J.C. PENNEY has broken free of its suburban parking area to invade Herald Square, and the most frequent question on New York’s collective lips seems to be: Why?

Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan  in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America  during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself? Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of boring, even traumatically parental, associations?

J. C. Penney has always trafficked in knockoffs that aren’t quite up to Canal Street’s illegal standards. It was never “get the look for less” so much as “get something vaguely shaped like the designer thing you want, but cut much more conservatively, made in all-petroleum materials, and with a too-similar wannabe logo that announces your inferiority to evil classmates as surely as if you were cursed to be followed around by a tuba section.”

But things, perhaps, have changed.

The juniors section of the new Manhattan Penney’s seems to be trying, in a somewhat timid fashion, to thump with new energy. Mini-sections flirt with Topshop-like knockoffs and goth wear lite  not quite a Hot Topic, but nearly lukewarm. It is possible for a raging tween to walk out of Penney’s looking mildly subversive in a zebra-print tee, a studded punk (vinyl) belt and black ankle-zip jeans ($42). Young girls and their moms were quite delighted, gasping and squealing to find T-shirts with post-Jacko-facto memorial sentiments like “I ♥ Michael Jackson” ($20) and “Every Girl Needs Her Vampire.”