkward clothing category between dirt-cheap Uniqlo and the kind of striking outfit you’d want to wear to a dream-job interview. Ann Taylor is “where aspiration meets motivation meets resignation, and that is why it is perfect for Washington,” the columnist Monica Hesse once wrote in The Washington Post. I regularly see women wearing the exact same outfit on the metro.Īnd yet, to admit to shopping at Ann Taylor or its slightly cooler cousin, Loft, is to admit fashion defeat. In Washington, D.C., where I live, it’s as though women are issued a pencil skirt and ponte top, Gilead-style, upon signing their lease. Most women whose titles end in something like coordinator or manager likely own a pair or two of Ann’s sexy-but-not-too-sexy slacks. A recent Saturday Night Live sketch featured a parody store called Fashion Coward, “the only store for people who hate shopping and feel lost and scared.” Contrasting its neutral cardigans with the edgy jackets worn by the truly fashionable, the fake commercial proudly announced that “we keep it safe with things like ‘brown sweater’ and ‘pants for the legs.’” At one point, the actor Emma Stone, playing a customer, says that if fashion tells a story, Fashion Coward’s is, “I’m a stranger to myself.” The end of the skit reveals Fashion Coward’s inspiration: Ann Taylor.Īnn Taylor, the tried-and-true, white-collar women’s retailer, is in the strange position of being both ubiquitous and ubiquitously mocked.