I’m afraid I gave Abercrombie & Fitch short shrift last week, when I wrote about a woman who found the naked male torso on the store’s 2013 Christmas gift card too sexy to feel appropriate as a gift for a 12-year-old granddaughter. (So she pulled out a Sharpie marker and drew a T-shirt on the young man.)
The thing is, A&F’s reliance on its usual brand of bland, explicit sexiness — as conveyed by photos of the fastidiously sculpted, barely dressed bodies of interchangeable clean-cut white American teenagers — is turning out to be more of a problem for Abercrombie than it was for the lady with the Sharpie. All those pretty, nearly naked white teenagers built Abercrombie’s brand in the 1990s, and defined it as provocative. Now they seem to hark back to a mythical high school world where milk-fed physical perfection ruled and the ascendancy of jocks and cheerleaders was unquestioned. They seem, somehow, kind of old-fashioned.
Meanwhile, the actual world has moved on, to a place where not every girl dreams of becoming a Heather with swingy blond hair, and not every boy would give anything to play varsity football. Lately teenagers — and other people, for that matter — seem more interested in being whoever they are, and in doing whatever they care about, whether it’s fronting a garage band, teaching fourth-graders to play chess, racking up credits in AP physics, working for LGBT rights, volunteering for Habitat, tracking fashion trends, whatever.
In November, a Wall Street Journal reporter cruising a mall in Albany, N.Y., interviewed a 15-year-old shopper who’d strolled past the local Abercrombie without a second look. “When you’re in middle school,” she explained, “everyone wants to look the same. Everyone wears North Face jackets, American Eagle jeans and Ugg boots. In high school, you’re more yourself. It’s about discovering who you are.”
And fashion is about figuring out how to look like who you really are. In that context, the Abercrombie pin-ups, so serious about sculpting their six-packs, look a little out of it.
Two questions:
∎ What are the odds that an Adonis so invested in sculpting his abs will also have an interesting mind? (I’m not saying it’s not possible, but is it likely?)
∎ Can you imagine any of the characters on Girls shopping at Abercrombie? It’s unthinkable. They’d be at H&M or Zara or Uniqlo or Urban Outfitters — or a vintage shop or thrift shop — or some eclectic little boutique in Soho or Brooklyn.
So little wonder the company’s been in a slide since the Great Recession started, losing shoppers to “fast fashion” stores like H&M and Forever 21, which offer a wider range of different looks, faster turnover and lower prices. At year’s end, with the Dow up 26 percent and Standard & Poor’s up 29 percent, Abercrombie’s stock was down 30 percent; The Wall Street Journal named it one of the five worst stocks of 2013. How can that be cool?
In the weeks after Christmas and New Year’s, Abercrombie’s website offered up to 60 percent off its entire winter collection.
For a store that, for the first few years of its decade-long slide, steadfastly refused to lower its prices, that could look like progress. Also, the come-on was flanked on one side by one of A&F’s usual interchangeable poster boys for clueless blue-eyed blond hunkiness and, on the other, by a fetching young woman of (some, if not much) color. This was notable for a store that had been sued for allegedly recruiting its salesclerks mostly from white fraternities and sororities and for consigning employees who didn’t fit the white-bread A&F spokesmodel mold to working the stockroom.
After five seconds, the scene switched to a midriffs-to-midthighs view of an entwined hetero couple in well-worn denim. The website advertised jeans for $39 and under.
Even more progress, given that critics had cited A&F’s $70 jeans as failing to appeal to teens struggling to survive the recession — especially compared to the $40 jeans at competitor American Eagle Outfitters.
Abercrombie also announced its intention of adding larger sizes for women this year, and sort of apologized for its CEO’s 2006 explanation that the store didn’t sell women’s clothes in sizes XL and XXL because he wanted only thin, beautiful people to shop in his stores and wear his clothes. (As of last week, the website still offered no women’s jeans or trousers in sizes larger than 10.)
And, on Jan. 8, A&F announced that it had received a perfect score of 100 percent on the 2014 Corporate Equality Index, a national benchmarking survey/report on corporate policies and practices related to LGBT workplace equality that is administered by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
But will any of this be enough to rescue the store from the damage done over the last 10 years by a strong brand identity that feels increasingly out of step with the values, vibes, leanings, wishes, hopes, daydreams and inchoate longings of its target market?
Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Uclick, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.
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