The fabric hang tag with The Gap logo unravels  and falls apart.
Illustrations: Guillem Casasus

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This Is How The Gap Dies

It’s possible America’s most iconic retailer might not survive this

Rob Walker
Marker
Published in
14 min readApr 29, 2020

Once upon a time, The Gap was the brand. The brand that Spike Lee and Madonna and Missy Elliot and Picasso would all front for in ad campaigns. That Sharon Stone would wear to the Oscars. It was a generational reference point — of course that’s where Janeane Garofalo’s character worked in Reality Bites — and it somehow made khakis cool. At its peak, circa 2000, The Gap morphed from a mall retailer hawking T-shirts and denim into a new vision of affordable “casual chic,” and no less than “an international arbiter of style and a global megabrand.”

But that world, of course, has been fading away for a while, and now looks to be ending altogether. This past March, an estimated 250,000-plus non-“essential” stores closed en masse across the country in the second half of the month, a catastrophe for retail. The apparel category in particular was brutalized, with sales down over 50%. And here’s the thing: April will almost certainly be worse.

The pandemic crisis has accelerated a brick-and-mortar “retail apocalypse” already in progress. Traditional retailers closed something like 9,000 locations last year, and well-known brands are already filing for bankruptcy.

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Marker
Marker

Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Rob Walker
Rob Walker

Written by Rob Walker

Author The Art of Noticing. Related newsletter at https://robwalker.substack.com

Responses (8)

What are your thoughts?

The Gap died for me long ago, when I realized that the polo shirts I had been buying from them for years, and which were a staple of my wardrobe, were suddenly two inches shorter in the front. I had a gut by then and “the gap” became a literal…

This just further solidified an adage I’ve heard about retail these days. “If you’re not online or off-brand, you’re toast.” This explains why retail by 2021 could just simply be Amazon, Costco, Dollar General, Target, TJ Maxx, Walmart, and a few…

Sad and scary. Will Bezos be the first to break through the $ 250 billion mark? Who needs all that money? Isn’t it about time to put an upper limit on the individual wealth that any individual may accumulate? $ 5 billion should be more and more than…