In 2012 a US court case claimed that, on Abercrombie & Fitch boss' private jet, there were rather peculiar rules that male models working as stewards had to abide to. According to a former pilot making the claim in an age discrimination lawsuit, the rules included wearing Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirts, boxer briefs, jeans, flip-flops and black or white gloves (depending on the task stewards were carrying out), no coats (unless the temperature fell below 10°C), a whiff of the retailer's own aftershave, and playing Phil Collins on the homeward journey.
Even before the Abercrombie & Fitch private jet manual rules were revealed, the brand was already under scrutiny for the way it recruited its staff. Workers in the United States claimed they were moved in a part of the shop where they couldn't be seen because of the company's "look policy"; staff from the Milan store stated they were forced to do press-ups for punishment.
The rise and fall and the many legal suits involving Abercrombie & Fitch are now chronicled in the documentary "White Hot"”, recently released on Netflix. Directed by Alison Klayman ("The Brink", 2019), "White Hot" starts off with the early story of the brand.
Financial reward was the main aim of the recovery plan launched by Michael Jeffries, who arrived at A&B in 1992. The failed CEO of women's wear brand Alcott & Andrews, Jeffries was called to rescue Abercrombie by retail mastermind Les Wexner (who, later on in his life, allowed the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to operate on behalf of his brands Abercombie & Fitch, and Victoria's Secret as a "model scout"…).
Known as the "Merlin of the Mall", L Brands' Wexner used to acquire an existing brand and try a new concept for it or would buy a brand that was failing and relaunch it.
Abercrombie was an outdoorsman brand that had been around since 1892, catering to sportsmen à la Teddy Roosevelt. Wexner tried to work his magic on it, but, having failed, he enlisted Jeffries.
In his search to cater for the coolest kids, Jeffries reinvented the brand according to three principles - Heritage, Elitism and Sex.
Store design was revolutionized, the clothes and the spaces were sprayed with Abercrombie fragrance and the brand started hiring mainly white employees that management thought looked cool enough to fit in with the company's new image. The interview process wasn't indeed based on experience but on the appearance of the interviewee.
By 1996 the brand was on top and Abercrombie went public, building a huge campus with young people working there becoming part of a super cool scene.
The brand's marketing was shaped by Bruce Weber's homoerotic aesthetic, summarized by journalist Robin Givhan (well done to Klayman for interviewing one of the most distinguished and eminent voices in fashion journalism) in the documentary as "joyful group shots, young people, sex, Americana and golden retrievers."
Former A&F models reveal in the documentary that Weber would invite them to his house to have dinner with him and, if they refused, they would be fired (in 2018 Weber faced sexual-assault allegations and lawsuits, some of which were settled out of court for undisclosed amounts, while others were dropped).
Surprisingly, the homoerotic fantasies of shirtless men with perfectly sculpted abs completely went above the heads of most of the brand's clientele.
Business boomed throughout the 90s, and the brand was also mentioned in 1999 LFO song "Summer Girls".
Yet the brand didn't thrive on its clothes that could be filed under the "preppy" category and didn't really have anything special about them, but on the sense of belonging that came with wearing the brand's clothes. Kids who could afford Abercrombie’s designs were indeed part of a cool tribe.
Fans of the brand would also cut out images of adverts from magazines, or from the brand's "magalogue" or from shopping bags and decorate their school lockers and bedroom walls with headless torsos and gym-fit bodies
In in our times, social media help shaping the minds of consumers, but in pre-digital times, Abercrombie had arranged an equally successful system: they would recruit good-looking fraternity guys from colleges to prompt other students to copy their look and style.
But, as it often happens, what goes up must come down, and, little by little, Abercrombie started falling out of luck. Th brand's "irreverent" graphic T-shirts like the ones advertising a fictional dry-cleaning service bearing the slogan "two wongs can make it white" outraged Asian American students (the documentary doesn't mention other products, but there were a few, like the 2005 slogan T-shirts aimed at women that stated "Who needs a brain when you have these?" printed on the chest…).
As people started getting angry about the messages carried by theses designs, the brand's recruitment modus operandi became object of class actions.
Black employee Carla Barrientos found herself doing night shifts or was completely removed from the staff schedule, simply because she didn't fit the look.
Abercrombie's management followed indeed specific rules to recruit shop assistants: their manual recommended a "natural, American, classic" look - summarized in one concept - "White and good looking".
In the documentary, Givhan highlights that Jeffries micromanaged the look of the team (he regularly checked stores).
Members of staff were ranked according to appearance, skin tones and hairstyles (dreadlocks, for example, were deemed unacceptable).
Barrientos soon discovered she wasn't alone and, eventually, anger and frustration turned into a proper racial discrimination lawsuit against the label.
The lawsuit ended with a $50 million financial settlement, but, unashamedly, Abercrombie admitted no guilt. The brand also agreed to enter into a consent decree (that didn't have any enforcement mechanism), meaning it would have to change its recruiting, hiring, and marketing practices.
Even with a newly-appointed diversity officer - Todd Corley, the brand's first Chief Diversity Officer - things didn't improve or improved only on the surface (interviewed in the documentary, Corley, seems reluctant to give us his full opinions).
A court-appointed monitor did find Abercrombie repeatedly missing benchmarks including underrepresenting minorities in marketing and hiring. In a nutshell, discrimination continued.
In 2015 a Muslim teenager, Samantha Elauf, was denied employment on account of her headscarf that, according to Abercrombie, violated its "look policy". Another suit followed and the company lost in a 8-1 ruling.
By then Jeffries had already left, though not for his elitist views: in December 2014 he stepped down as A&F CEO amid mass criticism of the company's performance and 11 straight quarters of negative company comparable-store sales.
Jeffries completely disappeared from the scene and, as the years passed, his "preppy cool" vision of exclusivity was left behind.
Now the brand, under new CEO Fran Horowitz, promotes inclusivity, widening its offer, catering to plus sizes and also launching Pride campaigns.
Klayman doesn't focus a lot on this new phase of the company, after all following the entire history of the brand is definitely not the main purpose of this documentary that features a wide range of interviews with former brand models, employees of color, former editors of the Abercrombie quarterly journal, apparel designers and lawyers and journalists who covered the discrimination lawsuit against Abercrombie.
Klayman's hope is to invite those ones who grew up surrounded by Abercrombie designs, stores and adverts to look back and ponder about how the brand shaped their youth and American culture. But the documentary is not just for those ones who loved/hated Abercrombie: through the interviews Klayman asks us all to question the unashamed approach of the brand that always went without admitting wrongdoing.
The director doesn't point her finger at Jeffries as the sole responsible of what happened at Abercrombie. Interviewed on Salon magazine in 2006, Jeffries admitted, "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 [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely". Yet his vision of exclusivity was supported by the rest of the company and by consumers who shopped at A&F.
In conclusion "White Hot" is a documentary to think about how the fashion industry creates unfair standards and fosters structural racism and should be taken as a warning about the perils lurking behind certain attitudes.
As Robin Givhan states towards the end of the documentary, "The story of Abercrombie is essentially an incredible indictment of where our culture was just ten years ago. It was a culture that enthusiastically embraced a nearly all sort of WASP-y vision of the world, it was a culture that defined beauty as thin and white and young and it was culture that was happy to exclude people." Does this culture still exist? Watch the documentary to hear Givhan's answer and, as a consumer, before buying into a specific brand, get more informed about their policies and code of ethics. We can all make a difference, just like the A&F employees who bravely chose to speak out.
"White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" directed by Alison Klayman is now available on Netflix
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