‘Discrimination was their brand’: how Abercrombie & Fitch fell out of fashion

theguardian.com:

If you’re a millennial or have parented one, you know the look: advertisements with shirtless men, sculpted abs above low-cut jeans, a melange of thin and tan and young white bodies in minimal clothing. A store at the mall mostly obscured by heavy wooden blinders, music pulsing from within. Faded jeans and polo shirts in middle and high school, all featuring the ubiquitous moose.

White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a new Netflix documentary on the ubiquity of a once zeitgeist-y brand’s limited vision of “cool” and its culture of discrimination, is easy catnip for adults re-evaluating the influences of their youth. The brand of barely there denim miniskirts and graphic T-shirts was “part of the landscape of what I thought it meant to be a young person”, the film’s director, Alison Klayman, told the Guardian. (Klayman, a millennial, grew up in Philadelphia.) That’s true for many US adolescents in the late 90s through the 2000s, as Abercrombie stores anchored most mainstream malls across America, including my hometown middle school hangout in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Anytime Abercrombie comes up in conversation, “you immediately cut right to stories about people’s identity formation”, said Klayman. How much money you could or could not spend on clothing, body insecurities, memory imprints from hangouts at the mall. The overpowering smell of its cologne, Fierce, liberally applied to every surface. The messages one received on what was cool, on whose bodies met the right standards and whose did not.

As White Hot traces through a succinct and wide-ranging survey of the brand’s evolution and sales tactics, Abercrombie & Fitch, a company hinged on a vision of “preppy cool”, kept those messages pretty overt.