Customers began to flag the racist nature of some of the slogans on those basic t-shirts and it became clear that many of the brand’s potential consumers were members of racialized communities. It turned out that not all their target audience in the US was exactly as they had profiled it, that is, Caucasian and affluent.
The bubble burst when customers started to question what A&F was selling and how they were selling it. In an early prototype of today’s hustle culture, where the boundaries between work and life are barely discernible, A&F built a giant campus in Ohio where workers trained in pilot models of the stores and meetings merged with regular parties and team outings.
When asked what the brand was looking to sell, the documentary’s interviewees inevitably say “class,” helped by the company’s 1996 IPO that put it on Wall Street. “But that fashion and definition of masculinity caught on with gay guys in the late 90s.” “Bruce Weber wasn’t the first to recreate these homoerotic, pretty-boy scenes that date back to Ancient Greece,” he says. “But it was done in a way that went unnoticed by the target audience, the typical cool, straight college guy.” Guys hammering biceps hanging from a tree, guys doing push-ups in unexpected places, half-naked guys having a great time.Īnyone who was paying attention would see that there were a lot of gay men involved in defining that aesthetic, says journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis. The architect of the A&F aesthetic was photographer Bruce Weber, who had worked at the time for brands such as Calvin Klein.
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With windows closed to the outside, anyone drawn to the party lights and disco music inside was forced to enter to find out what was going on.
How the brand got there, and what happened next, is revealed in the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, created and directed by Alison Klayman.Īs Washington Post critic Robin Givhan tells the camera: “What Abercrombie did was create a middle ground between the sex being sold by Calvin Klein sold and the posh American style of Ralph Lauren.” Givhan is joined by former employees of the brand – its models and sales clerks –, as well as journalists and activists who have closely followed its trajectory over the late 1990s and early 2000s when it emerged as a pop phenomenon, advertised by half-naked Adonis types in print media and on billboards and of course, inside the stores. Here, customers were received at the door by perfumed, shirtless young models with the physique of Greek gods – incarnations of the rich, white, athletic young men at the center of the US company’s then marketing strategy, with which it built an empire of basic t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with their logo. When it hit Spain at the beginning of the last decade, the international Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) phenomenon was embodied in its palatial store in Salamanca, an upmarket neighborhood in Madrid.