ELLE's look at the new Forever 21

Okay, so we’re biased. Between Forever 21’s repeat-offender status in Fashionista’s eagle-eyed Adventures in Copyright series, our own experience with the chain’s club-ready fare from our club-ready days in New York, and Bip Ling, we had to gird our will as we stepped through the doors on an outing to the chain’s new London store.

You want trends? They’ve mined them all. One display managed to cram leopard print, shredded red denim, Breton stripes, tweed-ish shoes, varsity jackets, lace and Fair Isle prints into a five-foot-wide stretch of wall.

The ground floor is a forest of pleather, flammable polyester shirts and box-creased jersey dresses. Confronted by a stand bearing distressed American flag t-shirts and striped denim shorts (clear copies of the Balmain collection that elevated such truck-stop fare), my nose gave a little involuntary crinkle. Every ‘lace’ shirt, polyester playsuit or synthetic skirt I touched felt vaguely unwashable.

Sometimes, choice can be exciting. Rummaging through boxes of bargain-bin secondhand clothing and finding a winsome ‘50s dress, or scanning the shoe department at TK Maxx only to find a shelf of pristine Pedro Garcia pumps, feels like bagging a trophy in the fashion hunt. But this quantity of clothing seems daunting, excessive.

It also verges on copyright infringement. Although Forever 21 has never been found guilty of infringement in the US court system, Diane von Furstenberg,