Alo, Aritzia, and the "West Village Girls" I’ll Always Compare Myself To
“I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day.” was the first time the Taylor Swift phenomenon really made some sense to me, because I always cry on my birthday. And I don’t know why. I wish I didn’t. Because I’m not like bedriddenly depressed or anything. However, I don’t like that we’re all aging against our will and that sometimes it feels like my life moves faster than me.
I only have experience crying on my birthday at home, so the Aritzia fitting room on 5th Avenue was like going to the Super Bowl. That was not embarrassing at all. It was almost like, kind of cool and free-spirited. And if you’ve been to this particular one, you know it’s not your standard fitting room.
This Aritzia has no mirrors in the individual rooms, so you have to step out into this communal mirror zone, which turns into a little runway show for the boyfriends, dads, or whoever got dragged along. And because of the setup, I could see that I was trying on the same things as everyone else, but everything felt slightly off on me. It was either too big, too small, too long, too ugly, or too Republican. Even when the fit was actually perfect, it just wasn’t right. I was so jealous that the clothes looked so much better on the other girls right next to me. I wonder if I wouldn’t have cared so much if stepping out of the changing room didn’t feel like standing in silent competition with everyone else. But I think I was the only one keeping track of the score in a game that no one else was playing. No one else was getting emotional in there.
I was already having one of those days where none of the clothes I already owned felt “right,” and the last thing I wanted was to parade through a crowded store in a dress that looked like a garbage bag on me and gorgeous on the girl right next to me. And it was my birthday! All the clothes should look amazing. That should be a law. But instead of accepting that I could go to literally any store and buy very similar things, I just obsessed over why the same clothes looked everyone but me.
I’m being shallow. I know that clothes are meant to serve the wearer, not the wearer the clothes. So I must be a different type of crazy to want the opposite. Because that’s not how the world works. Even if it’s your birthday. I just wanted the clothes to look good on me. Maybe that’s because I spend too much time on Instagram and TikTok, and this store is everywhere right now. It felt like most of the shoppers were 22- to 25-year-old girls buying their first set of ‘adult’ clothes for real office jobs. And sue me, I also wanted to get more “adult” and slightly more sophisticated clothes because of my job, too. That's why I walked into Aritzia in the first place. Except I don’t work in an office. I work as a hostess in a restaurant in the West Village. It sucks that I could have been a part of something bigger than myself. I could have been so trendy and cool that I was wearing office clothes to a restaurant.
I got over all that, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t treating my job almost like an anthropological exploration on the niche internet sensation that are the West Village girls, and I feel like I can do my people watching more successfully if I blend in. But sometimes I worry that I’m just weird and have a staring problem. Either way, I have to look presentable for work, and because I’m always staring at people’s outfits while I’m at work, I can’t unsee how much Aritzia and also Alo Yoga are being worn right now. Sometimes my job reminds me of the ten minutes I spent at the Greek life fair in my freshman year of college, when I made the gigantic mistake of not wearing Lululemon, and I didn’t end up rushing.
But this isn’t sorority rush, this is the real world. And I need to start being a serious person. So one day, when I could have been reading something meaningful like the news or a good novel, I read that viral New Yorker article, Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl, and decided to conduct a little field study. I’d say about 80 percent of the Gen Z female customers embody the post-grad “West Village Girl” style that the article described, and I wondered what would happen if I did too? I should have stopped myself right there, because this could easily go south. I’m self-aware enough to know that I’m the type to overreact and make dumb material things into existential problems about my identity, but I still decided I was going to do it. At least for one day.
These girls’ styles are different from mine and emulate promises that always seemed just out of reach: an escape from the monotony of my closet, envy of how easily the clothes suited others, and surrender to that little voice in my head that’s always whispering that the truest currency in this world is acceptance. I’m making some big generalizations here, so bear with me. I know the world is more complicated than I’m making it seem. These are just my observations. Around where I work, people 21 to 29 in downtown Manhattan dress eerily alike variations of the same four outfits, and honestly, it started making me feel subconsciously kind of left out at work, even though I know I should just focus on working. Maybe I should have rushed Zeta Tau Alpha. I heard a rumor that they were going to make me sit on a running washing machine and call me a fat pig, but maybe if I followed through with rushing, I’d have thicker skin and could deal with some pants at Aritizia being too long on me.
But it’s not like if they weren’t, that I’d automatically be able to access the lifestyle I overhear the ‘West Village’ girls brag about at work. They always seem to have great jobs, a million friends, perfect sleep schedules, amazing apartments, Equinox memberships, and Aritzia clothes that don’t make you look like you’re beta testing maturity. And I get jealous of all of that. And I think I latch on to the fashion part of it because it’s easier than sitting with the gap between who I am and who I wish I were. And there’s just something about their style that says ‘I’ve got my shit together.’ Even if they don’t. But from my point of view, it kind of looks like they do.
I’m not even close to being one of the first people to comment on the “West Village Girl” stereotype, and saying that I don’t understand why the West Village now feels like social media come to life, and that it’s become an utter culture of monotony within new-money Gen Z, is pretty unoriginal. Me and my native New Yorker friends have made so many jokes about how the “transplants” don’t want to go out above 14th street and exclusively drink Blank Street coffee, but the jokes have been exhausted of their charm and are not funny anymore. Because it really is so peculiar why so many of the same types of people moved to the exact same place, but maybe it’s just easier to disappear into a crowd of people who look and sound exactly like you.
But maybe I’m just overanalyzing everything out of insecurity, and I’m missing the point. Maybe if I dropped the whole “I’m not like other girls” mindset for literally three seconds, I’d realize that there is a true method behind this madness. That there is a science behind dressing like you’re ready to stumble into the new TikTok trending wine bar, but also, at any second, might head to hot Pilates. This is something that I don’t understand how to do. But I wish I did.
Me and the West Village Girls have a very multifaceted relationship; I kind of resent them, but I kind of ache to mirror them. Their style looks like a uniform for a life that’s so much more put-together than mine. Like a uniform for being taken seriously, and I wish it fit me. And even though the culture of sameness gnaws at me, a part of me can’t stop longing for it anyway.
But, you know what? I have a lot of clothes, and if I put my mind to it, I can definitely dress like that too. I just needed to scroll for like 10 minutes on TikTok. People always say fake it till you make it, right? Not that I consider “making it” to be living in the West Village and going out for drinks with my little clone friends in the same clothes I sometimes do pilates in, but you know what I mean.
On the subway to work, I felt like the default avatar you get in a video game, before you’ve earned enough coins to buy better clothes. My outfit was beaten-up Onitsuka Tiger sneakers and a plain black Alo Yoga dress. After Aritizia, which is now a trigger word for me, Alo is probably the second most popular brand within the “West Village Girl” community, and a couple of years ago, I spent too much money on a dress there, so I was all set. I don’t know why I hadn’t worn it to work before. It’s a pretty cute dress, but nothing special. The only thing that marks it as Alo is the small silver logo stamped on the back. Everyone else on the subway car seemed like they had more of a sense of themselves than I, who was dressed with the sole intention of blending in. But whatever. It was fine. I had an internal experiment to conduct. I didn’t care.
But during my shift, I started to really care. I honestly started feeling absolutely sick as I started noticing how many girls were wearing the exact same dress as me. I knew it from the little silver logo in back, made visible by the fact that most of them had their hair slicked into a tight bun. From 6 to 9 pm on that busy Friday night, I counted 18 girls wearing the same dress as me. 6 of the 18 had my sneakers on, too. The others usually wore Adidas Sambas. But none of their shoes were as beaten up as mine. I honestly remember wanting to throw up. But that was also probably because I didn’t drink any water from 6 to 9 pm, and it was 99 degrees out.
I kept my hair down the entire shift because I haven’t cut it in years, and now it’s long enough to cover up that stupid logo. Even though it was a horrible heat wave, I couldn’t bring myself to tie my hair up and reveal both the logo and how much of a try-hard I was. I felt like the hair tie on my wrist was personally taunting me. It didn’t matter that I wore a dress from a store that was considered “cool.” None of that mattered. Because a real put-together West Village girl would probably have one of those cute claw clips for their hair, have sneakers in better condition, and not give a shit if they saw a bunch of people wearing the same outfit as them. I felt like an idiot. This wasn’t my style, I felt like a phony, and I definitely didn’t feel like I fit in more. I don’t even know why I wanted to in the first place. I don’t even live in the West Village.
So I had to wonder…if I was so aware of what was going on because of my purposeful fashion experiment, why did I feel like such a loser? I mean, I did know. And I felt like I couldn’t be upset because wasn’t this my intention? To look like just another fake blonde chick wearing Alo Yoga outside of an actual yoga studio? To look like just another version of what that article had described? As the bottom layer of my hair kept absorbing the sweat dripping down my back, I wondered if I could get rid of the logo with the black Sharpie I was using to cross off people’s names from the reservation list.
By the end of my shift, I had sweated off all of my makeup, my hair really needed to be washed, and I looked and felt dehydrated, but at least my dress still looked good because it’s made out of sweat-wicking bullshit. Funny how the dress kept its shape while I felt like I was unraveling inside.
I felt hollow. I tried to reassure myself that even though I kind of look the same, I’m different and unique, and special. And when I wear the trendy dress and sneakers, it’s totally different than when they do it. At least in Brooklyn, I was the only one in that Alo dress. But am I not even a little different because I did it on purpose? I consciously sported the West Village uniform. That’s gotta make me at least a little different, right? Probably not. I did not look like someone who was conducting a fashion experiment. I did look like someone who was absolutely devastated that I fell face-first for that stupid Instagram explore page style I thought would make me belong, the very one I’ve mocked the West Village Girls for buying into.
When I got home that night, I randomly put on the movie Mean Girls. It’s funny that I’ve seen it so many times, but it was only this time when I really paid attention to the climax of the mathletes’ competition, when Cady stops herself from making fun of her opponent in her head during the final math problem.“Miss Carolyn Kraft seriously needed to pluck her eyebrows. Her outfit looked like it was picked out by a blind Sunday school teacher. And she had some 99-cent lip gloss on her snaggle tooth, and that’s when I realized. Making fun of Carolyn Kraft wouldn’t stop her from beating me in this contest. Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier. All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.” And she’s right. Calling the West Village Girls “basic” doesn’t make me any more unique. Buying a trendy dress and wearing it to work didn't make everyone magically accept me. Trying to copy the West Village style didn't all of a sudden make me super put-together and give me a perfect life. And making fun of all of it with my friends doesn’t make me funnier or somehow above it all. If my life is a movie, this is the part where my character has to learn self-acceptance instead of trying to fix everything in front of me. It’s not a math problem. This is the part where my character has to choose to break the mold. Because that’s when the movie becomes worth watching.
