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In his seminal book “Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler captured how the moguls who created Hollywood were, in no small part, forging an onscreen identity that was the opposite of their own - a white-picket-fence America of idealized WASP conformity. There’s a dimension of the Abercrombie story that has a perverse parallel with the movie industry. They have absolutely crystalized everything that I hate about high school and put it in a store.” The journalist Moe Tkacik recalls that the first time she walked into an Abercrombie outlet, she said to herself, “Oh my God, they’ve bottled this. It was the label, the brand, the club, the cult. But advertising them with no clothes on.” But that made sense, since “the clothes themselves were nothing special,” according to Alan Karo, an Abercrombie fashion marketing and advertising executive. (The godfather of Abercrombie models was Marky Mark in the Calvin Klein ads.) There were some girls in the ads, too, and celebrities before they were famous, like Olivia Wilde, Taylor Swift, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher, and January Jones.īobby Blanski, a former A&F model, says, “They literally made so much money marketing clothes. The ads were all about frat boys with the look of rugby and lacrosse jocks, who became, in the quarterly coffee-table catalogues, the stud next door. (You feel the start of influencer culture.) The mall stores were shielded by shuttered doors, and inside they were bathed in dance-club beats and musky clouds of A&F cologne. She traces the incredible ride the brand enjoyed (it was iconic for well over a decade, but then flamed out the way that only a white-hot fashion phenom can), and she interviews many former employees, including several from the executive ranks, who explain how the sausage was made.Īt colleges, Abercrombie reps targeted the hunkiest dudes at the hippest fraternities to wear the clothes, figuring that the image would spread from there. In “White Hot,” Alison Klayman, the ace documentarian who made “Jagged,” “The Brink,” and “Take Your Pills,” shows us how Abercrombie & Fitch rose to an insane of popularity by taking a certain strain of sexy preppy entitlement that was already out there and kicking it up into the aspirational stratosphere. At an Abercrombie boutique, the text was: We’re white. Like the models, the sales people who worked on the retail outlet floors all had to conform to an “all-American” ideal - which meant, among other things, an exclusionary whiteness. Abercrombie & Fitch was selling neo-colonial jock chic infused with a barely disguised dollop of white supremacy.
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It was the fact that not just the company’s advertising aesthetic but its hiring practices were nakedly discriminatory. The brand was unabashed in its insider/outsider snobbery, but the problem with it - and there was a major problem - wasn’t the clothes. What you were buying, in many cases, was really just the logo - the Abercrombie & Fitch insignia, splayed across sweatshirts and Ts, which signified that you, too, were a member of the ruling echelon of youth cool. The models - in the catalogues, on the store posters, on the shopping bags - were mostly men, mostly naked, and all ripped, like the missing link between Michelangelo’s David and “Jersey Shore.” The rugby shirts and fussy torn jeans weren’t all that special, but they were priced as if they were.
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It originally catered to elite sportsmen (Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway were loyal customers), but after falling on hard times and kicking around as an antiquated brand, the company was reinvented in the early ’90s by the CEO Mike Jeffries, who fused the upscale WASP fetishism of designers like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger with the chiseled-beefcake-in-underwear monochromatic sexiness of the Calvin Klein brand to create a newly ratcheted up you-are-what-you-wear dreamscape of hot, clubby elitism. As recounted in the lively, snarky, horrifying, and irresistible documentary “ White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” (which drops April 19 on Netflix), that story gets less pretty the closer you look at it, even as the models who were used to market it were gorgeous.Īs a company, Abercrombie & Fitch had been around since 1892. It was a story of where America - or, at least, a powerful slice of the millennial demo - was at. And in the ’90s and 2000s, the preppy youthquake mall-fashion outlet Abercrombie & Fitch told a very big story. Fashion, of course, is rarely just fashion - it tells a story about whoever’s wearing it.