Goodbye Delia's, You Served Us Well

This has been a devastating year for the beloved retailers of yesteryear. First the beautiful and bizarre SkyMall gracefully bowed out of our lives forever without any warning, throwing the world into a tailspin. (Now where are we supposed to peruse useless, "time-saving" novelty items while flying through the air?) And today, after months of anxiety-inducing headlines about the financial uncertainty of Delia's future, it was announced that this will be the last official day that Delia's website exists. Say goodbye to the retailer that defined all of our nineties dreams.

Delia's stackable glitters, zip-away cargo pants, and platform flip-flops pretty much ruled my pre-teen existence. Somehow, the store and its catalog came to represent everything that was good and great about being a young woman in the nineties, especially if you were a girl like me living in rural New England. The brand's upper/lower-case font mash-up with a casually placed asterisk was the epitome of cool, early-Internet chic and ushered in a new (in retrospect, blatantly obnoxious) way of typing for every AIM neophyte.

Delia's demise seems particularly cruel as it comes to us in the midst of a full-on '90s fashion revival. In fact, I could see many of the brand's original items being extremely popular and trendy today without any alteration. The end of the Internet shop is especially devastating considering, for many of those who loved it, this moment also marks the end of our nostalgia-laden teenage years and forces us to finally admit we've reached full-blown adulthood. Yes, Millennials, that time has come: we are officially getting old.

As we all know, bad news comes in threes. With Wet Seal in dire straights these days, we're in for even more bad news by that logic. So, which nineties relic will be cruelly torn away from us next? I'd rather not know. If you'll excuse me, I'll just be over here humming "Forever Young" to myself and playing Clueless on repeat while weeping into my inflatable daisy shaped chair.

Images: delias/Instagram