I knew that A&F was in trouble when my daughter Veronica, not normally a news junkie, emailed me about Jeffries’ comments, “It would be shocking for a CEO to say something like this, but whether he said this or not the company does have that attitude. It’s disgusting.”
Amazingly enough, Jeffries did indeed put into words what we’ve known all along — that Abercrombie doesn’t market to kids who are unattractive or overweight. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he told Salon. “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.”
Wow.
Yet the counter-campaign against A&F, while well-intentioned, stumbled into its own brand of insensitivity — an effort to “rebrand” A&F by donating its clothing to the homeless. Los Angeles-based writer Greg Karber launched the campaign in a video posted on YouTube with the goal of making A&F the “number one brand of homeless apparel.”
Karber explained to the social media website Mashable, "I see the video as a way to channel populist anger at A&F toward something positive. Hopefully, my video will raise awareness of the problem of homelessness and will get people talking. I am glad it's started a discussion about the media representations of homeless people."
My daughter and I, while sharing Karber’s concern about A&F’s attitude toward women, felt dismayed by the message he is inadvertently sending about the homeless. “The way they did the video, it felt like a joke,i” Veronica said. “It’s like they were saying, ‘Look, Abercrombie, they’re the worst kind of people and now they’re wearing your clothes.”
Concurred homeless advocate Kathleen Shanahan, “It seems like, in their eagerness to smite A&F, they didn’t think through what their campaign was actually saying about people who experience homelessness, which itself is a bit exclusionary…I think it is inadvertently marking the homeless as a lower caste.”
I don't mean to be too harsh with Karber. Clearly he means well, and it's human nature to see the way others are typecasting people without noticing that we're doing it ourselves. In high school I tended to stereotype football players and cheerleaders as superficial, flighty — imagining, all the while, that they were the ones doing all the stereotyping.
I share his sense of outrage about the A&F CEO’s statements as well as the message that the fashion industry sends to young women. As Veronica expressed it, “He kept using cool and fun as being synonymous with thin and attractive. He’s suggesting that otherwise you have no value to us; we look down on you so much we don’t even take your money. You’re just that low of a human being.”
Such attitudes can contribute to low self-esteem or, worse yet, eating disorders. As Shanahan noted, “It’s a bit stunning to hear someone say it out loud, although I think it has always been pretty clear that that is the marketing strategy for A&F. The appalling part is that he is obviously so comfortable with that exclusionary point of view that he would speak so candidly.”
Yet perhaps Jeffries did us all a favor by starting a national conversation. A petition on change.org states, “Bullies don’t belong in executive positions for companies that have access to influence the minds of children. When an executive for an influential organization takes a stance that is contrary to what society is trying to accomplish (such as — developing a positive body image for all children)…”
The problem goes far beyond a single CEO or a single designer label — beyond, even, the way the fashion industry tries to corset today’s young women as tightly as their 19th-century predecessors.
Witness Karber’s unintended insult to the homeless in his anti-Abercrombie campaign. The temptation is all too great for us to “brand” our fellow humans.
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