As an adult, I’ve watched plenty of brands slowly sputter and die: the Toys“R”Us of my childhood, the Bed Bath & Beyond of my wedding registry, the Jo-Ann Fabrics where I purchased my daughter’s first sewing kit. Last week, Forever 21—site of many adolescent shopping trips, purveyor of iconic yellow plastic bags—announced it would be shuttering all US stores, citing online competition from brands like Shein and weak traffic at American malls.
This one hit different. The story of Forever 21 is also my story: a story of Korean immigrants, like my parents, succeeding in America. It’s a story of Christians making a mark on the world, imperfectly and sometimes even harmfully, and of God’s unlikely redemption.
Between 2005 and 2008, the number of Forever 21 locations doubled to about 400 worldwide, including the one at Bridgewater mall in New Jersey, where my friends and I hung out on weekends. Inevitably, we’d end up inside the sprawling, chaotic store, hugging armloads of low-waisted skinny jeans in the fitting-room line or clawing through unsorted boxes to score a deeply discounted, deeply wrinkled shirt.
My Korean American friends and I would ask each other proudly, “Did you know the owners are Korean?” And as one of the only Christians at our school, I felt an additional covert victory in knowing that the bottom of every bag was stamped with “John 3:16.”
The Fashion District of Los Angeles, where Forever 21 had its beginnings, is responsible for more than 80 percent of all made-in-the-USA clothing. Up to half of that industry, at least as of a decade ago, was Korean immigrant businesses. One anthropologist called it “the most important sector of the Korean American economy.”
Forever 21’s Do Won and Jin Sook Chang were the district’s reigning king and queen. Do Won Chang was just 18 years old when he arrived in the US from South Korea with empty pockets and a lick of English, working a cleaning job at a gas station.
“Whenever drivers drove nice cars, I’d ask them what job they had,” he said in a CNN interview via a translator. “They all said it was in the garment business. At the time, I didn’t even know what garment meant. I later learned that it was the clothing business. And that is how I went on to start my clothing store.”
His wife’s account of Forever 21’s beginnings is more spiritual; she was praying on a mountaintop, Jin Sook Chang said, when God told her to open a store. With just $11,000 in savings, the Changs did just that in 1984 on North Figueroa Street, closing out the year with $700,000 in sales. They eventually adopted a fast-fashion model and renamed their brand Forever 21—because, as Do Won Chang told CNN, “old people wanted to be 21 again, and young people wanted to be 21 forever.” Business was so good that a new store opened every six months, and the Changs cemented their status as the envy of the district.
The Changs could have been any of the hardworking, devout, success-driven Korean adults of my youth. When I lived in Los Angeles for a few years in my 20s, I met fellow churchgoers who also worked in fashion. They aspired to be like the Changs, savvy businesspeople and serious Christians.
Why Fashion Matters
Like my parents, the Changs arrived in America with almost nothing. They went to church every morning at 5 a.m. to pray. Do Won Chang kept a Bible open on his office desk. Their daughter Linda has said that, instead of taking vacations, the family goes on mission trips to Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. They achieved an American dream infused with prosperity-gospel promise: Dream big, work hard, and God will bless you to be a blessing.
But you know what happens next. The prosperity gospel isn’t actually gospel. The same adults in my life who bought into the promises of a transactional faith—pray every day, and God will reward you with success—also seeded disunity in the church, pushed their children to the brink of burnout, and were largely absent from the lives of their families. I learned that an outward show of faith sometimes does not translate into a life of love and integrity. And good endeavors championed by influential believers get mixed up with newsworthy failures.
Investment mogul Bill Hwang, for example, another Korean Christian immigrant and once one of the wealthiest evangelicals in the US, supported Christian ministries around the world with about $600 million of his own wealth. He was also sentenced to 18 years in prison last November for mass market manipulation.
Likewise, Do Won Chang has been generous. In an interview, he said he brought corn into North Korea and personally handed out cobs to villagers. Asked why he was still working so hard even after becoming a billionaire, he replied, “I have never once thought of myself as a billionaire. Even today, I got here on a bus.”
But how well his faith overflowed into his company is another question.
As my high school self watched various local Korean pastors and church leaders get caught in adultery and embezzlement, the headlines documented a steady stream of lawsuits against Forever 21 for copyright infringement and underpayment of workers. In 2001, the company was accused of violating labor-practice laws and allowing some employees to toil in sweatshop-like conditions. The 2007 documentary film Made in L.A. highlighted the protests that happened as a result.
At least today, Forever 21’s website claims it is committed to ethical sourcing, worker rights, protecting the environment, and giving to charity programs like Boys & Girls Clubs. But such statements are no different from the ones from companies without Christian origins, like H&M and Old Navy and even Shein. In a culture that’s well aware of the detrimental impacts of fast fashion, it’s profitable (and trendy) to declare good intentions.
Of course, a statement is just a statement; it is easier to love with empty words than with costly actions. When asked in 2011 if the Changs’ Christian faith might conflict with the dubious ethics of fast fashion—ravaging the environment and adding to the sufferings of the world’s poorest people—Linda Chang responded curtly, “The faith of the founders is separate to the brand.” The John 3:16 stamp was “simply a statement of faith.”
As a teenager, I didn’t need Linda’s words to tell me that the verse on the bag was mere faith signaling. I had only to look at the skimpy tube top hanging on the rack to know it wasn’t biblical values that were first and foremost on Forever 21’s mind, or mine, when I purchased it. The company’s name elevated youthfulness and beauty, contrary to the wisdom that comes from numbering our days. Paired with that famous verse on its yellow bags, “Forever 21” implied that the eternal life proclaimed in John’s gospel was more like discovering the mythical fountain of youth than following in the steps of Christ.
Many of my Christian friends from those adolescent days, fed up with the lack of integrity in professing believers and unable to live up to the standards themselves, left the church as they went off to college and entered the workplace. The polyester tops that went out of fashion almost as soon as we bought them were metaphors for the unending cycle of belief and betrayal in which we were trapped. In a consumerist culture, faith was one more worn-out garment that felt dispensable, stuffed into the bin like a discarded Forever 21 bag, gospel promise and all.
Somehow, my own faith persisted. Really, it was bits of trash—imbued with grace—that did it. At a youth group retreat one night, crouched on the floor, I asked God to give me some small proof that he really loved me. When I opened my eyes, there was a paper clip only a few inches from my face, sparkling in the dimly lit room, and I clutched it as a sign. Jesus said we needed faith as small as a mustard seed—for several years after that, I had my little paper clip, a reminder that God hears.
On another day, I listened, breath held, as a short-term missionary to Israel told us of standing on the very hill where Jesus once said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I have longed.” A sudden gust of wind neatly tore a single page of Isaiah from the missionary’s Bible, sending it tumbling down into the streets below. I wondered. Did that page flutter to the feet of the one who needed it—and would we someday hear the complete story? A piece of air-bound litter helped me begin to see faith as something eschatological, something that reached into a new world I yearned for.
One evening, caught in a spiral of teenage angst and woe, I looked down through a haze of tears at the rumpled Forever 21 bag lying on the floor and caught sight of the words John 3:16. The Bible verse I’d read, memorized, and seen a thousand times since childhood opened in that moment like a door ajar. In the light that streamed from it, the words were no longer a badge of belonging or a tract to throw at unbelievers but a lifeline cast out to me as I floundered, drowning. This message is for you too. Here is the love you crave.
When asked why he put John 3:16 on his company’s shopping bags, Do Won Chang responded, “The love [God] gave us, by giving us his only Son, Jesus, was so unbelievable to me. I hoped others would learn of God’s love.” He could not have known how, years later in an attic room in New Jersey, God would answer that prayer for a distraught high school girl.
The theologian John Calvin tells us that our feeble attempts at prayer are perfected by the Holy Spirit. Our stuttering, childlike confessions and petitions are transfigured into fragrant incense before the throne of God. If that is so, can we say the same for our efforts at witness? Maybe heaven will tell of how other feeble, trashy attempts at the life of faith bore eternal fruit.
The end of Forever 21 means there will be no more yellow bags in America—and in many ways, that is probably a good thing. But I still hope that every morning at 5 a.m., the Changs will be at early morning prayer and that God will hear their cries. Long after the last Forever 21 bag has disappeared, the truth of John 3:16 will remain forever.
Sara Kyoungah White is an editor at Christianity Today.
