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 On one of my first trips to the U.S. back in the early nineties, I bought a pull-over winter jacket at a local Abercrombie & Fitch store in Austin, Texas. It is comfortable to wear, practical, and looks good. It is warm without being overbearing, it has a great pouch built-in for a wallet and other stuff, and I can slide in my hands sideways into the front pocket to keep them warm. Women generally smile at me knowingly when I do that. What's more, when I'm feeling silly, I can pretend to be a kangaroo and hop around.
When I moved to Boston in early 2000, I was looking forward to shopping at an A&F store more regularly. Imagine my disappointment, when I entered the nearest store and found only bland and generic clothing much like you would find it at the GAP or similar stores. Nothing of the ingenuity of my old jacket. Moreover, my disappointment changed to dismay when I looked at the pictures on the walls. In the men's section, it was barely dressed highschool boys, perfectly trimmed and tanned, and with faces generally as bland as the laid-out wares. With such a focus on the body, I wondered whether A&F had switched their target market and was targetting gay people only. Or maybe they were targeting girls shopping for their boyfriends. In any case, I felt out of place.
Abercrombie & Fitch has kept up this focus over the last couple of years. The men's section of their print catalogs reminds me as much of soft-porn for girls and gays as Victoria's Secret catalogs remind me of soft-porn for boys. When I went back to school in 2002, I found the respective catalogs scattered around (younger) students' homes in equal measure. As you can see from a 2006 screenshot of the A&F website, they've clearly been learning from Leni Riefenstahl. Except that it doesn't look to me like a triumph of the will, more like a triumph of the morons.
It all finally came together when I read today's New York Times, where Dan Mitchell quotes the CEO of A&F on his company's strategy:
"Uppity and Proud: Most of you, take note. Mike Jeffries, the chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, doesn't want you in his clothing stores. 'We want to market to cool, good-looking people,' he told Salon.com. 'We don't market to anyone other than that. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong, and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.' In a photograph, the 61-year-old Mr. Jeffries is shown sporting dyed-blond hair, blue jeans with factory-applied paint splotches, and a pair of flip-flops." (NY Times, February 4, 2006)
Marketing talk? Certainly. Social responsibility? Not really.
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