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The mall was a sacred space. It was a universe unto itself, impervious to the elements, with diversions galore to pleasantly while away the day. It was where I got my hair and makeup done before prom, opened my first bank account, purchased my first prized pair of flare jeans, and nonchalantly surveilled my crush working at Hot Dog on a Stick. It was where teen life happened.
Illustrator Sally Nixon’s new lovingly detailed seek-and-find book (à la Where’s Waldo?), Let’s Go to the Mall (Chronicle Books), celebrates the golden age of shopping malls with reverence and warm humor: Teens munch on pizza on the atrium escalator; a pair of older ladies in sweatsuits power walks through the shoe department; couples smooch in the movie theater. You can almost hear the Muzak, smell the Auntie Anne’s.
The book encompasses other 1980s teen milieus too, from high school lunch tables and choir club to the burger joint and roller rink. Nostalgic adults like me and young people with a penchant for retro aesthetics are sure to delight in spotting objects redolent of yesteryear: the Walkmans, fanny packs, TV Guides.
Nixon is known on Instagram for delicately capturing with pen and marker the humor and beauty in our mundane moments, often featuring solitary women and girls. But in recent years she’s found herself compelled by the 1980s—even though she didn’t experience much of it, being born mere months before the decade’s end.
As the youngest of five children, though, she inherited lots of hand-me-downs from the period and was immersed in its TV and movies, thanks to her siblings. “I guess we’re all nostalgic for a time when things felt simpler,” the Little Rock–based artist reflects, “even though they weren’t, obviously. But if you were a kid then, it seemed like it was.”
Back then, the mall was a haven, where teens first tasted freedom from their parents. “It was a rite of passage to go to the mall by yourself when you were 12 or 13,” Nixon notes. “That was one of the first places our parents let us go by ourselves because it seemed pretty safe.”
The mall of Nixon’s book was inspired by the one she frequented growing up, with supplemental research from social media and old family photos. Those also informed the fashion, with Nixon eschewing ’80s over-the-top glamour in favor of the low-key vibe of her hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Windbreakers figure prominently in the illustrations, as do acid-wash denim and graphic, oversized sweaters.
But even with its obvious affection for these sites and people, the book has a bittersweet tinge. These places that once teemed with people, as they do in the book—the cineplex, the video-rental store—are now irrevocably changed or nearly extinct, and their role in young life much diminished, if not completely foreign. (Nixon’s young nieces have asked her what a VCR and cassette tape are.)
Today, nearly two decades into our post-mall era, much more has vanished than just a single, central place to gather, shop, eat, and perhaps get your ears pierced or have studio portraits taken. No single location has supplanted the mall in fostering such formative extracurricular experiences as I and many others had. Nixon agrees, admitting that she rarely finds herself at the mall now. “People think that with social media, kids don’t need a place to come together. But they definitely need a physical space to go to.”
Images: Let’s Go to the Mall: An ’80s Seek-and-Find by Sally Nixon, published by Chronicle Books 2024.
