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The teenage jury is in: Abercrombie & Fitch’s cross-channel marketing/ hype machine leaves just in regards to every one else in the dust. Launched in 1892, former shoppers Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Amelia Earhart and Clark Gable would hardly recognize the clothier whose soft-core porn advertising/experience has turned the chain into a cultural icon (well, perhaps Gable would feel at home…). Since rebooting the brand in 1988, A&F has broken from the teen pack by courting controversy everyplace it goes. Let us count the ways… Because just when it comes to each retailer has a catalog and everyone’s catalog is free (ho-hum), A&F invented a distinguished life style magazine full of black-and-white photographs taken by Bruce Weber, the photographer best known for highlighting “the beauty of youth in male nude photography” (per his own website). There were so a lot of protests over A&F Quarterly (which the company sells – further stoking desire amongst teens) that the company suspended publication for awhile; it’s hard to say whether it was the magalog’s porn star consultations or the b&w shots of Santa and Mrs. Santa Claus in flagrante that pushed thousands of parents and a few governors and attorneys frequent over the edge… Who’s to say? Such outrage, of course, only pushed the Quarterly to greater, more mythical heights, stoking the company’s good-but-bad-boy (emphasis on “boy”) reputation. Go online right now to witness the hysteria it generated in 2003. Totally un-cool Bill O’Reilly, a series of religious organizations and others called for boycotts, and articles concerned with “cultural decay” screamed out with headlines like “Abercrombie & Fitch Stops Selling Porn.” Parental boycotts? Porn? Thongs for pre-teens, according to Bill O’Reilly? [Don't think too much with regards to that one.] All like catnip to your underage kitty. Meee-ow! A&F Quarterly has not long back been reintroduced (in Europe, not the US) with a promise from the company that it would no longer be sold to people under the age of 18 and that there would be less of everything that made it hot in the initial place. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t suppose any A&F articles on the virtues of temperance anytime soon. On the ground, it appears that the company employed the Quarterly’s hiatus to commence focusing on client service and the stores. A new CEO was brought in from Gucci which – at 46,000 feet – now boasts the biggest luxuriousness store in the world right here on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Gucci knows how to push the rags. The CEO beefed up store staffing and there are now greeters at the front of each store, in addition to at least one employee inside covering each sales section. But what is A&F’s spin? A&F hires male models as greeters, who may in a literal sense be standing out on the sideway, stirring up… whatever. The company further inflates the aspiration by “casting” for such greeters on it is website, where the pages pulsate with club music accompanying a video of store events where the models are decidedly half-naked and the clients are without doubt or question beneath 18. If you are mesmerized in getting a model for A&F, you’re asked for a photo, your height, your weight… and the name of the mall nearest you. ‘Cuz you may be pretty, but don’t ever forget why you’re here. A&F’s been knocking around in this blogger’s subconcious for a lot of time, but the impetus for this post was an experience this past Labor Day weekend. While merrily cruising down NYC’s Fifth Avenue, an unwitting New Yorker would have run headlong into a case of gridlock at 57th Street. What could it be? Celebrities (pretty typical in these here parts…)? No, it was a huge mass of persons standing in front of A&F’s flagship store, waiting to get in and taking pictures of what unquestionably seemed to be a spotlight of their day. There were two gorgeous young male models standing at the door controlling entry, and a line of people behind a velvet rope that snaked around the corner. A velvet rope. 2008′s version of Studio 54/Limelight/China Club is… Abercrombie & Fitch. There is no question that A&F has made a great deal of wrong moves, particularly in the area of diversity. Several years ago, the company made t-shirts that it considered fun and tongue-in-cheek. Just regarding every one else, including a good deal of college student organizations, considered them racist. And in 2004, the company settled a $50 million class action lawsuit brought by former workers who claimed that the company was happy to hire African-Americans, Asians, Filipinos and other minorities… as long as they worked in the stores’ stockrooms and not out on the syndication floor. Ergo, the screwed up (and illegal) side of presenting the “Caucasian, football-looking, blonde-hair, blue-eyed, skinny, tall male” as everyone’s ideal. Fast forward to 2008, and the company is making progress. Today, the company claims that minorities make up 32% of it is sales staff. It likewise has a huge “Diversity” division on it is website. Of course this is A&F, so the section plays a video loop that features Asians, Latinos and African-Americans – all of whom are finelooking and (most of whom are) in a lot of state of undress. The company can’t give up everything! [Nota bene: An employee not long ago claimed that A&F has plainly shifted it is discriminatory ways toward not hiring "ugly" people, with the company's "hierarchy of hotness" dictating just in regards to everything. And not hiring unattractive humans (across all ethnic groups) is very hard to outlaw, according to a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the introductory 2004 case.] There is little doubt that A&F’s lawyers and senior management are to the full or entire extent cognizant of what they’re doing, and believe that a irritation lawsuit or two is worth sustaining the highly profitable fantasy world they’ve created. And by doing so, A&F taps into it is target consumer’s impressionable zeitgeist like few others do – or have the nerve to do.
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