But What Do the Clothes Look Like?

I will admit up front that if attractiveness is the criteria by which super-shallow clothier Abercrombie & Fitch judges who's out on the sales floor and who's in the stockroom, I'm the guy sweeping up after closing.

The company was founded in 1892 by a man named David Abercrombie, who joined with Ezra Fitch in 1904 in selling outdoor gear to people who hunted, fished, camped, etc. The pair split in 1907 when Abercrombie wanted to keep the outdoorsman market while Fitch wanted to expand to some more general goods. Abercrombie sold his share to Fitch. The company sold outdoors gear and sports clothing first to men, then also to women beginning in 1910, and pretty much continued to do that for the next several decades.

The Limited company bought A&F in 1988 as it was losing sales and revamped the brand to sell youthful preppy clothes. Over the course of the 1990s, the company catalog was redesigned to figure out how to sell those clothes in as sleazy a manner as possible, especially with its quarterly catalog-magazine, or "magalog" called A&F Quarterly. In addition to photos featuring models who had decided not to wear A&F clothes or much else, there were interviews with pornographic film performers and, in 1998, a "Back to School" issue that featured several alcoholic drink recipes. The company stopped publishing the quarterly in 2004, although they did publish an edition in England earlier this year.

In any event, the company's policy about who gets to flash their pearly whites to the paying public highlights the lie at the heart of their marketing campaign. Kids, the story goes, if you wear this neato-keen A&F stuff, or Hollister, or whatever other label we decide to print on the same shirt so we can sell it to you for more money, then you will have the same cool look as the impossibly good-looking models we have in our pictures! Buy and wear these and you'll look just like our models and the preppy, square-jawed fellas and all-American gals we employ at our store!

Unless, of course, you don't. In which case you stay in the back room and you fold stock and you'd better not even dream about opening your troglodyte mouth in front of the customers.