‘The Shards' Mall Feels Like 1981 Because The Show’s Designers Made It Real First

For one weekend in August, FX turned the Sherman Oaks Galleria back into a mall to launch “The Shards,” its new prep-school thriller from Bret Easton Ellis and Ryan Murphy. Vinyl, makeup, soft serve, an arcade, with every brand involved showed up as its 1981 self. Guests looped through it swiping a collectible credit card (a wickedly good wink in a story about rich kids torching their parents' money). At the Maybelline kiosk, makeup artists shade-matched foundation, so the only shade thrown across the two-day pop-up was the kind you blend. Licorice Pizza, the iconic record chain that died in the late '80s and has since clawed its way back, spun vinyl at a station wired up by RadioShack.

The reason it works, the reason you can stand in a 2026 office complex and feel like you've stepped into 1981, has almost nothing to do with the brands. It has to do with the people who built the 1981 of “The Shards” in the first place.

Months before the activation, production designer Cat Smith and set decorator Lori Mazuer recreated the Galleria for the show itself, down to details no viewer would ever consciously clock. They tracked down Michael Bryan, the artist who painted Licorice Pizza's old Los Angeles street scenes, bought a file of the original mural that once hung in the real Sherman Oaks Galleria, and had it reprinted. Costume designer Joshua Marsh and co-costume designer Serrita Coleman skipped the neon-leotard cliché for a "late '70s, transitional, mauve-y, gray-bluish" palette, according to co-executive producer Lou Eyrich, so the show reads as one specific year instead of a decade in general. Smith has described building the sets as "time travel, but you're traveling back to your childhood." That is the exact feeling the mall activation is selling, and it lands because she conjured it first.

This is the part the marketing write-ups skip. Gen Z has been reviving the American mall, with PwC clocking their share of foot traffic up 57% year over year, hungry for third spaces and the analog hum of a material world that exists outside the group chat, and they'd rather a brand host them than sell to them. Disney+ and Hulu ran the same play in June, turning Westfield Century City into a "Throwbacks" mini mall where MAC did full Y2K glam off the faces of Hannah Montana and Lizzie McGuire. 

The brands and the marketers pulled it off beautifully. But the artistry was there long before them, in a production designer, a set decorator, and costume designers who built a 1981 so precise and so alive that fans could walk straight back into it. The activation is their world, briefly stepping off the screen.