Abercrombie und fitch gay marke
Soft porn, white supremacy, and Epstein: Abercrombie & Fitch’s sordid past
Shopping centres smelt differently in the mids. From Wisconsin to West London, cavernous barns pumped a blend of woody musk, surf spray, and neurotoxins into the brains of pubescent passerbys, setting off a tinderbox of hormones, flushed cheeks, and cash register ker-chings. Instantly recognisable as Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce, the scent was collected, exclusively, from the ravines of sweat that gathered in the clavicles of all-American sports scholars, bodies hairless and buff like a shit-tonne brickhouse. It was like huffing the inside of one of their team jerseys. It was “aspiration”, bottled.
Inside the label’s mahogany-panelled stores, bare-chested assistants gun-fingered to floor fillers and spritzed piles of rough-hewn graphic tees with yet more of those pheromones. To enterprise into the darkened belly of a flagship Abercrombie & Fitch was favor taking a trip to Le Raidd, a blue-lit lgbtq+ club in Paris where amateur pornstars foam themselves into a lather in claustrophobic shower cages
Welcome to OBSESSED, in which I provide you a reading list / media consumption list that speaks to my primary hobby: doing obsessive amounts of research into a unusual topic or story for no reason. This week guess what, I watched the Abercrombie & Fitch documentary.
Graphic by Autostraddle / Photo by Carley Margolis/FilmMagic for Paul Wilmot Communications
It was Abercrombie & Fitch&#;s homoerotic imagery that reached us first — shopping bags and mag-a-log pages of shirtless, muscled, clear-faced American boys with low-slung half-buttoned jeans and cheerful Golden Retrievers. They liked to wrestle in amber waves of grain or lie on checkered blankets in the backseats of trucks with sinewy girls in camisoles and bikini bottoms. They were always just about to fling a football. Those pictures were displayed prominently in stores, but also adorned the cinderblock dorm room walls of the gay boys I was friends with at our boarding school in Northern Michigan.
As detailed in White Hot: Abercrombie & Fitch, Abercrombie & Fitch — once an outfitter for outdoorspeopl
Case study: Abercrombie & Fitch
Successful gay marketing, est.
Arguably one of the most successful brands that crossed over from ‘gay’ to mainstream via a launch in the gay market. Or rather: after a (re)launch in the homosexual market.
Abercrombie & Fitch, also known as A&F (with sub brands Abercrombie kids, Hollister Co., and Gilly Hicks, and until Ruehl No) was originally founded in in Fresh York, as an elite outfitter of sporting and excursion goods, particularly noted for its expensive shotguns, fishing rods, and tents.
It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, finally closing its flagship Manhattan store in , but the identify was revived shortly thereafter, when in Oshman's Sporting Goods, a Houston-based chain, bought the defunct firm's name and mailing list. Oshman's relaunched A&F as a mail-order retailer specializing in hunting wear and novelty items.
In , Oshman's sold the organization name and operations to The Limited, a clothing-chain operator based in Columbus, Ohio.
The current version of A&F sells mostly clothes for the youth market, and describes its
&#;White Hot: The Increase &#; Fall of Abercrombie &#; Fitch&#; Review: How Youth Fashion Turned Fascist
Fashion, of course, is rarely just fashion — it tells a story about whoever’s wearing it. And in the &#;90s and s, the preppy youthquake mall-fashion outlet Abercrombie & Fitch told a very big story. It was a story of where America — or, at least, a powerful slice of the millennial demo — was at. As recounted in the lively, snarky, horrifying, and irresistible documentary &#;White Hot: The Rise & Plummet of Abercrombie & Fitch&#; (which drops April 19 on Netflix), that story gets less beautiful the closer you look at it, even as the models who were used to market it were gorgeous.
As a firm, Abercrombie & Fitch had been around since It originally catered to elite sportsmen (Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway were devoted customers), but after falling on hard times and kicking around as an antiquated brand, the company was reinvented in the early &#;90s by the CEO Mike Jeffries, who fused the upscale WASP fetishism of designers like Ra