H&M is finally going to peddle its gay wares in our gay city

Jimmy Choos, made famous by 'Sex and the City' typically cost between $175 and $1,095 at high-end retailers were sold for $50 to $200 at H&M.

In news that is the gayest not technically gay gossip, Euro hipster fashionista-for-less giant H&M is finally coming to Portland. It’s slated for Pioneer Place coming this summer.

Our broke but fashionable local audience has been foaming at the mouth for our own store for years now as we’ve watched it break into random markets like suburban western Massachusetts, or open 12 stores in 4 square feet of expensive NYC space.

The chain, which plans to add 225 stores this year, operates more than 1,700 stores with apparel for men, women, teens and children in 33 countries.

Much like its Swedish housewares counterpart, H&M is a destination retailer that attracts excited shoppers who’ll spend the night in a sleeping bag in line before a grand opening. The company called its Seattle store opening one of the largest, but on its Web site said that the Pasadena, Calif., grand opening garnered the overnight party scene.

That’s the weird thing about H&M. Before you have one, you drool over it, make it a tourist destination in every city, and perhaps even sell some extras back to Buffalo Exchange where they mark them up to prices twice as much as you originally paid for them. Once your city gets one, however, it spreads like a cancer. Suddenly everyone is wearing that hoodie that no other person on the west coast had.

I have been waiting for so long for H&M to come to our city, thinking our market was so perfect it was absurd. But perhaps they were right to take it slow. Portlanders are fickle. Will it no longer be cool once it’s here?

Nah, I’ll still love it, just as I still love Ikea even though we no longer have to take homo field trips to Seattle. But it will be just a little easier, a little more trite, and make our thrift store finds even more special. Fashionista hipsters will just have to work a little harder. Now why couldn’t you make it happen before Christmas? Next!