Abercrombie & Fitch: From Abs to Acceptance?
Jun 8, 2021 3:37:24 GMT 10
Post by al on Jun 8, 2021 3:37:24 GMT 10
Abercrombie. 2000's young middle class indulgence in a mall store. Abs on bags. Abs on walls. But now for Pride 2021, the company is sending a different message via their advertising:
This marks a big change from a company that not only promoted a very fit, clean cut aesthetic, but actively discouraged shoppers and even employees who did not embody the look.
However, this transformation did not come overnight. With the ending of the 2000's and all its excess and clique-ishness, Abercrombie spent the 2010's facing backlash for its increasingly extreme attitudes. The company's CEO at the time Mike Jeffries was very adamant about running the company utilizing his vision, insistent that he still understood his market. The majority of Abercrombie's controversies have focused on size, with their unwillingness to carry larger sizes. This also extended past advertising, but down to their hiring practices, in which employees were required to wear company clothing, and could no longer work there if they ceased to fit in their sizes. (From personal experience, I can say what was once their largest size Women's clothes would today be marked as a size Small or Medium at many competing stores.)
Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Explains Why He Hates Fat Chicks
"He doesn't want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people," Lewis said. "He doesn't want his core customers to see people who aren't as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they're one of the 'cool kids.'"
“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told the site. “Candidly, 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. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don't alienate anybody, but you don't excite anybody, either," he told Salon.
The company has also faced complaints, even lawsuits, regarding their race relations.
The Unbearable Whiteness Of Abercrombie & Fitch: In A Multicultural Era, Can This Branding Still Work?
In 2003, a class-action lawsuit, Gonzalez v. Abercrombie & Fitch stores, was filed by nine minority litigants who claimed they were either refused jobs or fired for being minorities. Their suit charged A&F’s promotion of so-called classic looks extended to its hiring, that the company discriminated against African-American, Latino and Asian-American applicants and employees by refusing to hire qualified applicants to work sales floors -- relegating people of color to stockrooms or other places where they couldn’t be seen -- and that the firm discouraged minorities from applying for jobs.
Zimmer’s students of color recounted feeling “distinctly out of place” in the store that had huge pictures of white people everywhere. They told her they realized that it’s why they either had never entered an A&F store before the assignment or that, when they did, they felt unwelcome.
By the mid 2010's, Abercrombie did finally give in to, as requested by Facebook users for many years, turn the music down and turn the lights on. But despite changes being made to tone things down and make the company a less "cringe" experience for a different decade, they instead got lost in its sea of competitors.
Today, Abercrombie & Fitch is cool again, after years as the most hated retailer in the US, because it caught up to what millennials and Gen Z want
So does Abercrombie actually care about being inclusive?
Myself, I'd say Abercrombie cares about a dollar. Which is okay to some degree, it is a store after all. However, it does bring up some disingenuous feelings regarding rainbow capitalism. In the case of a company that was so known for establishing youth trends, only to lose its way and had to rediscover itself by being a follower, it's hard not to see it as a clout chasing move. (To be fair, the company hasn't been straight up homophobic, at least not for a while, and if anything, even homoerotic in its advertising, at the preference of their gay former CEO. But even so, they had somewhat let go of the straight passing aesthetic once gay acceptance was in vogue by the early 2010's.)
But is this move still a good thing regardless of its intentions? Time will tell. The brand's target market has skewed more mature (in taste, if not age), though uses mostly straight sized models with plus sized models with otherwise classic looks, of all races, while carrying streamlined basics in a wide array of sizes. Is Abercrombie genuinely trying to sell to the more "alternative" customer? Unlikely, which contributes to the feeling that the current advertising is a gimmick. Which is again, okay, as maybe their vilified ex CEO wasn't wrong about stores not needing to appeal to everyone.
Thoughts on Abercrombie, their transformation, and trendy "woke" marketing in general?