📣 Our next Group Chat Girlies live show is happening THIS Thursday, 7/31 at Seaboard Southend! Send a group text. Assemble the squad. Grab your ticket. Real convos, unhinged laughs, and probably someone oversharing.
🎟️ Get your ticket here.

Carol: This week Carrie and Aiden broke up (again), The Devil Wears Prada (2) started filming, and Hollister announced the drop of a 2000s throwback collection. This sentence makes me feel like I must be late to cheer practice. The year is 2025, but spiritually? It’s 2006.

I won’t even get into the Carrie and Aiden situation except to echo what the internet already said: And Just Like That… is a tough watch.

But the Hollister drop? I can feel it. I can smell it. Babydoll tees, graphic tops advertising fake beach towns with names that were 100% sexual innuendos, and the zip-up hoodies we wore like they were armor. I can smell Jake (and Fierce, from Abercrombie), the cologne baked into the drywall of every Hollister store, and I can feel my high school boyfriend breaking up with me between third and fourth period at the gym lockers. (Don’t worry, we got back together. Then broke up. Then got back together. Then broke up again… I had Carrie Bradshaw as a role model…you get it.)

Hollister, Abercrombie, and American Eagle were the holy trinity. My mom once offered to take me to Anthropologie (a bribe), but I couldn’t live without denim shorts so short they doubled as underwear and sweaters so thin they dissolved in the rain, so off to Hollister we went.

She hated those stores, and in hindsight, she was right. These stores were dark enough to require a flashlight inside, loud enough to rupture an eardrum, ran by teens who were hired because they were hot (god, millennials have endured), and so doused in cologne that it was hard to breathe. (Raise your hand if you sprayed yourself with Jake or Fierce just to smell like your crush on the ride home from a mall trip 🙋🏼‍♀️).

One year, during back-to-school shopping at Hollister, my mom and I were waiting to try things on. The hired-because-hot-employees were ignoring us. They were too busy swinging their key lanyards and flirting with each other to notice me, a 14-year old girl, clutching low-rise jeans I was in no way emotionally prepared for, waiting for a dressing room. So my mom, already pissed to be in the hellscape, crawled under a locked dressing room door and opened it from the inside. She. Crawled. Under. The. Door. I was attempting to be so casual, so cool, and my mom is crawling on the floor. I froze. The employees froze. My mom did not freeze. She said, “well get in here and try things on” …so I did. It took me weeks to emotionally recover.

Anyway, can’t wait to see what other memories come back when this drop goes live.

Skylar: Carol’s mall-core memory spiral unlocked something I’ve worked hard to repress. Junior year me was deep in my hot pink + electric blue + lace cami era, with Hollister and Abercrombie proudly stamped across my late blooming chest. I proudly purchased a new clearance rack find every time my dad gave me a $20 before a Friday night mall haul. 

On a family vacation, I forced everyone—parents, siblings, cousins, friends—to sit down while I unpacked my suitcase like I was interning at Cosmo Magazine. One by one, I pulled out shirts that were basically identical, convinced each one was chic and iconic. 

At the end of my little fashion showcase, one of the girls just said: “I’m happy for you.”

Future instagram shopping haul influencer? Not quite. Humbling core memory? Absolutely.

Amy Bradley is Missing is the three-episode true crime doc currently hijacking the group chat. Well, not my group chat because no one has watched it yet. But I’m hopeful they will soon because I have feelings and need to discuss. It covers the 1998 disappearance of Amy Bradley, and let’s just say: goosebumps? Check. “Wait, what the actual F?” moments? Check. Cliffhangers that make you stare at your screen in silence with a chill down your neck? Check.

This one’s got me sending “pls watch so we can debrief” texts like I’m running an unsanctioned investigation. And no one is biting. A few days post watching, and I feel like a hardened detective with the case that won’t leave her. No spoilers here, but if you were a 90s kid who grew up terrified of being kidnapped at the beach, this will hit a little too close to home. It really does make you wonder how differently this story would play out today—with Ring cams, AirTags, and TikTok detectives. 👀

Sacha Baron Cohen is jacked now… and honestly? It’s unsettling. The 53 year-old Borat star and freshly single ex-husband of Isla Fisher is serving Men’s Fitness thirst trap on the cover—and it’s giving… something.

I only paused mid-scroll because I’d just seen something about Isla recently posting some cryptic breakup vibes. Most notably: “Women realize it’s not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage.” 🔥

A response to that old “why buy the cow” quote—and maybe, just maybe, a little post-divorce mic drop? Either way, it made me want to know more about what really went down. 

Our resident aesthetic nurse is taking us back to school again. This week’s lesson plan? Microneedling, PRP, and something called PDGF (don’t worry, there will be a vocab review). If you’ve ever been curious about smoothing texture, softening acne scars, or waking up dull skin, consider this your chance to earn extra credit in collagen. → Read the full article here.

Do you have your ticket for 7/31 at Seaboard Southend yet? Don’t wait til the last minute, treat yourself today.

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