website today is filled with Gen Z-friendly greetings for diversity and inclusion, including a themed collection featuring “gender-inclusive” rainbow tees.
The brand’s Instagram account proudly promotes wheelchair models, body positivity stories, and statements of LGBTQ solidarity.
However, behind the brand’s new slogan, “This is #AbercrombieToday”, there is a past that many would prefer to forget.
Any chance of that is effectively blocked by the new Netflix documentary,It showcases Abercrombie’s transformation from the forgotten 19th century retailer to the epitome of late 1990s youth fashion.
Through interviews with ex-models, recruiters, store workers, and managers, the 88-minute film suggests that looking cool, attractive, and white isn’t just a branding exercise. branding. whites, workers and consumers.
Despite all the messages of inclusivity present, millennials (and older) will remember an entirely different Abercrombie – an Abercrombie who conquered malls and billboards with an army of attractive models with ripped male bodies.
Spread across college campuses and featured in LFO’s 1999 anthem “Summer Girls” (“I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch”, voiced by the group’s last lead singer, Rich Cronin).
As veteran Washington Post critic Robin Givhan reflects in the documentary, Abercrombie’s explosive success was achieved by combining Calvin Klein’s sexy appeal with Ralph Lauren’s refined elegance, but at more affordable prices than either.
At the time, it seemed that the brand could do little harm. A former trader remembers a colleague saying they could “write ‘Abercrombie & Fitch’ with dog poop and put it in a baseball cap and sell it for $40.”
One of the brand’s former models put it even more succinctly: “If you weren’t wearing an Abercrombie, you weren’t cool.”
But behind the exclusivity aura was a policy of exclusivity. As a pioneer of today’s influencer marketing, the brand hunted good-looking employees and sought fraternity and college alumni associations for models and store clerks—a strategy for hipsters whose looks were only supported by the tacit understanding of being “totally attractive.” “American.
“We acknowledge and affirm that there were exclusionary and inappropriate actions in the previous leadership,” Fran Horowitz, the company’s current CEO, told CNN. belong”.
“We have improved the organization, including changes in management, prioritizing representation, implementing new policies, rethinking our experience, and updating the fit, size and style of our products,” he said.
“Are we exclusionary? Absolutely”
The company began to face allegations of wrongdoing at the turn of the millennium. In 2003, a group of former employees and job seekers sued Abercrombie & Fitch for discrimination.
Many of the plaintiffs feature in the Netflix documentary to reiterate long-standing allegations that black, Asian-American and Hispanic employees have had their hours reduced, fired or forced into backstage roles because of their appearance.
Abercrombie settled the case in 2004 by paying nearly $40 million to his accusers. While the company never pleaded guilty in the lawsuit, it passed a non-binding Consent Act that saw a court oversee improvements in recruiting, hiring and marketing practices.
While there were obvious improvements in the variety seen at Abercrombie stores, the company would later go to the Supreme Court after Samantha Elauf, an American Muslim, claimed she was rejected for a job in 2008 for wearing a hijab. The court ruled in favor of 8-1.
The documentary also revisits other disturbing parts of Abercrombie’s success story. Among them is her close relationship with fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who has since been accused of sexual misconduct by many models. (Weber has consistently denied the allegations, telling the New York Times in 2017 that he had “not touched anyone inappropriately.”)
Other moments that are now unthinkable include offensive t-shirts using stereotypical Asian fonts and cartoons, including the fictional Wong Brothers Laundry Service and the slogan “Two Wong Cans Can Whiten You.”
However, what’s shocking about the documentary isn’t just the nature of the accusations – many of which have already been made public – it’s how long this showdown has lasted.
Abercrombie made little secret of wanting her clothes to be worn by people of a certain appearance. In 2006, former CEO Mike Jeffries described his tactics in a now infamous profile on the Salon news site, saying: “We’re going after the attractive American boy with a great attitude and lots of friends. Many people do not belong (our clothes) and cannot belong. Are we exclusionary? Definitely. “
The comments went almost unnoticed at the time. The Jeffries quote—and the brand’s troubled marketing and advertising history—would become another corporate responsibility over the next decade. But then, as a young, socially conscious generation of customers began to gain attention, the floodgates opened.
In 2013, teenage eating disorder survivor Benjamin O’Keefe started a campaign. It was signed by nearly 80,000 people, encouraging the brand to offer sizes XL and above.
That same year, filmmaker Greg Karber went viral with the #FitchTheHomeless campaign and video showing Jeffries donating Abercrombie clothes to the homeless in response to his exclusionary approach.
Plus-size blogger Jes Baker created a series of inclusive fake ads that changed the brand’s logo to “Cute and Fat.”
The following year, Jeffries stepped down as CEO amid declining sales, paving the way for another rebranding effort. But like several other documentaries that revisit disturbing elements of our not-so-distant past, “White Fire: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” is more of an account of what went on under his leadership, rather than a description of what happened under his leadership. It is a reflection of what we do as us. a society, we let that happen.
As the Asian-American students who protested against the “Wong Brothers” t-shirts in 2002 can attest, there have always been objections to the brand’s behavior – but eventually someone finally stopped listening.
Near the end of the documentary, a former employee says, “There were probably as many people as now who hated what we did, who were totally offended, didn’t feel included, didn’t feel represented.”
But they didn’t have a platform to express that, and now they do,” he said.
Source: CNN Brazil
Source: Breitbart
