A diss track for the TK Maxx dressing rooms.

This applies to all fitting rooms.

Your eyes are burning and bloodshot. The soft part of your head is convulsing from a screaming child across the room. You stare into a mirror and all your veins are bright green. There’s dust around your mouth, your knees are buckling, SALIVA drips out of your mouth. You don’t recognize yourself. Seeing the husk in front of you, you wonder how you got here. You want a glass of water but there’s no faucet to be found. You want to piss but there’s no working toilet. You wonder if you’ve died and gone to hell. Perhaps, this what happens at the end of Monopoly, when you banker cleans you out for the 15th time and your entire family divorces and vanishes? Is this purgatory, in the internally spiritual sense, the way a theology student would describe it before you find someone else to talk to at the party? Is this what happens when you give birth to the antichrist and don’t register them for the right preschool? Is this Mark Zuckerberg’s dream? Is this your personal nightmare? The answer is yes, and no, to all of the above. The answer is that you are in the TK Maxx dressing room.

In the US, it’s TJ Maxx, but it was dubbed TK in Europe, to not get confused with the British store T.J. Hughes. The naming semantics don’t matter, this could be any dressing room. Unless you’re exclusively paying $1000 for a bespoke hand-jeweled top from a designer who was featured at Art Basel and has warm lamps lighting their 2-meter capsule sale, THIS is what dressing rooms feel like. Dressing rooms are a brutal offense to all that is pleasant. They come for your sense of aesthetics and lighting! Anyone who takes joy in the color wheel, who finds artistry in the textures of an outfit is BLUDGEONED by the “before” lighting in an antidepressant ad.

If that doesn’t phase you, if you can survive the bright-white violent glare on your clothes, the lights will then come for your body! These motherfucking DMV spotlights make even the most vivacious person look like they died five years ago of consumption and then came back to haunt people with Vitamin D deficiency. The average dressing room glare is a psychological terror. It’s the 9-5 capitalist hellhole lighting that inspired movies like Office Space. If the cubicles in Office Space had adjustable Phillips Hue sexy bisexual lightbulbs with settings like “Blood Orange Fucks To This Lighting” and “Beach That Somehow Isn’t Too Loud Or Crowded,” then that movie would be a lot less “FUCK WORK” and a lot more “we’re FUCKING at work (but also please get us a 4-day work week)!

If you can’t tell already, I made the mistake of going inside a TK Maxx this week, and I’m still mentally recovering from the fluorescent glare of mortality. I coped just fine with the warbling singer who sounded like a 2025 AI cover of Jason Mraz. I handled the long lines of migraines and colicky husbands. I survived the loud rows of Stanley cups, seducing people with brightly colored lead poisoning. I spent plenty of childhood afternoons running around TJ Maxx. I have muscle memory of shoes piled next to plastic seating, decorative baskets, and spotlit King-sized candy bars. I knew the energy would be both loud and muted, brightly colored and monotonous, full of the sounds of life and the fluorescent glare of mortality.

One minute, you’re a human woman with a pile of clothes, wandering a store. The next moment, you’re a grey-skinned gollum, clutching at your glowing veins at the bottom of the river as the One Ring (your self-esteem) floats away from you. Listen, I know that’s not what happens with Smeagol, I’ve read the books. But THE IMAGE of Gollum, hunched over and dusty and dessicated, fingers twiddling for a shiny distraction, that’s what it feels like to step under the fluorescent spotlight when you were having a good day.

You can have a deep and abiding knowledge the ways the dressing room was built to kill you, but it will not change the jump scare reality. No matter how evolved you become, there is a light in your eyes that is automatically supplanted by the dingy overhead light. There is a glare that knocks you down to your toes, and sends a surge of the grave, a special preview for your previously lit eyes.

It’s not your body itself sending the surge of the grave, but the RANCID VIBES of the bulbs above you. Imagine, an old man yelling “MY BONES HURT” non-stop on the speakers. And I’m not talking about a nice old man telling you about his life, I’m talking about a really awful old man you avoid at the local bar. This man abandoned his children and mutters slurs under his breath, and now he’s screaming a spoken word soundtrack over the TK Maxx loudspeakers! That is what the lighting emotionally feels like (to me). Are we in a store with clothes that we are supposed to WANT TO BUY?! Or are we in a twisted psychological experiment, some offshoot of the Dr. Phil house, where surveillance cameras capture our headshakes of disgust before we scoot out of the store empty-handed?

Wouldn’t you think, from a purely capitalist perspective, that stores would want to SEDUCE you into buying clothes? How am I supposed to feel seduced if I feel like I’m stripping down in the DMV while a teenager knocks on my dressing room because their creepy manager is vaping to porn in the back?

Where is the seduction, the art of persuasion in convincing me that my skin has already turned into dust and polyester brings out my anemia?

Can you feel the depression through the screen?

In my pursuit of ANSWERS, in my pursuit to UNDERSTAND the world, I tried research the history of dressing rooms. I was expecting to find a rich tapestry of history, a deep knowledge of why the lighting is so abrasive. I assumed it was a form of hostile architecture. I figured some Rockefeller asshole had a theory of customer manipulation. I figured the lights were plying people to buy clothes faster. If not that, then maybe giving customers headaches and insecurities would inspire more impulse purchases. I was ready for the pathology of it all. This is not because I was craving a new dreary slice of capitalist psychology, but because I couldn’t square the circle.

From a business perspective, making people hate an environment they’re decorating themselves in is a BAD business move! But all I could find in my scrupulous (rushed and distracted 20-minute Google session) search, was that fluorescent lighting is cheaper. Lighting places is expensive. Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is very stupid!