Mall Malaise

Last week, while the dog was having the growth removed from her paw, we had several hours to kill while waiting for the vet to call and tell us when we could go back and pick her up. We could have gone home, but we would have had to drive back. The vet was near the mall, and I had an errand I needed to do there anyway, so that's where we spent our afternoon.

I hadn't been in a mall in at least a couple of months. With the end of summer upon us, I figured this would be a good opportunity to check out the first arrivals of fall clothing, but I came away more disappointed than anything else. The Proper Bostonian hates malls, and I'm starting to feel the same way.

As much as I love shopping online, I also enjoy shopping in stores, for several reasons. You can inspect things up close and check on construction and fit, you see colors more realistically than on a monitor, you may get ideas about ways to wear certain items from what they are displayed with, and in a setting like a mall, there's a wide assortment of merchandise to see in the various stores.

The problem was that, in store after store, nothing interested me. There seemed to be a lack of differentiation, a lack of variety. Most of the smaller stores skew too young for me these days. If you're in a mall with two or three major department stores, they all have more or less the same stuff from the same typical department store brands. These days the prevailing trends seem to be beach bum, Jersey Shore, and fashion-dude.

In department stores I've never been hesitant to shop house brands, which used to offer viable alternatives to the Ralphs and Tommys. But as profits have become harder to realize, store chains have cut back on house-brand offerings. Now everything available is bland, lowest-common-denominator stuff that's meant to appeal to the widest possible audience.

Even Nordstrom, a store I've always considered a cut above, let me down. There's a much heavier emphasis on the young men's section than I would have expected, given that their prices are typically higher and younger men typically have less money to spend. And the stuff for the middle-aged guys skews toward logo-laden Faconnable (once independent, how a house brand) and what some people refer to as "restaurant shirts"—you know, those brightly-colored striped shirts with contrasting inner cuffs meant to be worn turned up. Ecch.

As I walked from store to store around the mall, I kept thinking how much I still miss Martin+Osa, which used to have a store in this particular mall. Their stuff really hit a sweet spot for me in terms of style, fit, and value. But American Eagle pulled the plug on the brand a year and a half ago, and the stores finished liquidating their remaining stock about a year ago.

Since then I have more or less replaced them with Lands' End Canvas, but LEC seems to be treading water, and this fall's offerings aren't impressing me. Ditto for L.L. Bean Signature, which has been scoring points with the menswear bloggers but doesn't seem to have much to offer me.

J. Crew has been my go-to brand for some time, and there is always something there that interests me, but the stores often don't have the space to stock a full collection, and while I have to credit the men's-only store in Copley Place for the breadth of selection in a relatively small space, it has no sale merchandise.

I've gone through phases like this before, when I felt like there was nothing out there of interest to me. This is typically when I'd turn to eBay or Style Forum in search of elusive pieces from years past. I'll probably do some of that searching, but the truth is, there's very little I need at the moment, so maybe this is a good time to take a break from shopping. It might be difficult, but if there's nothing to buy it will be slightly easier.