Fashion’s fountain of youth
By Sylvia Toh Paik Choo
December 28, 2009
DOES this guy look forever 21 to you?
In his heart and mind he is, this businessman behind the latest clothing store to flog a label, Forever 21.
The American fashion brand hot with teens and twenties made quite a racket with lion dancers and drummers last Sunday on Orchard Road.
Its low-profile chairman and CEO Don Chang flew in expressly to cut the ribbon to the four-level store in 313@Somerset.
The women’s apparel and accessories group was founded by American-Korean Chang (birthname Do-Won Chang) and his wife Jin Sook, whose original outlet, Fashion 21, still operates from the same spot in Los Angeles.
It was created to cater to ‘little Korea’ in LA, but found wider appeal. It is the size of a three-room HDB flat.
Look how they’ve upgraded!
A flagship store in Singapore – four storeys high, 16,000sqft – joins their 500 shops in 13 countries.
GLAMAZONS: Jade Seah, Mindee Ong and CEO Don Chang. PICTURES: FOREVER 21
A couple of familiar screen and print faces were roped in, ribboned in if you like, Mindee Ong and Jade Seah (‘I know that face, what is her name?’).
Together with an entourage of executives from Sharaf Trading, the mammoth group from Dubai who holds the Forever 21 franchise for this region except Japan, hundreds of guests, hundreds of onlookers, hundreds of shoppers rubber-necked to see what the fashion fuss was all about.
What it is is, from runway to off-the-peg in four weeks, that’s the promise the brand keeps, to its mostly young and trendy girls with not an awful lot of lolly to spend on the fickle world of garments.
The I-just-need-something-to-wear-tonight, stylish, not expensive, and doesn’t have to last me forever.
Those 50something men do know what it is to be forever 21.
The NewPaper