LF Stores
Buckle In
My earliest memory of LF Stores was scrolling their online look book in 2012.
I was young, fresh off of a 6 inch growth spurt and a giraffe amongst my 7th grade peers. I used my family’s computer and it was located in the den where I always did my homework.
This was around the time I had also discovered Tumblr. I fell headfirst into the world of galaxy leggings and Coldplay’s “Paradise”, HTML glitter encrypted cursors, Triangular hand poses and Jeffrey Campbell’s Litas. Acacia Brinley was plastered on nearly every screen. “It” girls were the long haired white girls of California, dressed in tattered jean shorts and wearing Brandy Melville gallivanting in an empty parking lot doing mundane bullshit that I thought was the coolest thing on earth.
These images, the clothing, the trappings of a Tumblr culture and “Hipster” attitudes, were feelings I chased like a young drunken fool. I wanted so desperately to shed my youth, to feel that I belonged to the culture of cool that these 17 year olds in Santa Monica clearly had.
There is a pernicious success to these kinds of algorithms. On Tumblr it was a feeling of wanting to belong. If I can curate the vibe that I so desperately seek, perhaps I can convince myself partially that I belong in it. That I embody it myself.
Of course, this is no new idea. Ralph Lauren knows very well the power of curating a lifestyle. When you market to people’s innermost desires to belong, you create a lasting loop. In short, be it retail or the internet, this consumer keeps coming back. And I don’t think this evil dies. It just reinvents itself. We are on Instagram or TikTok or Substack or X wondering what summer footwear is maybe the coolest, the most interesting or the most popular. And why?
In my everyday life I am still struggling with this pressure. Questioning my buying habits and wondering if sometimes I am still dressing with the sole intention to signal belonging. But back to Tumblr.
I kept coming back. Sneaking internet hours at night when my parents went to sleep and took my IPod for the evening. I crept to the family computer to scroll on the Tumblr blogs that I admired and envied. With names like glitter-tears, Illimunati princess, these sites were havens to my young and impressionable mind.
Then I discovered LF Stores. LF to me, 12 and punch drunk off Tumblr, was the pinnacle and embodiment of this cool. The girls in my school who had more money than my family and straight long hair to contrast my curls wore LF. Their mothers could afford it. This luxury was casual. I hated them for it.
If only I could wear LF too. Enter the stores like they did and be able to buy a $180 sweater just on the spot. The one I especially had my eye on was a simple knit pullover likely made of polyester with cuts within the knit that ran up the arm. It was called the Latty sweater.
The LF look books ended up plastered all over Tumblr. The boho spirit and the stick skinny white models were perfect fodder for the hipster eating machine that Tumblr was then. And no place was this spirit embodied better than in the brick and mortar store of LF.
It was a store that my mother never wanted to enter with me. The facade, white with blue lettering above the doorway just read “LF”.
The store itself was stacked high with piles of jeans, cotton thin strappy shirts, bedazzled dresses and tiny micro shorts by a mysterious jean brand called Carmar. The denim washes were in neon pinks, a faded green, a stone wash light blue with a triangular laser cut at the bottom hem of the shorts.
Jeffrey Campbell platform shoes littered the floor like candy and strung about were necklaces, flash tattoos and feathery accessories all for the perfect hipster wardrobe. It wasn’t the slight mess of the store that turned my mother off, but the prices and the atmosphere.
Because the clothes were so expensive it was egregious. For a Latty sweater, $180. A black sequin dress, $395. Considering the quality, the material and the crass often-hostile shopping experience, it was never worth the price.
My mother is also an expert discount shopper, because she grew up in with a knack for thrifting.
My mom knows good material, what looks beautiful on her body, and she is never willing to spend more than it is worth.
She adores TJ Maxx. These days, she buys $9.99 oversized Jackie O black sunglasses and will stock up on 5 pairs of them. She is never down for the bullshit, the ornament or the bad fucking attitudes.
So naturally, my deep and unrelenting teenage obsession with LF was her worst effin’ nightmare.
I have thought for weeks about how to write this story. I have stalked old LF Yelp pages where customers lamented the same things: the filth of the messy stores, the nasty attitudes of employees, the ludicrous prices, the rampage of the Summer and Winter annual 60% sale.
I have read Reddit threads pondering the decline of the store and its inevitable fall from glory.
I have tried and failed to collect more research about what LF was and how that looked in numbers and figures.
And I realize now, that this failure is mostly because I would like to tell you a different story. One that is only as successful as my old memories serve. Because I remember what it was like to want so badly to belong that I was willing to steal for it. And from LF I did.
Yes, when I was an early teenager, I stole from LF en masse. It started during the 60% off annual sales. Because the stores were in such disarray, it was easy to get away with small theft.
I am now a woman who believes in the integrity of telling on herself, because it is within this honesty that I come back to myself. I understand now, that my teenage actions were more than just wrong but a reaction to my mother and to my insular white bread town. Ironic as it is, in wanting so desperately to belong, I casted myself away a wrong doer.
For when I wore the stolen LF shirt to Spanish class, my peers knew. And asked me “Did you steal that too?” and this adverse reaction did not feel cool at all. It felt deeply, completely shameful. And inside my “cool” clothing there was nothing special that I felt or no closer to that belonging I so desperately craved. I felt confused. And very alone.
I also admit I was lucky in that I was never arrested or charged for theft. I know this happenstance to be related if not rooted in the fact that I am white and clearly privilege from the same system I stole from.
So my stealing only became worse.
When I realized I could sneak a small tote bag into the dressing room, I would bring it in discreetly and try on more than I needed to in an attempt to take the rest home with me inside the tote bag.
I’m to this day not sure if it was the employees complete negligence or the general untidiness of the store that allowed me to physically sneak out the front door again and again. But it is my belief in my somewhat murky recollection that I likely stole from LF a dozen times.
You’ve seen the Bling Ring. The strange, almost blind greediness that happens with a first taste of shiny material. For me the stakes were less dramatic. I was not robbing Paris Hilton, but a chain of Hipster stores employed by girls 4 years my senior. This likely made the quest feel that more doable.
I don’t mean to report all of this now to indict myself but instead to really set a scene. For the picture of LF was painted with so many strange colors, all of which were born out of that Tumblr era of youthful rebellion and material desires. I want to tell you all a story about a store that feels accurate, and this is the only one that I know.
And in doing so I hope you can see that that store was much more than a store to me. If shopping is a feeling, my stealing was belonging. I was finally holding the clothing that would let me signal coolness. If I owned these things I could be like her. I could dress like her. I could feel like her.
I do not remember when I stopped stealing from LF. Like the haze of youth, the memories feel closer to me than the actual timeline. It was likely in my sophomore year of high school, when I focused my energy in different places like the rat race to get into college.
They say sometimes that addiction doesn’t die, it jumps. My desire to fit in jumped. Clothing no longer signaled coolness, but getting into a “good” school did so that is what I focused on.
The other day, on a visit to my parents home, I found a gray Lord and Taylor clothing box hidden on the top of my closet. I opened it to find at least 12 purple LF plastic bags. The ones they would give out exclusively during their 60% sale. In these bags I saw my teenage obsession, my strange compulsion to keep every last bag to prove to myself that I had it.
That I had it. The clothes.
That I had it. The bag.
That I had it. The cool.
I know now what I did not then. That I wanted to witness myself belonging. Or at least trying to. That I was grasping to dress like a person that I was not. That in this teenager, Tumblr filled delusion, I did not know what I really liked but was very good at pretending to.
My younger cousin is 16 now. She is a very different teenager than I was. She is so quick witted it is unbelievable. She has the best humor and knows language for her emotions that I had no idea I could even access when I was her age.
Her LF is most likely Brandy Melville. Where one of these new Brandy stores actually exists in the skeleton of an LF store that once was. And it is perhaps not so different. Her Tumblr is TikTok.
But my stories will not be hers. Because only I can be the one to tell them. For they are my own.
LF meant something to a lot of us. To me, it was the young desire to belong and an early obsession with the internet as it signaled beauty and the farce of cool.
I wish naively that I listened to my mother’s battle cry. But I was doing what I knew how, which was to rebel against her, against everything.
So now I am older. I do not steal. And LF has been closed for years. The stores that once were are ghosts, apparitions in a weird fable of coastal retail lore. And with my cousin I can share all of this because she listens. And it is so soothing to talk teenager with teenager.
So I tell on myself to her, and now you, about LF stores, and how confused I was.
When I was a girl who was yet a woman, desperately trying to know how to belong.
I love this, LF honestly raised me (I'm from San Francisco) and I will never forget their cutout sweaters. It was a moment.
It really was so strangely expensive when it should have been priced more like urban outfitters. So funny id forgotten all about LF stores and how messy they were until I read this article.