In the past few years since I first started earning my own money, I've discovered a love of clothes shopping that I had never known was there before. When the quality of Kohls' clothing took a dive, I searched high and low for stores to take its place in my shopper's heart. One of my newest favorites is Wet Seal, a clothing store for juniors with some of the prettiest, most feminine garments I've ever seen. Wet Seal is more organized than any other clothing store I've been to, with its items impeccably divided among various styles and color families. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with blouses, skirts, jackets, sweaters, tank tops, shrugs, dresses, and other apparel. Even for unusually tall ladies, the highest items on the walls are out of reach and need to be fetched by an employee with a long stick. I assume that this setup was necessitated by a lack of space in the small store, but it still annoyed me because I'm rather short (5 foot 3), so I had to wait for an available employee to help me every time I spotted something up high, and just my luck - it always seems like the prettiest items are the ones just out of reach. One section of the wall is festooned with lacy, ruffled clothing confections, for the "girly-girl" in all of us - and this was the section to which I gravitated the most. I have always been a hopeless "girly-girl" at heart, with a soft spot for anything pink with feminine touches such as lace, satin, embroidery, ruffles, eyelet designs, sequins, beads, and ribbons. Naturally, then, I was immediately infatuated with nearly every item on this section of the wall, as I felt the pull of my heart's inescapable desire to buy everything in sight, and the simultaneous sense of dread emanating from my wary wallet. Fortunately for the latter party, I didn't have the opportunity to dish out too much cash because not many of the clothes fit me.
Yes, as I sadly discovered, many of Wet Seal's clothes are geared toward the malnourished instead of the average woman, with size ranges that cater to human toothpicks with eyes. Their "extra large" would probably translate to a medium in misses, and in some cases would even match up with a misses' small. What's strange about this store is that all of the items are Wet Seal's signature brand, yet not all of them have size ranges that accommodate a wide variety of women. For instance, you would think that if an extra large blouse in a particular brand fit you, then most other blouses and other upper-body apparel in the same size would fit you as well. This is the case for many department store brands, but it is not so at Wet Seal. For whatever reason, I was able to find an adorable ruffled vest with an eyelet racerback that fit me perfectly, but I couldn't find a single dress or blouse that fit me as well. I also found a three-tiered black tank top that fit me to a T, but couldn't find a single flattering skirt. I can't figure it out, and I grew increasingly frustrated as I tried on item after item, some of them absolutely gorgeous, only to put them back in dismay. To add insult to injury, their return policy is the worst I've ever encountered: no cash refunds, only store credit within a fixed period of time. So buyer beware: make sure you try on everything before you buy it, or you'll be sure to end up with a few items that don't fit, even if you buy everything in the same size.
To sum up, I've got mixed feelings for this new favorite of mine - as much as I love the items I've bought there so far, I'm discovering that such finds are few and far between, so it may have been a fluke that I had such success on my first extended visit there. In any case, I'll continue to stop by now and then, but I won't get my hopes up too high.
