Claire's
The ear-piercing rite of passage: the window chair, the piercing gun, picking starter studs while your friends pressed against the glass. Claire's claims more ear piercings than any other retailer — over 100 million — and for generations of tween girls it was the reason the mall existed: bins of cheap earrings, chokers, butterfly clips, and best-friend necklaces made to be split in half.
Claire's began, improbably, as a wig company. Rowland Schaefer founded Fashion Tress Industries in 1961; in 1973 he bought Claire's, a 25-store jewelry chain, and the company became Claire's Accessories. The lasting identity arrived in 1978, when the stores began offering ear piercing — a service that turned an accessories shop into a destination, and a first piercing at Claire's into a rite of passage performed in full view of the mall corridor.
Aimed squarely at tween and teen girls, Claire's spent the 1990s as a fixture of the American mall — the sleepover-supply counter of the butterfly-clip era, anchoring mall trips with its bright displays and endless bins of fashion jewelry. The chain kept growing into a global giant: by October 2012 it had 3,469 stores across 37 countries, and its signature service kept compounding: over 100 million ears pierced, by the company's own count — more, it claims, than any other retailer.
The retail apocalypse caught up with Claire's in March 2018, when it filed for Chapter 11. A second bankruptcy followed in August 2025, but the chain survived under new owners — a holdover from a mall landscape that had fundamentally changed, still piercing the ears of a new generation.
Similar items
Butterfly Hair Clips
Tiny plastic butterflies clipped in careful rows across the top of your head — pastel, glittery, sometimes with a rhinestone body. For late-'90s picture day, a fistful of butterfly clips was the whole hairstyle.
Body Glitter
Roll-on, gel, or powder with a puff — applied to the collarbones, the eyelids, and eventually the entire upper body before a school dance. It came in every color imaginable, and its single defining property was that it never came off. Not that night, not that week, not from your bedsheets.
Lip Smackers
Hoarded in Caboodles and traded at sleepovers like currency, Lip Smackers were the first cosmetic your parents let you own — because it wasn't quite makeup, just flavor. Bonne Bell made them in dozens of flavors, but everyone wanted the Dr Pepper.
Hot Topic
The black-walled store at the end of the mall where the music was too loud and the T-shirts had bands your parents had never heard of. Studded belts, band merch, hair dye, and a smell of incense you could identify from thirty feet away. For a certain kind of teenager, walking in felt like finding your people.