A passer-by photographs 2011 Abercrombie & Fitch models outside a store in Knightsbridge, a mall in Singapore. (AFP/Getty Images)
If you’ve come of age at any point between the two Bush presidencies, you probably have – or do have – strong feelings for Abercrombie & Fitch, the retailer whose logo T-shirts were once ubiquitous in high school cafeterias.
Perhaps you’ve been striving for the narrow definition of cool. Perhaps you were annoyed by the company’s exclusionary identity. Maybe both. But you just couldn’t avoid Abercrombie as a young person in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Now, a new Netflix documentary examines the brand and its legacy, arguing that Abercrombie’s corporate culture was even more damaging than the perfume its employees avidly dispensed at malls across the country.
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie explains how the company, founded in the 19th century as a supplier of sporting goods to elite adventurers, became the hottest label of the “TRL” era under the leadership of Chief Executive Michael Jeffries made billions in profits aggressively chasing cool kids – who once proudly declared, “A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes]and they cannot belong.”
The strategy worked for a while, but it wasn’t sustainable: nothing that burns incandescent can last forever. Especially if the brand is built on exclusion.
“This is a story that everyone can relate to,” said director Alison Klayman. “People immediately start talking about their personal experiences with the brand. It quickly cuts into something about identity, about childhood, about fitting in.”
A man carries a shopping bag from an Abercrombie & Fitch Co. store in San Francisco in 2008. (Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
The film chronicles the innovations that fueled the company’s rise in the ’90s, including A&F Quarterly, a fast-paced catalog/magazine shot by famed fashion photographer Bruce Weber, and store associates who were hired for their looks rather than their customer service skills became. Abercrombie’s vision emanated directly from Jeffries, who dictated every aspect of the company’s image, right down to the jewelry and hairstyles worn by employees. (Dreadlocks and gold chains were forbidden.)
The story goes on
The company’s popularity crystallized in the 1999 hit “Summer Girls” by second-rate boy band LFO, which played heavily on MTV: “I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch,” chorused the chorus.
But “White Hot” also traces the controversies that ultimately turned anti-Abercrombie sentiment and contributed to Jeffries’ downfall in 2014, including racist merchandise, allegations of discriminatory hiring practices that led to a landmark Supreme Court case, and alleged predatory behavior by Weber to the company’s young male models.
Klayman said she was drawn to making a film about Abercrombie because she thought it was “the perfect story to make seemingly abstract forces really concrete.” It shows you how bias in society is actually formally enforced from the top down. How do you explain systemic racism? Well, how about people from corporate headquarters come into your store and tell a 20-year-old who to hire and fire?”
The filmmaker grew up in suburban Philadelphia during the retailer’s heyday. Preferring second-hand finds to the casual, preppy styles of Abercrombie, she felt intimidated by the store at the local King of Prussia Mall. “I wasn’t skinny or blonde, so I knew it wasn’t for me,” she said. “I got the message that’s cool. And I’ve also received word that it’s not for me.” (While the documentary is comprehensive, it doesn’t have time to rehash all of Abercrombie’s controversial moves, like the thongs worn to teenage girls labeled “eye candy” being marketed, or the decision not to make women’s clothing larger than one size for many years 10.)
“White Hot” is likely to evoke complicated emotions among millennials who grew up under the influence of Abercrombie – colored nostalgia for mall culture, the pre-social media era and the brands we craved as youngsters with disgust at the pervasive racism, misogyny and homophobia that seemed perfectly acceptable in the not too distant past. (Some viewers will also feel very old-fashioned when malls are explained as “an online catalog that is an actual place.”)
The documentary comes at a time when pop culture is caught in a year 2000 time warp. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are engaged, Britney Spears is pregnant and low-rise jeans are back in fashion. Television has offered likable portrayals of women once treated as media punchbags, such as Spears, Janet Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, Brittany Murphy and Pamela Anderson. America’s Next Top Model, a show that debuted nearly 20 years ago, has been the subject of journalistic revelations and countless outraged Twitter threads.
And the recent Hulu documentary, The Curse of Von Dutch: A Brand to Die For, told the wild story behind another clothing company that identified strongly with the early days. Just as yuppies relived the 1960s through the 1980s and 1990s, millennials and the younger Generation X look back on their youth and ask: why did we ever put up with it?
“Pop culture was so much more hegemonic in that era — it was more of a monoculture. There were many people who thought [Abercombie] was ridiculous to begin with, but it was the dominant culture and they didn’t want to drown that out,” said Klayman, who has reflected on this period for several years: Her previous film, Jagged, focused on 1990s pop star Alanis Morissette, and she’s also working on a documentary about the WNBA, which was formed in 1996.
“White Hot” features interviews with journalists who covered the retailer at the height of its influence, as well as with former models and employees who have become disillusioned with the company’s exclusionary policies. (A model named Bobby Blanski jokingly refers to himself as the “armpit guy” because of a famous ad that featured his likeness.)
As a student at Cal State Bakersfield 20 years ago, Carla Barrientos applied for a job at an Abercrombie store in the nearby Value Plaza Mall. She loved her clothes and loved a pair of low-rise jeans with tiny pockets in the front. “I’m not sure what to hold,” Barrientos said, laughing during a recent video chat. “At that time I only wore a low rise, everything was tight. If I could show my belly button it was a great day.”
Although Barrientos, who is black, noted the lack of variety in the store, she thought, “You’re looking for all-American products, and I’m all-American.” She worked at Abercrombie for a few months, but was soon hired with no explanation. When she learned that another friend who was white was still working 20 hours a week, she began to piece it together. But she didn’t act immediately. “I saw it that way, racism has to be obvious – almost like the KKK, right? I wasn’t called a racial slur, I wasn’t chased out of the store,” she said.
“I think part of me didn’t want it to be about race,” she continued, “because there’s nothing I can do about it. I am very proud to be a black woman. How can I fix this?”
Barrientos, now 38, eventually joined a class action lawsuit against the retailer in 2003, claiming that the company’s hiring practices excluded black people and women. The case resulted in a 2005 Consent Decree that required the company to promote diversity in its workforce but was largely non-binding. After the settlement, Abercrombie found a cynical workaround: if it reclassified the employees who worked outside the store as “models,” it could continue hiring them based on their looks. In another case a decade later, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman, Samantha Elauf, who was denied a job at Abercrombie because of her headscarf.
The Abercrombie experience “opened my eyes to what discrimination looks like” and how insidious it can be, said Barrientos, who appears in “White Hot.” She’s heartened to see the changes at Abercrombie, whose website now features models with a range of body types and skin tones. A banner on the homepage reads, “Today – and every day – we lead with purpose, champion inclusivity and create a sense of belonging.”
“It’s so refreshing and beautiful to see how inclusive the world is these days and how people want to know you because you’re not like them, not because you fit into this box of what’s cool,” Barrientos said. “I’m so glad we’re where we are, but I think you still have a long way to go.”
Though social media and the rise of a new generation “unwilling to be fed” fueled Abercrombie’s decline from its turn-of-the-millennium heights, Klayman also sees less inspiring forces at work: falling profits and changing consumer habits. “It’s really hard to be at the forefront of the youth market for many, many decades. Abercrombie had a formula that worked, but it hasn’t changed.”
In other words, the brand suffered the fate of all fads. The cool kids got bored with it.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.