At Forever 21, the Adrenaline Rush Was the Point

“Is it ever sad when fast fashion bites the dust?” Kim France, the founding editor of the seminal Condé Nast shopper Lucky and producer of the popular newsletter “Girls of a Certain Age” said on Tuesday, reacting to news that Forever 21 had filed for bankruptcy.The answer depends on how passionate a consumer is about both bricks and mortar and the hunt.Anyone who ever formed a search party to stalk low-rise jeans, fringed crop tops, mesh flats or whatever else happened to be trending that very instant is familiar with the chain, which tracked fashion minutely and churned out the latest iteration of its whims at rock-bottom prices.

At its peak, Forever 21 employed more than 43,000 people worldwide and brought in more than $4 billion in annual sales.As the chain’s name implied, the target consumer base skewed young.Back in the early aughts, when Ms.

France was first editing Lucky, she and her fashion editors made weekly scouting trips to a Forever 21 outpost in Union Square in Manhattan to track trending styles.Often enough, the styles turned up on sales floors before magazines had a chance to report on them.

“You could compare it to Zara, although Zara is a little more sophisticated,” Ms.France said, referring to the Spanish mass-market retailer.

“Or maybe Topshop.”Forever 21 may have lacked the curated cool of competitors like Topshop, the British high-street retailer, whose Kate Moss collection proved so popular when it debuted in 2007 that crowd control was put into place outside London stores.(Those same clothes are now hotly traded online as vintage.) And it was never likely to inspire Instagram tags or art-directed haul videos.In terms of sheer volume, however, the retailer was without rival.Part of its appeal was a level of excitement impossible to replicate online — that adrenaline rush that comes from sifting through stacks of dross to find, if not the exact right thing, something close.We are having trouble retrieving the article c...