Urgh. What’s worse than high school? A company that takes all the shallow crap that exists in high school and makes it their mantra. Enter Abercrombie & Fitch, the worst representation of a heinous John Hughesian high school villain ever re-imagined for modern day consumerism.
Because Mike Jeffries, the CEO of Abercrombie “Jock-Strap 4 Lyfe” & Fitch is perpetually seventeen, it’s been announced that if you’re a girl larger than a size L or size 10, you’ll never be able to wear their clothes because obviously studying the movie Mean Girls is the way to run a business.
Abercrombie won’t be making larger sizes for girls and won’t explain why. But Jeffries gives us some clue. Consumerist.com recalls a 2006 interview wherein Jeffries told Salon this:
“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.”
Good God. They actually let this person run a company? Does he give out wedgies in the company parking lot too?
Sure, we’d like to be able to say, “Screw that asshole!” because something so silly wrapped up in a consumer environment that sustains this attitude shouldn’t get those hard-earned babysitting dollars from young girls across the country anyway, right? But, not so fast. Have you been to a mall lately? The youth loves clothing from this store. Jeffries has figured out what they want — blaring indie rock music pumping from inside the store, models looking “All-American” fresh with tussled hair and rippling rib cages who stare longingly out at passersby all the while bottled teen male testosterone captured in the stink of cheap department store cologne wafts out the entrance to entice smirking boys and giggling girls. It’s a veritable den of hormones in that place — so naturally every red blooded kid, no matter their size, wants to shop there. And yet, Jeffries says:
“It’s almost everything. That’s why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that,” Jeffries said.
So if you don’t ascribe to whatever Jeffries’ version of “good-looking” is, you shouldn’t step your wart-covered, hunchback, decrepit sewer-dwelling corpus into his teen angel, ethereal nymph, fairytale castle made of hoodies. And if you’re a girl larger than a size 10, just go wrap yourself in a circus tent and cry in the corner as all your friends starve themselves in order to fit into “Abercrombie” because as Jeffries says, “these are for the cool kids.”
However, if you’re a guy, you can find XL and XXL sizes in A&F stores. Yes, only boys are worth the extra fabric. Even though most critics have confirmed that’s because Jeffries wants to cater to high school football players and wrestlers, because if you can’t be a grown man swooning over high school football players and wrestlers, than you should just go out of business.
Yeah, well, Mike. We’d love for you to go on that Undercover Boss show and see if they’d let you into your own store when you look like this.
Image: Source
