Reheated Target Collab Collection Brings Out the Faithful

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

Grid View

Expand

• A small group of dedicateds: technically, it was still 7am, which is damn early.
• The Thakoon dress on the left smelled like something extruded from a test tube.
• Rogan and Thakoon. The Thakoon dress is the one that's ringing up at $139.99
• The Luella dresses (right) already looks like they've been wadded up at the bottom of a closet.
• Well stocked.

Oh Target, you are so cruel: rolling out the Go greatest hits collection on the first Sunday of daylight savings time, so the mildly obsessed or maximally curious had to rouse themselves from bed even an hour earlier. Of those two categories, we were more column B than column A, but that didn't stop us from shopping. Or rather, rushing in to check out the merchandise and then remembering why we didn't purchase it the first time around.

A small band of ladies gathered at the WeHo Target five minutes till 8. Once the doors opened, they amiably moved in: a few ladies had stalked their prey online, while a few other shoppers were there for whatever struck their fancies.

We don't know the specific criteria behind which pieces were in and which pieces weren't -- whether actual sales data or just subjective, "That's really cute." Really, not one thing from the Jean Paul Gaultier line made the cut? And it's the same old story: Adorable in the magazines, pleasing to the imagination, but the actual article leaves a lot to be desired. The cotton-poplin stuff doesn't look so great in the real world-- even at 8 in the morning, without being manhandled, the Luella Bartley and Tracy Feith pieces looked smooshed and wilted. Is it terrible to admit that, even at $39.99, a few dresses seem overpriced?

This Target didn't appear to have everything. They had all four Thakoon dresses, both Rodartes, both Zac Posens?maybe they did have everything and we just didn't recognize it (since it looks so different on the racks). One reader in Torrance let us know that no one was shopping them in that Target, while another reader said that the pieces were moving briskly in Glendale. The WeHo Target seemed well stocked -- assuming they started with equal numbers of everything, it looked like there were about 12 or so in each size for the dresses that were S-M-L, and three or four in the numbered sizes.

If there's one dress that we'd unscientifically predict to sell out, it would be the cream Rodarte mesh dress. We saw a few shoppers carrying it in bulk. We're not usually lemmings, but we couldn't fight the consumer urge, and ended up with four dresses in our cart: the lace-print Rodarte, a Tracy Feith, and two of the Thakoons -- one of which rang up at $139.99. Targetfail! Not an isolated incident, either, as a couple of other readers reported the same thing. In the old days, if they charged you the wrong price and then you brought both the item and the receipt back, they gave it to you for free, didn't they?
· Target [Official Site]
· All Collabs coverage [Racked LA]