If you’re a millennial or have one, you know the look: ads featuring shirtless men, sculpted abs over low-cut jeans, a mix of skinny and brown and young white bodies in minimal clothing. A store in the mall, mostly obscured by heavy wooden blinders, with pulsating music blaring from inside. Faded jeans and polo shirts in middle and high school, all with the ubiquitous moose.
White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a new Netflix documentary about the ubiquity of a once-zeitgeist brand’s limited vision of “cool” and its culture of discrimination, is a light catnip for adults re-evaluating their influences on youth . The brand of barely-there denim miniskirts and graphic tees was “part of the landscape of what I thought it was like to be a young person,” the film’s director, Alison Klayman, told the Guardian. (Klayman, a millennial, grew up in Philadelphia.) That was true of many U.S. youth in the late ’90s through the 2000s, when Abercrombie stores anchored most of the mainstream malls across America, including the middle school hangout in mine Hometown in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio.
Every time Abercrombie comes into the conversation, “you immediately cut to stories about people’s identity formation,” Klayman said. How much money you could or could not spend on clothes, body insecurities, commemorative casts from mall hangouts. The overwhelming smell of its Eau de Cologne Fierce is generously applied to every surface. The messages you got about what was cool, on whose bodies met the right standards and whose didn’t.
While White Hot conducted a concise and wide-ranging investigation into the brand’s development and sales tactics, Abercrombie & Fitch, a company guided by a vision of “preppy cool,” kept those messages fairly open. To quote former CEO Mike Jeffries, who oversaw the brand’s meteoric rise in the late ’90s and 2000s in a now infamous 2006 interview, “We’re after the cool kids. We are looking for an attractive, all-American boy with a great attitude and lots of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they cannot belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
Translated: a brand that was not only financially “white hot” in a time of cultural ubiquity around the turn of the millennium, but also propagated an exclusively white vision of beauty and style internally and externally. This “All-American” does a lot. (The brand also famously refused to carry plus sizes for years, until Jeffries’ departure in 2014.) As White Hot recounts through personal interviews with several former employees and cultural scholars, this is a brand that once sold graphic T-shirts with the logo a racist Depiction of Asian people and the words “Two Wongs can make it white”. The brand, which in company materials banned store staff from wearing dreadlocks, classified employees by appearance and skin color, faced a class action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in the early 2000s, arguing in the Supreme Court in 2015 that it was legal to refuse employment a woman with a headscarf because the religious garment violated her look policy. (The company lost 8-1.)
The 88-minute film offers its fair share of nostalgia bait — the opening sequence plays alongside Lits My Own Worst Enemy, and the signature scent is ripped plenty good-naturedly — but focuses on getting the scalpel to fine-tune the company if now outdated , Picture. “We wanted to focus on the everyday people who are impacted by this venture,” Klayman said.
A more objective look at Abercrombie provided an opportunity to examine “abstract forces that affect us in life, things like standards of beauty or structural racism” and to look behind the scenes to see “just how accurate this was a top-down system.” , on which existing prejudices were based”.
This system, the film explains, was both a reflection of American culture and executed under the close oversight of Jeffries, who took over as CEO in the early 1990s. The Abercrombie & Fitch name was founded in 1893 (as the shirts often boasted) as a shop for elite athletes (think Teddy Roosevelt-style gentleman hunter). It became the famous Moose Polo version after retail magnate and Jeffrey Epstein financier Les Wexner bought it, moved its headquarters to Columbus, Ohio, and handed the reins to Jeffries.
Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty ImagesIt was Jeffries – a moody and reclusive character who declined to be in the film – who spearheaded Abercrombie’s transformation into a clothing brand that fused sexy Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren Americana, selling at sophisticated but affordable prices and mostly to adolescents were marketed. According to numerous accounts by former company employees in the film, Jeffries was discerning, obsessed with youth, and a micromanager who valued appearance—as in, slimness, whiteness, and Eurocentric traits—in the company’s stores. In 2003, the company, under Jeffries, faced a racial discrimination class-action lawsuit from California, alleging that the company turned down minorities for sales positions, relegated them to warehouses, and reduced their hours when managers heard their looks weren’t Abercrombie enough . (Three of the class plaintiffs testify to such discrimination and its emotional damage in the film.) The company settled the $50 million lawsuit without admitting wrongdoing.
As part of the deal, Abercrombie & Fitch was subject to a consent decree and had to hire a diversity officer – Todd Corley, who appears in the film but doesn’t give his full opinion on the brand’s controversies. As White Hot explains, the consent decree had no enforcement mechanism, and while behind-the-scenes representation increased, the exclusive vision of the brand continued under Jeffries. “Discrimination was their trademark,” says Benjamin O’Keefe, who started a viral petition in 2013 to boycott the brand until they made their clothes for teens of all sizes. “They were rooted in discrimination at all levels.”
Mike Jeffries. Photo: NetflixJeffries certainly fits the “eccentric bad CEO” criteria now popular on television shows from WeCrashed to The Dropout to Super Pumped, and his portrayals of millennial hustle culture (“Abercrombie definitely worked hard, played hard,” Klayman said .) But as tingling as it may be to focus on your oddities (like his comically over-the-top cosmetic surgeries), such focus can end up being “relieving,” Klayman said. “It sort of leaves us all, the collective, off the hook, not to mention the entire company that made this exclusionary vision possible for decades.
“It’s really convenient to blame Mike for all your sins [Jeffries] and this era because it was so closely tied to the company’s rebirth in the ’90s and early ’00s,” she said. “And he definitely deserves real criticism, but it takes more than one man to do what A&F did.”
Since Jeffries left in 2014, the company has changed course. Under CEO Fran Horowitz, who was appointed in 2017, the company’s sales rebounded from their mid-2010s trough and a rebranding of its image to an inclusive image, again in line with Gen Z politics. “We run a company that is very focused on diversity and inclusion,” Horowitz said. The company has developed a cult following for its Curve Love Jeans in a range of sizes.
Her marketing now brings her “in line with what good business looks like today,” Klayman said. But “it’s important to talk about it holistically, and I don’t know how much they’ve really come to grips with their past.” This reckoning, the film finally argues, goes beyond a corporate name change; The stamp was less extraordinary than illustrative. It wasn’t the pioneer of exclusivity or whiteness, but for a time one of the best to capitalize on it – which, to be fair, is pretty classically American.