King of Prussia works with GQ and Glamour for chic shopping event

Malls are dying. That's not a secret. It's not opinion.

In January, Business Insider proclaimed that "Malls Are Dying A Slow, Ugly Death," with images of spookily deteriorating mid-tier department storefronts. Sears, JCPenney and Macy's were shuttering stores.

The New Yorker's March mall headline offered a little more hope than morbidity, posing the question, "Are Malls Over?" — the last sentence of the piece which reads, "You can buy it on Amazon," ironically answers the query — yes.

BBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and DeadMalls.com, a website specifically dedicated to tracking the demise of your retail-fueled childhood hangout, have all but declared massive, middle-class shopping malls eradicated because of the Internet. How can malls compete with the convenience and variety of online shopping?

To answer this, Simon Malls has crafted a method aimed at bringing virtual shopping experiences to life while providing shoppers a more curated, personalized mall experience in once place, like websites can. Taking it a step further, Simon is collaborating with the very online and retail innovators whose existence threaten mall success.

Mall-ennials is, so far, a two-event series targeting millennials, people born approximately between 1980 and 1995. The series brings in virtual fashion authorities like Refinery29, a popular fashion blog, to re-create the online style experience through outfits curated mall-wide, interactive activities like participatory hashtags, and personalized style tutorials designed to make the mall fun again.

"With the millennials and all of our shoppers," said Lee Sterling, VP of brand management at Simon, "Simon wants to create compelling reasons to shop at our malls," using real-life events like September's The Shopping Block with Refinery29 and the upcoming LOOKBOOK Live event featuring Glamour and GQ magazines. LOOKBOOK Live will be held at King of Prussia Mall in the Lord & Taylor Court on Saturday, Oct. 4 from 1 p.m. until 6 p.m.

The Shopping Block held at King of Prussia Mall included a fashion show featuring trendy looks from stores throughout the mall and a shopping guide about where to buy the pieces. It mixed traditional, more "outdated" department stores with the chic, indie, Philly-local boutiques and brands, including Ritual Ritual and Omoi Zakka, the city is becoming known for. "Think 'Etsy meets Guess,'" Sterling said.

Events like these, said Sterling, "bring together the online world that is so important to millennials with the physical world of retail that adds an important social dimension to the shopping experience." A social dimension is one thing the mall can give that online can't. By combining this advantage with the convenience of having looks from all over in one place, an experience typically provided by online service sites like Shopbop, ShopStyle, Net-a-Porter and Polyvore, a Mall-ennial experience is theoretically more advantageous.

At LOOKBOOK Live, the last of two local events in Simon's Mall-ennials event series, shoppers can expect a convenient, interactive shopping experience. LOOKBOOK Live Lounge gives women and men the opportunity to receive complimentary style consultations, grooming stations, and a how-to selfie station. Yep, that's what I said. On the event's main stage, a Style Q&A Expert Panel will explore this season's runway trends. Shoppers can compete in the Style Challenge next to Philly's most fashionable folk like Sabir M. Peele, GQ style ambassador. Main stage event He Said/She Said gives shoppers insight into a topic that consumes almost everyone at one point or another: what the opposite sex thinks of their outfit. And, of course, you simply must take a picture of your fave fall 'fit and post it to social media using the hashtags #FoundAtSimon and #gcglamourcontestentry. Do it. You could win a shopping spree.

This is a valiant effort to bring online shopping relevance to a real-life industry declared deceased by just about everyone. All the ingredients are there, mall. May the odds be ever in your favor.