The GAP Playlists Edition

On sound, retail, and curation

Louis Cheslaw (LC) is a friend of (and new editor at) WITI. After the best part of a decade at New York magazine and Condé Nast, he now runs his own editorial consultancy out of London.

Louis here. Like most major retailers, GAP has piped music into its stores for as long as they’ve been open. Unlike the others, however, a substantial number of GAP’s painstakingly-curated, monthly-rotating in-store playlists are accessible for all of us today thanks to the singular efforts of a Texas schoolteacher named Michael Bise. A GAP employee from 1992 to 2006, Bise has spent the last 17 years trying to re-obtain his lost collection of the paper tracklist inserts that would come with each month’s in-store CDs and cassettes.

Bise, who only wears head-to-toe GAP to this day, has so far managed to re-acquire about 85 percent of the playlists from the years he worked for the company. (If he finds a disc or cassette somewhere that lacks the accompanying paper insert, he’ll even recreate it exactly, down to the font size, italics, and underlines.) His @gapplaylists Instagram following recently crossed 12,000, and many of the over 180 Spotify playlists he’s made for the various months have been saved by hundreds of people. When, on a recent call, I congratulated him on his staggering collection, he was gracious but quickly pointed out that his GAP KIDS search is only getting started. “Those have more Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake,” he says, “but they represent a moment in time that really existed then, so I want that too.”

Why is this interesting?

It’s easy to forget today, but at its height, GAP was the moment. Long before the iPod, their iconic, music-forward ads, from The Khaki Swing to Everybody In Cords (featuring “Mellow Yellow”) to Everybody In Leather (featuring “Just Can’t Get Enough”), were carefully executed to capture the zeitgeist. The stores had to keep this same energy, and it was the unofficial duty of someone at GAP Corporate to send a company called AEI Music the sonic themes they wanted to hit that month, then tweak what came in. While AEI catered to other major retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Pottery Barn, and Old Navy, Bise tells me that GAP took its playlists far more seriously. For example, Alix Umen, a trend director for the brand in the 90s, was adamant about inserting genres of music she felt were on the up. “She was the one who really drove the acid jazz era, which I loved,” Bise says. 

To me, Bise’s project is many things—one being a reminder of the rewards that can come from pursuing a personal project beyond the realms of work and family life. Many people have encouraged Bise’s search along the way and become friends, and GAP even invited him to their archives in July 2021 to dig around for playlists. (The company is good at jumping on organic moments—when I wrote about Steve Kornacki’s GAP Khakis for New York magazine, they quickly sent me a customized pair with my name and other cute phrases stitched in.) Many former GAP employees have also been in touch with Bise to say how much the project moved them. “My mom has worked for GAP for 30 years,” someone recently wrote to him, “and she says it’s a joy to open Instagram and go down memory lane for the different periods of her life.”

2022 was a particularly good year. Bise met some people involved in curating the playlists between 1995 and 1999, which allowed him to “complete those years 100%, which was monstrous.” An Italian who worked in a German GAP branch in the 2000s sent him “about 15 playlists, which really filled in my blanks from 2003 to 2004.” He also found a guy who had all of 1993 on cassettes and was able to finally track down October 1992—his first month at the company and, therefore, holy grail playlist. 

I’m not surprised there are others out there who saved these playlists. They’re a great listen. Upbeat and bright, they jump around from dance, to trip-hop, to pop, to rock, to trance, yet somehow remain coherent as a monthly package. Bise’s favorites include May 2004 (featuring Electric Light Orchestra, The Postal Service, and Bryan Ferry), January 1993 (Sade, Annie Lennox, Yazoo), and January 1999 (Beck, Fatboy Slim, Moby, Cher).

Bise’s project is a reminder of the relative silence of our material lives today. Remembering back to those days, there was something that added to the excitement of buying a new piece of clothing when you could associate it with the mood of the place you’d bought it from. As Bise puts it: “These playlists made you want to move. And if you want to move and dance, you feel kind of sexy about yourself, and then you're ready to try some new clothes on. Then, if you're wearing the right size and it's cut well, you're going to feel good about yourself.” That dressing room experience is a far cry from today’s online shopping environments, which are spare at best (SSENSE, Mr Porter) or visually chaotic (Amazon) at worst. And ripping open a package at your kitchen table just doesn’t create the same lasting emotional association that walking out of a retail store, new purchase in hand, does. 

Still, if there’s any silver lining here, it’s that the opportunity exists for brands to do as much as they can to add elements to their packaging that somehow convey the desired mood and attitudes of their products, be that through scent or through slowing down the opening process with delightful packaging, as brands like Soft Services, Officine Universelle Buly, Santa Maria Novella, and of course Apple do so well. It makes a real difference, even if it can’t offer the wild advantages that come with having complete control over a retail environment—something GAP understood so well and that Bise has preserved for us all to appreciate.  (LC)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Louis (LC)

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