Uniqlo Is a Size Queen

If you don't live in or visit New York often, odds are you haven't experienced the moderately priced fashion wonders that are Uniqlo. The Japanese company, who claims to "provide casual clothes for all kinds of people", has only had one location in Soho until this month when the Fifth Avenue store opened last week (the third, at Herald Square, is slated to open tomorrow).

A step above questionable touch-and-go HM quality and a step below the obnoxiously over-confident prices at Top Shop, Uniqlo has been my go-to place for novelty socks, slim-fitting button downs and wardrobe trend pieces that might cost more elsewhere. So you can understand my delight in learning this month that the Fifth Avenue store would be the largest retail space on the famous Manhattan shopping stretch.

Uncharacteristically eager to join the throngs of shoppers this weekend, I decided it was high time I invested in some more Uniqlo stock (and socks) so I headed over to Fifth Ave. My optimistic spendthriftiness soon turned into amusement park anxiety and panic. When they say it's the largest retail space, they're not kidding. The place is seemingly endless, made more dizzying by a multitude of mirrors that reflect hallways and corridors and foyers in overwhelming triplicate and quadruplicate.

Determined to leave clutching a new purchase I used everything but GPS to find the sweaters, of which there were piles and piles and PILES (I'm sure there were more piles, but the end-of-the-world/last-minute-holiday-shopping frenzy of tourists and suburbanites were blocking my view).

In short: Too much is too much. The Soho store is anything but small. But the Fifth Ave location is far too big. I've been satisfied with my Uniqlo purchases in the past, there's no doubting it. Yet, when a store goes from retail outlet to mammoth warehouse, it sadly becomes more apparent how sub-par a majority of the products are (i.e. if you see one rhinstone, it's pretty and sparkly, if you see 1,000 rhinestones, it looks like a one way ticket to High Class Hookerville).

The polyester blends I used to breeze past in Soho, are now so obviously overtaking the shelves and tables and racks, that the gilded vision I had of my Uniqlo products morphed into a brassy, poor quality poly blend of misfortune and tackiness. Word to the wise: you can have too much of a kind of good, well-priced thing. I'm not saying I won't return to the Soho store for my usual basics, but I am saying when I go there, there'll be a fleet of sweaters in non-naturally occurring fabrics dancing in my Fifth Avenue memories telling me that I should just go and spend a little more somewhere else.