Alison Klayman's documentary
Abercrombie & Fitch: A Brand on a Wire
premiered on Netflix on Tuesday, April 19, 2022.
Mike Jeffries, who was CEO of the brand from 1992 to 2014, acknowledged that he focused the brand's strategy on the "exclusion" of a part of the population.
The documentary tells how she is a bleak mirror of American society and how fashion influences popular culture.
What does Abercrombie & Fitch mean to you?
As a French or French, your answer would probably fit in a few lines and maybe you would even leave a blank page.
In the United States, it is quite a different matter.
The brand, created in 1892, had a phenomenal success at the end of the 1990s, becoming an emblem of pop culture, then appeared as the symbol of elitism, cynicism and exclusion, before operating a complete change of image in recent years to better embrace diversity.
It is this chaotic, sometimes shocking story that
Abercrombie & Fitch: A Brand on the Wire
by Alison Klayman goes online this Tuesday on Netflix.
This documentary tells how the brand made headlines, how it is a poor mirror of American society and how fashion influences popular culture.
Let's go up the thread thirty back.
When he was named CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992, Mike Jeffries dusted off a century-old brand.
So brand of the elite and chic adventurers – it was worn by President Roosevelt as well as by Ernest Hemingway – it becomes the synthesis between the sexy dimension of Calvin Klein and the BCBG look à la Tommy Hillfiger.
Clothes are expensive but not unaffordable.
Dim lights and deafening sound
Photographer Bruce Weber signs the advertising campaigns.
His photos of muscular and naked young men, in black and white, instantly join the collective imagination and pop culture.
The homoerotic side of the clichés does not alienate the brand's core target: cool high school students and campus
frat boys
, mostly straight.
The strategy is a hit with teenagers who kill their free time in
malls
, shopping centers which are both meeting places and strolling places to find out what to wear if you want to be part of the “popular”.
Going to an Abercrombie & Fitch store is therefore an experience in itself: the dimly lit shops are bathed in a musky atmosphere supposed to inspire virility while deafening music springs from the speakers.
Parents hate, all the more reason to love.
The low luminosity of the stores was perhaps very practical so as not to see what was nevertheless obvious.
The sales assistants were recruited mainly on physical criteria.
Hiring was conditional on good looks, thinness and their ability to "inspire customers".
The staff was subject to a very strict dress code: prohibitive dreadlocks, prohibition for men to wear a gold chain... We had to respond to the triptych: "Natural, American, Classic".
Complaint of racial discrimination
The witnesses of the documentary explain that the employees were not judged on their sales volume but on their appearance.
Someone who didn't seem "cool" enough could disappear from the schedule without warning.
A fate experienced by many non-white salespeople who have faced managers explaining to them, with more or less tact and empathy, that their workforce should remain overwhelmingly white.
In 2003, several aggrieved employees filed complaints of racial discrimination.
The case caused a stir in the United States.
Abercrombie & Fitch preferred to avoid the lawsuit and settle the case by paying 50 million dollars to the collective of plaintiffs and plaintiffs.
It has also committed to reviewing its hiring and management practices, as well as appointing a diversity and inclusion manager.
What, relates the documentary, was not followed by effects.
“Are we excluding?
Absolutely "
It must be said that Mike Jeffries has never hid from focusing the development of the brand on exclusion.
“We hire good-looking people in our stores because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we go for cool, good-looking people.
We do not want to target anyone else, declared the CEO in 2006 to the Salon site.
We're targeting cool, young Americans with charisma and lots of friends.
A lot of people don't match [our clothes] and they can't claim access to it.
Do we exclude?
Absolutely.
»
These remarks, at the time of their publication, went unnoticed.
In 2013, they were exhumed by Benjamin O'Keefe, a "gay, fat and poor" activist, in the words he uses in the documentary.
In shock, he launched an online petition demanding that Abercrombie & Fitch apologize and finally bring plus sizes to market.
The impact was beyond anything he could have imagined.
Controversy swelled in the media at a time when the brand was on the decline.
The exclusion wasn't cool anymore.
People marginalized yesterday have become adults and have been able to express their rejection of the "values" of the sign.
In 2001, one of Peter Parker's stalkers in
Spider-Man
By the way, wasn't Sam Raimi dressed head to toe in Abercrombie & Fitch clothes?
Mike Jeffries stepped down as CEO in December 2014.
Inclusion at the top of the gondola
Since 2017, Abercrombie & Fitch has been led by a woman, Fran Horowitz, and has made a 180° turn.
The brand is now betting on “belonging values” and no longer considers “diversity” and large sizes as scarecrows.
She communicates by saying she supports causes related to LGBT and/or people of color whereas, twenty years earlier, she did not hesitate to market t-shirts with deliberately offensive messages.
As Kelly Bloomberg, ex-director of graphic design, says in the documentary, “At the time, we probably had detractors, but they didn't have a platform to express themselves.
“In the era of social networks, it is the turn of brands to be, rightly, dressed for the winter.
An evolution of society that manages very well to highlight Abercrombie & Fitch: A brand on the wire.
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