One of its best sellers (sold with an 85 per cent mark-up), it sat alongside other slogan tees reading “West Virginia, no lifeguards in this gene pool” and “Juan more for the road”, and it caused outrage among Asian American student groups. In 2002, Phil Yu AKA the Angry Asian Man caught wind of an “irreverent” t-shirt design floating around Abercrombie & Fitch stores – a graphic tee based on a fictional dry cleaning service bearing the slogan “two wongs can make it white”. It's not degrading! And it's not gay, and it's not straight, and it's not black, and it's not white. Former CEO Mike Jeffries framed it as “depicting wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness,” saying that “"I think that what we represent sexually is healthy.
All that homoerotic imagery went above the heads of most of their fratboy clientele, though, despite the brand’s magalogue – A&F quarterly – which was a catalogue of soft porn set in college changing rooms and sports fields. The brand’s depiction of a pumped-up, all-American brotherhood prompted a sexual awakening within much of its teenage client base, who would reappropriate shopping bags (printed with headless torsos) as bedroom posters. Much like Calvin Klein, the brand merged sex with youth culture, birthing a pent-up prepster who spent their days frolicking in the Great Outdoors, in billowing plaid shirts and unzippered denim.
People didn’t flock to Abercrombie & Fitch for its logo tees, flip flops, and ribbed vest tops, but for the vague notions of belonging, confidence, and sexuality that they were packaged with. Below, we travel through the seedy history of Abercrombie & Fitch through its most scandalous moments.įashion really has very little to do with clothing. And while the label is rebranding itself on inclusivity, turning DOWN the music and turning ON the lights, its sordid past is, as journalist Robin Ghivan says, “an indictment of where culture was ten years ago”.
The arrival of White Hot dovetails with a resurgence of “vintage” Abercrombie staples on TikTok and Depop, hawked by those who were too young to properly get involved the first time around. With candid commentary from models, journalists, and HQ-ers, the show follows Von Dutch’s “rise and fall” whodunnit, which debuted in November of last year, cashing in on the collective thirst for nostalgia and corporate schadenfreude. The ceremonious demise of the brand is the subject of a new hour-long Netflix documentary called White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a true crime-style missive tracing ex-CEO Mike Jeffries’ reign of terror. Levelled by allegations of racism and sexual exploitation, the brand soon became void of its social cachet, with former employees speaking of a eugenics-inspired approach to hiring and firing. It was common knowledge that the only entry requirement to working at Abercrombie & Fitch was to be good looking and slim, with hiring managers masquerading as model scouts hiding any subpar employee (not white, not slim, not jawlined) in the stockroom.Įventually, though, the teenage customer grew up and bore witness to an exclusionary culture that bred corrosive business practices. The walls, covered in monochromatic portraits of college life – a dog pile of Greco-Roman limbs and unbuttoned waistbands – read like a staff handbook. To venture into the darkened belly of a flagship Abercrombie & Fitch was like taking a trip to Le Raidd, a blue-lit gay club in Paris where amateur pornstars foam themselves into a lather in claustrophobic shower cages. Inside the label’s mahogany-panelled stores, bare-chested assistants gun-fingered to floor fillers and spritzed piles of rough-hewn graphic tees with yet more of those pheromones. It was like huffing the inside of one of their team jerseys. Instantly recognisable as Abercrombie & Fitch ’s Fierce, the scent was collected, exclusively, from the ravines of sweat that gathered in the clavicles of all-American sports scholars, bodies hairless and buff like a shit-tonne brickhouse. From Wisconsin to West London, cavernous barns pumped a blend of woody musk, surf spray, and neurotoxins into the brains of pubescent passerbys, setting off a tinderbox of hormones, flushed cheeks, and cash register ker-chings. Shopping centres smelt differently in the mid-00s.