Macy’s Chicago Launch Party for Material Girl by Madonna

When I was a child, my parents made the life-changing decision to move our family from New York City to Arkansas. I only fully forgave them for what I perceived as a quarantine from “urban environments” after I moved to Chicago a couple years ago and realized that life in New York isn’t that great after all. I used to hear justifications all the time: “But Amy, cities are dangerous. Don’t you want to have a yard? It’s impossible to raise a family in the city.” When we moved out of Greenwich Village I was just old enough to know how special the urban lifestyle is. The prospect of owning a patch of grass seemed rather trite in exchange, even to a five year-old.

In my adolescence I had one single mission: to escape the suffocation and isolation of the rural South and return to a walkable urban metropolis (New York or Chicago). I missed the energy, the diversity, and even the public transit systems! Most of all, however, I yearned for street-style. Growing up, my mom loved to torment me with stories about how I used to complement the punks outside CBGB on their multicolored mohawks. She liked to tease me about my adventurous fashion taste, which I didn’t feel comfortable exploring until I moved back into a metropolis. Twenty years later, and I’m STILL going up to random people on the streets complementing them on their looks! Only this time I’m in Chicago instead of New York. Chicago is a better city to live in anyway, so I’m happy with the way my life turned out!

So when I heard about Madonna and Lola’s new street-style inspired clothing line, the first emotion I felt was jealousy. Why had Madonna not created a street-style clothing line for independent girls when I was a teenager! My shopping trips were infrequent and the shops I visited rarely accessible, as the internet was just coming of age. I so badly wanted a place to shop that wasn’t the typical suburban mall apparel store. Madonna and Lourdes’ decision to partner Material Girl with Macy’s is perfect because Macy’s is the ultimate accessible department store. No one, especially teenagers, should feel like it’s necessary to spend a small fortune to be stylish, or that they have to travel to exotic European cities to find clothes that look good. With the expansion of H&M and other similarly-priced high fashion low-cost labels, people have begun to realize that everyone can look stylish regardless of age, finances, or social class.

Material Girl is perfect for street-savvy teenage girls because it’s trendy but not too revealing, and well-made but reasonably priced. This collection is the ideal brand for girls looking to bring a hardcore edge to their wardrobes. And moms will be happy too with both the minimal damage to their wallets and the age-appropriate looks. Material Girl is the perfect vehicle for translating urban teenage street-style from Chicago’s State Street to Main Street, U.S.A