This could have been my “Joker.”
Because as much as I hate having to make a reference to supervillain movies made without superheroes in them and/or things that made men mad on the internet—it’s true. Netflix’s “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” documentary could have been a tea-spilling takedown and instead, I have to be honest, it was so bad. I don’t think anyone who went to words school and not film school could say it was necessarily poorly done and it’s definitely not 👀 untrue 👀 — but it was worse. It was boring.
As someone who likes to hate on things other people like (sports), and conversely defend liking things that other people hate (Taylor Swift), I was really hoping to watch this damn documentary and then review it like the good olde days of my journalism youth (me studying magazine journalism for 4 years and then writing exactly 3 articles for Columbus Monthly) with spicy anecdotes.
But after I watched it (fueled by 2 cocktails and pepperoni pizza), the only funny thing I could think to say about it was alternatively titling this post “Abercrombie & Bitch, What?”
Because, listen. This shit was uninspiring. This shit was giving “been there, heard about that.” This shit was giving, “Are we really still that butthurt about a brand that is basically trying to be Aritzia now?” This shit was giving, “We had too much space to fill before the second half of the last season of ‘Ozark’ also we approved this before we got the new bad earnings results.”
I don’t know?
Maybe it’s because I quit Abercrombie over a year ago and have decided to recognize it as both good and evil simultaneously, a Jedi mind trick all marketers must learn to master. Maybe it is because as an adult, you rewatch “Mad Men” and you’re like, “Do I feel bad for …. PETE?” Maybe it’s because no matter the amount of social justice initiatives and sustainability reports a brand puts out onto the internet, they will always be a corporation trying to sell you shit. Maybe it is because after five years, I still have the urge to let out a guttural scream when I hear someone add an “M” in the beginning of Abercrombie.
IT’S NOT AMBERCROMBIE. IT WAS NEVER AMBERCROMBIE. YOU’RE WRONG, OH MY GOD.
And while I found the Netflix documentary all-around pretty lame, it did allow me to open up a can of worms that has been sitting in my post drafts pantry for A WHILE. (That was a dumb metaphor, keep reading, I promise it gets better.)
Most of the eyeballs on this belong to people who know I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch from 2016-2021, because you’re either related to me, married to me, best friends with me, or former co-workers of me. A warning that this may not be the boardwalk burning expose you expected, but I certainly do have some … thoughts.
Warning, this is a long-ass post. So let’s take our shirts off and get into it. Wait, what?
PART I: EVERY BRAND IS LEMONS
My hottest take is that it is annoying to still be shitting on the Abercrombie & Fitch from 2000, and to think that there is enough of an audience who still wants to talk about how you felt traumatized when you walked through the mall because a global retailer was simply marketing to the masses. If you were, like, 16 in 2003 you’re like, what, almost 40 now? And still thinking the best use of your time is dipping into the DMs? Do you know how Instagram works or are you still friend requesting people from high school?
Rest assured this post is not solely a defense of Abercrombie & Fitch. They paid my bills and fed my cats and kickstarted my career, so my feelings are mixed, to put it lightly. But they deserve criticism. You’re allowed to criticize whatever you want, because this is America, so you can’t criticize Donald Trump (Abercrombie certainly won’t — we’ll get there in a bit) but you can criticize everything else and you should.
Rest assured I’m not saying Abercrombie’s marketing wasn’t harmful, because—
Mike Jeffries = bad
Mike Jeffries’ reign at Abercrombie = evil, also kind of genius re: retail marketing because, um, bad news, but…
All brands = bad
Editors note: I am going to say “I” a lot in this piece, maybe 1892 times. I am also going to say “brands aren’t people” until you hear me in the back. But, really.
I don’t think that you can continue to criticize Abercrombie without recognizing the situation is so much more complicated than how one time Channing Tatum was in their orgy catalog. You have to also be willing to criticize retail marketing, marketing as a whole and by some philosophical link (IDK they only made me take “Intro to Logic” at words school) — capitalism.
The idea that we are supposed to hold brands accountable like we hold our friends and family and other human beings accountable is bogus, bros. It’s bogus now, in the age of Living Your Authentic Long Weekend Life, and it was bogus in 1999.
That said, all these things can be true. You can call A&F out, and ask them to be held accountable, like, once every six months it feels like these days. You can also acknowledge that they are not the A&F of Mike Jefferies anymore, so is it really worth draining your emotional bank to, like, keep harping on this…? And also, you can admit to yourself that all brands are sort of sinister, because brands aren’t people.
It’s true that Abercrombie did some racist shit. They did some discriminatory, dumb shit. But everything you hear about in the documentary, you probably already knew if you’re actively choosing to watch a documentary about Abercrombie & Fitch and you don’t have any personal vendetta against them and/or weren’t employed by them at some point in your life.
“White Hot” isn’t anything new and I am confused why we are still Netflix-money-mad about it when you could literally tank them just by spending your money somewhere else.
But then again, I am a soulless, recovering aspiring girlboss who literally works in retail marketing. Marketing to you – whether it’s with naked people because that’s what was cool at the time, or ~realistic~ TikTok hauls, because that’s what’s cool now — is my job. It’s my livelihood.
Could I have worked in journalism and done the Good Work of investigative reporting? Yeah no, I would have cried too much and professors said I would probably have to start in some backwoods town with one tiny paper and no one who was interested in my review of One Direction’s “Take Me Home.”
Could I have aspired to be a pure-hearted writer who worked at, like, IDK, a non-profit? Also no, because, sorry — working in brand marketing is cool. It’s cool, okay, and it’s okay to think it’s cool. It’s a creative-driven job and I’m a creative.
Did working at my cool, brand marketing job cause a little menty b when suddenly all the brands Woke Up and it was like, wait, what the fuck, brands can’t be “good” because on one hand, you want us to post this pic of a Black model to show “support,” but on the other, it’s not purely support… it’s not because the company is pivoting from selling jeans to becoming solely dedicated to supporting the Black community—it’s because the company wants customers to think it’s doing something for Black people so that ultimately Every people will shop buy one, get one jeans 50% off Memorial Day weekend???
That’s a yes. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Retail marketing is always going to be a little soul-crushing. (It’s okay, everyone who works in it knows it.) You are constantly girlbossing too close to the sun. It’s like, do I want to work in branding as a creative, where the work is rewarding to that part of my identity and brain, but the end goal is also just to sell people things and that feels gross? Or do I want to …. not do that and never own anything because P.S. every brand is bad?
Retail marketing/brand marketing/marketing is a … whole thing. It is not for everyone. It can be hard and awful and exciting and rewarding, and, you know what? Getting a job at a fallen-from-grace global retailer when you’re 23 years old sure seems like a cool-ass creative challenge.
In all honesty, some of the smartest and coolest (!) people I’ve ever met, I met while working with them at Abercrombie & Fitch. Do some people who work there genuinely care about the state of the world? Yes. I’ve cried in storage closets with some of them! Do some people who work there genuinely care about being allies in their personal lives? I really think so.
People who work in marketing aren’t (all) terrible people. But it does get icky when anyone starts demanding emotionally driven actions from a corporation and the corporations don’t reciprocate because as a brand, they’re not … people.
(I may have always been too tall and uncoordinated for real gymnastics, but I am quickly becoming an ace at mental ones.)
Brands will never, ever be people, no matter how many black squares and beige-y, purposefully toneless statements are posted. They will never, ever be people no matter how many “mental health” days they give you without leadership bothering to help clear your schedule or alleviate your workload so you can actually enjoy them. They will never be people and they will never, ever care about whatever trauma they inflicted on you when you were 15—because at the end of the day other people bought their logo’d polos, anyway.
Once you realize that BrAnDs ArEn’T pEoPle, whether you took a job in marketing already knowing it, or it comes crashing down on you in your car on a Saturday afternoon after a communications crisis of an EMERGENCY meeting about how THE BRAND needed to SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING about Black Lives Matter because omg, did you see NIKE ALREADY DID — then it gets little easier.
Abercrombie The Brand didn’t care about you in the 2000s and they don’t care about you now. Sure, they want (and legally have) to make sure you know that a portion of the proceeds from their rainbow tees are going to The Trevor Project, but when it really comes down to it, do you think the board of mostly old white people directors of any brand would choose to just stop selling shit and go full philanthropy?
….
A frustrating thing that happens in the documentary is they fail to talk to people who worked in marketing. Hmm. I mean, they talk to the woman who made the racist graphic tees and plenty of people who worked in the stores, but there is no explanation about how a product and a storefront is a smidgeon of a brand’s strategy.
Something they do talk about in the documentary, though, is that Abercrombie’s marketing strategy? Smart AF.
PART II: 2000 AND LATE
Having worked at other places and at Abercrombie, I can concur that Abercrombie is really fucking smart. There’s a reason they have never filed for bankruptcy, despite the flailing of the 2010s and the literal parade of lackluster leadership hires they cycled through while I was there. They are super tight with their finances. They close stores when they should, they don’t open stores where they shouldn’t. They threw MANY dolla dolla bills at affiliates and influencers way before the other girlies were doing it, and the paycheck they get from paid media shows it. They decided to go digital this and omnichannel that, and immediately put a team in place who had made proven change at competitors. They make you take a logic test at the panel interview!
More my-brain-hurts here, but it can be true that Abercrombie’s marketing in the 00s was harmful and profitable and smart. Because they, like every other brand in existence, can be good-ish and evil-ish.
I mean, take the emotion out of it and their greatest crime is, what? That they are a global marketing entity that … capitalized on popular things—which, in the 00s, was popular kids? Ew! Who would have thought that was a smart way to market and make one gazillion dollars?! And then, when it became clear that those popular kids all peaked in high school, and being your genuine self (funny, when a brand doesn’t have a … self …) became the new, cool (!) thing in the era of Instagram and influencers and “reality” TV, Abercrombie capitalized on that, too.
It’s called catering to your audience. So they’ll buy your shit. And then you can make more shit.
You think Aerie, with their body positivity, is pure good and not just out here trying to get you to buy those comfy-ass bralettes in bulk? You think somewhere like TOMS, with its “do good” mission isn’t out here just trying to sell shoes to stay alive at the end of the day? You think Target, with its loud and proud support of things like Pride month, isn’t out here just hoping people continue to Target run and never be done?
I’ve got bad news for you. They all definitely a little bit inherently suck.
Because, let’s all chant it now like we’re at a definitely non-culty all-hands “fireside” meeting around an actual fire pit: BRANDS AREN’T PEOPLE. Can we really blame Abercrombie and/or brands for not being in tune with non-existent emotions?
I don’t think so. Especially not when they are also being run by a piece of shit.
You can’t spell “douche” without CEO and I think we can all agree Abercrombie & Fitch was run by the biggest one. Mike Jeffries may have been a person, but he operated more like a corporation: ruthless, evil, and, yeah, fucking smart.
The documentary paints him as an evil genius type, and I would say that tracks to what I heard about him.
Because, also, the doc kind of conveniently glides over this at the very end, but, uh, HE HASN’T BEEN THERE IN ALMOST 10 YEARS. MIKE JEFFERIES DOESN’T RUN ABERCROMBIE ANYMORE.
ALSO IT’S STILL NOT AMBERCROMBIE.
I can’t tell you how exhausted I will feel for the rest of my life after just spending, like, the first half of my time at Abercrombie telling people that he doesn’t run it anymore. The jerk who made the comment about cool kids? HE’S BEEN GONE. HE’S NOT SITTING WITH US. DID YOU SEE WE HAVE BUY ONE GET ONE 50% OFF JEANS LIMITED TIME ONLY.
Dude cast a LONG shadow, though, and I see that as part of Abercrombie’s reckoning—because, yeah, they totally deserve(d) to be held accountable for the harm they caused.
But also—holy moly, can I tell you the people who work for Abercrombie & Fitch FEEL accountable. We know, okay? We know that the nearly naked and fully naked dudes were offensive to some of you and we know that they perpetuated the racism and ugliest parts of the early aughts. We knew and we know and we’re all here because we sold our souls the day some adult told us we were good at creative things so we grew up to be creatives in marketing.
It was no secret that people hated Abercrombie when I started there, but I didn’t realize how strong the haterade was. (It was nearly as strong as the Kool-Aid you had to drink to get promoted there!)
Because, not to brag, but I didn’t give a shit about Abercrombie when I was a teen. I am probably a little too young, I think it’s mostly Gen X that still gets PTSD from Fierce. I was like, 9-12 when A&F had its heyday, so I was over in Limited Too, doing my thing and then over in Claire’s, buying magnetic earrings with no supervision. My actual teen years were wrecked by everyone idolizing the rail-thin Paris Hilton and blue cream eyeshadow, thank you very much. Can’t be bothered by topless jocks when you’re too busy buying Fall Out Boy posters and Marvel t-shirts from the guys section at Hot Topic, ya feel me?
So with that knowledge and the insider intel of, like, actually working and living and breathing fire uh I mean retail marketing, “White Hot” just felt….. late. And it is very cringe when you are too late on a pop culture reference. Like, is it 2006? Are we actually still thinking it’s cool to make hating Abercrombie your personality? Is Abercrombie still that big of a deal that people even … care? Because I can tell you from hearing the numbers for 5 years at many, definitely non-culty all-hands fireside meetings that people did not care that much anymore, you guys.
I mean, I think this doc could have tanked Abercrombie if it came out in, like, 2014. But it’s honestly embarrassing and weird for it to come out now, when A&F and every brand that isn’t a person has done work to try and prove to people that they have changed and are, what’s that buzzword again? Authentic.
I don’t know how long it takes to make a documentary, but this a good example of how not to make one about a pop culture thing that doesn’t have the staying power of other references – like the lyric from “Boom Boom Pow” I put as the subhead and can confirm is still cool because it was the basis of an SNL skit with Lizzo like two weeks ago.
Anyway, back to Mike.
He is … literally a campfire story at Abercrombie now. Everyone knows who he is and what he did. But hardly anyone currently employed by the company ever actually interacted with him. Really. Do you know how often a retail brand cleans house? And I’m not even talking about during a global pandemmy? Those home office fitches are at least 2 generations of Millennial removed from him. Literally no one talks about him unless it is a vague anecdote like, “Yeah this review sucked but at least it wasn’t a Mike review.” Boring! No time to hear more details about your very own Voldemort because you have to go redo that whole week of social posts to make it more PC!
No one mentions him or his POV when approaching marketing. Isn’t it weird that the documentary that failed to interview anyone in marketing also failed to mention that he has no lingering effect on the people who run the marketing department now? Hmm.
“Abercrombie Today” is not perfect, but it is not Mike Jeffries’ Abercrombie. Anyone — ANYONE — can go to a mall (they still exist, there’s a really helpful part in the documentary where a white man explains to you what malls are!) and see the change. That is, if the stores team put the sign pack together correctly.
Because sometimes they literally couldn’t tell up from down in a sign pack. Out here putting the wrong shit up all the time because they were all like 20 years old and didn’t give a shit about what “home office” wanted them to do at their college break mall job. I would 10000000% guarantee the Abercrombie stores in 2001 were not staffed by rocket scientists.
But I digress.
I do believe that Abercrombie did the work of ridding itself of its horcruxes (bad graphic tees, discriminatory hiring practices, too-prominent logos, quarterlies, Bruce Weber, not having any lights in the stores, and Mike). And I also believe that now it is just regular evil sometimes, like every other retailer you shop from.
Sure, there’s a questionable amount of work/life balance yet an abundance of mandatory “happy hours,” and plenty of inspo for any sort of meme making fun of places for giving you pizza parties instead of 7% raises to match inflation………….
But how much of that is an Abercrombie problem, versus a corporation in the cutthroat world of brand marketing problem?
Bragging about how much you hate Abercrombie? TIRED.
Having an existential crisis when you realize brands aren’t people, so while A&F did some evil shit, it maybe isn’t fair to pretend like they are or were the singular source of society’s woes in your pivotal mall-loitering years? 🤯🤯🤯
PART III: I LIKE GIRLS THAT QUIT ABERCROMBIE & FITCH
I’m a white woman. And so that’s why I have saved the race stuff for last, because I want to be respectful and also know that I don’t have the most perfect, polished language to talk about it. I can be more blasé about the harm Abercrombie inflicted, because I’m a white person. I can only speak to how I interpreted it, and not how it felt growing up as a person of color, and I don’t want any saucy sarcasm to denounce that.
So, here are some things that I know to be true about Abercrombie & Fitch, both past and not-so-distant past. You can interpret them as you want, and, remember, you can choose to spend your money wherever you please.
A&F did some SHITTY shit in the 2000s. They got sued for discriminatory hiring practices. Everything you hear about the dress code in the doc is true. (They even knew how to use the right fonts for the employee documents—noice.)
And after the lawsuits, there was a big push for diversity—forced, literally, by court order. So, yeah, about that …
Have you ever been to New Albany, Ohio? It is a Starbies next to a “we don’t have Wifi because we encourage conversations” local coffeeshop next to a place that only sells salads in the middle of 1400 farms. It is Whitey McWhiteTown & Whites.
The A&F “campus” as I knew it reflected its surroundings. There were fewer than 10 people of color on the marketing team. There was 1 woman of color with an art director-adjacent title. There were 0 people of color with VP or higher titles. You can actually find their board of directors pretty easily with a little hop, skip and Google. Here’s a spoiler: Rhymes with “fright.”
By the time I started working there, Mike’s racist mandates were no longer mandates. We were constantly hit over the head with the phrase “Always Forward” because, I am not sure if you’re gathering this, but the people who work at Abercrombie & Fitch aren’t big on rehashing the past. I did not witness overtly racist behavior that I could recognize as racist from my privileged POV. That definitely doesn’t mean that other people had different interpretations of things, or different experiences.
I was also pretty removed from the stores except for constantly scrambling to create signs for them to ultimately use incorrectly, so I can’t speak for how that experience evolved for store employees of color after the (m u l t i p l e) lawsuits.
For the most part, as a lowly copywriter stuck on a sub brand, the anger I gathered from the outside was mostly nasty social media comments from people who hadn’t left their basement in so long that they didn’t know the place was run by a (white) lady now.
But.
There is one really gross thing that sticks out to me when I think about my time there through a racial lens.
In June 2020, I was browsing Hollister’s (fun fact: they’re owned by the same company, which the documentary ish mentions, but, shockingly, doesn’t develop) IG and noticed a lot of comments berating them, and telling them to go check out a YouTube video recently recorded by one of their models. It was clear these teens were pissed, and as I had recently become hyper aware of the mental and emotional energy (stress) it took to try to be an ally for an inherently evil entity (corporations), I made my way to YouTube dot com real quick.
Editors note: The video has since been taken down by the model, and without ever actually talking to this person or anyone on the Hollister team about it. I don’t want to make too many assumptions. It could have been a personal decision, or maybe he was asked to take it down. Regardless, I won’t use names, but if you’ve got some time to scroll back on @hollisterco’s Instagram feed to June 2020, you’ll see that the post in question has been removed, but their statement about BLM has not. Read those comments and you’ll know who made the video.
Basically, a young Black man who modeled for Hollister was denouncing the brand for using a happy-go-lucky image of him in one of the first social media posts after the protests spurred by George Floyd’s murder.
He’s crying in the video, visibly livid, and rightfully upset. He says something along the lines of, if they’re going to tokenize his image, at least do it with some kind of statement. (I believe this post was made before the company had decided on the joint BLM post—A&F, abercrombie kids and Hollister often used the same exact, corp comms-approved lingo. So, the caption would not have said anything about the social justice upheaval happening, and could have very well been like #weekendvibes #yikes.)
He also noted that before this, he knew he wasn’t the most frequently used model in their images, although he was excited for the opportunity to work for such a huge brand. But then, suddenly, after the protests, his image was front and center.
He goes on to say he called Abercrombie/Hollister and they tried to PRspeak their way out of the nightmare. Whoever he talked to (he doesn’t name them, and it is an assumption of mine that it may have been someone from the PR team—if that assumption is correct, it was a white woman) said that it was unintentional, that “the team” planned their social media “months” in advance. He was invited to campus, where he noticed the, um, general aesthetic of the people who worked there. He offered to continue working with Hollister, even volunteering to talk to teams as part of the DEI discussions they were frantically putting on all our calendars.
That person never followed up.
Because that person flat out lied to him.
Anyone who has ever even peripherally worked in social media knows that telling someone your feed is “planned months out” is a wild thing to say.
I didn’t work on the Hollister team. But on the abercrombie kids and the Abercrombie team, we typically worked 2 weeks out, at best. And even before the racial reckoning of summer 2020, we would have to swap pics, edit captions or change posts altogether all the time. Sometimes it was because a product sold out, sometimes it was because there was late copy feedback, sometimes the regular degular strategy just fucking changed.
The fact that this A&F representative confidently told him there was nothing the team could have done to make sure they didn’t post a tone deaf picture of a Black man is disgusting.
At least 3 people touched our social media feed on a regular basis: a copywriter, a designer and a strategist. That post was likely approved by 10 white people. They knew what was being posted, when it was being posted, and what it said.
For weeks, after BLM really started to heat up, my team was scrambling and rescrambling and re-“planning” our social feeds about 15 minutes in advance, because we were told to prioritize posting images featuring Black models. We were told this was done with the intention to look supportive, but because a brand is not a person, one could also see how this approach made our model network look more diverse than it actually was, so that the company could look like allies.
And why do brands need to look like allies? To keep selling you shit.
The blatant lie that something like a little Instagram post was, like, so encrypted into our computer system that we couldn’t possibly not post his picture is insulting. Did she think he was an idiot? Sure seems like she thought he was an idiot.
“Planned months in advance.” Oh. It was “planned.” Just like moments of purposefully not posting were planned throughout the summer as the murders of innocent Black people piled up and A&F decided it actually wasn’t going to make a statement about everyone. The social feed is planned, and clearly never changeable, please don’t be offended if they tokenize you for a double tap!
A company so desperate to “stand for something” couldn’t stand up to their poorly planned Instagram post.
A company so desperate to reiterate that we are all one team went ahead and let their nice white lady from PR completely throw the marketing team under the bus, like we weren’t being told by her bosses to only post images of laydowns (flat photography of clothes without models) or of Black models, because that’s what the “temperature” was right now.
I doubt that she made that comment without running it by someone first — you always run everything by everyone first — but someone, somewhere at the top thought that model, that grieving Black man, would be too stupid to understand how a company’s social media account works and thought it was a better idea to lie to him than to be transparent.
Beyond race, the idea of Abercrombie or any brand becoming a vessel for social justice is incredibly drenched in hypocrisy and conflicting intentions.
They love to support the LGBTQIA+ community, and have a long-standing partnership with a great organization who does truly impactful work.
They will post every single International Women’s Day (because the CEO is a woman now and not Mike Jeffries), but you won’t hear a peep about reproductive rights.
After protests popped up all over the country, they worked quickly to reallocate money and make pledges to organizations that supported people of color. I do respect them for recognizing that if they were going to post a carousel of a corporate jargon on social media, that they needed to have some zeroes, and many of them, to back up their claims. They secured partnerships with new philanthropic partners… but they also will try to sell t-shirts that say things like FOR JUSTICE on them. Are they made with the contribution of Black employees and other employees of color? Yes. Are profits 100% donated to help other Black people and people of color? Nope.
They’ll post vaguely about the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, in the same way you might shade your Trumpian relatives on Facebook.
But the war in Ukraine? No word on if they’re making t-shirts for refugees, too. Nike didn’t say anything about the war in Ukraine, so maybe they’re waiting until the “temperature” is right.
Brands now know that diversity and authenticity and allyship sell. I’ve sat through SO MANY, TOO MANY presentations about how the Gen Z and/or Millennial consumer will only give their money to a brand that is trying to do good. But if a brand can never be truly good, because it is always just going to be selling you things, what does good mean?
Good is creating new philanthropic efforts. Good is encouraging and prioritizing having your team create social media series and stories featuring the Black community, sharing your humongous platform. Good is listening. Good is learning. Good is offering diversity trainings and talks with a truly badass Diversity & Inclusion leader. (Who recently left the company, BTW.) Good is trying—as much as a corporation could—to have a “purpose.”
BUTTTTTT.
While Abercrombie & Fitch was attempting to stand for something, they were also choosing to invest in creating a brand-new sub brand with two of the biggest spoiled brats on TikTok. They chose to stand for this instead of, you know, allocating those funds to literally … anything else …. happening in the social sphere right now that they claim to care so much about ….?
I think it goes without saying that those TikTok stars are white. Did they crunch the numbers and find there wasn’t enough money in “uplifting” the voices of a Black TikToker? Or Latinx TikTokers? Or trans TikTokers? They could have changed someone’s life with a collaboration like that, and chose to continue nurturing a relationship with wannabe Kardashians anyway.
So are they good, or are they just a corporation?
I don’t know, I was just someone who had to write all the socially sensitive Instagram captions.
Race and social justice and any attempt at doing good by a brand is an unsolvable problem, because it’s philosophical and philosophy sucks.
PART IV: ALWAYS FORWARD
I’m no saint. I didn’t quit Abercrombie to go work for the Best Company in the World, as “best company” is an oxymoron and an unrealistic expectation.
Nowhere is perfect, and that is perfectly clear.
It’s up to you to balance where you want to work with how you want to life. Because is it better to work for a company that, like, doesn’t even pretend to prioritize diversity and inclusion, or is it better to work for one that does, but lies when it gets caught making a misstep? Is it better to take a job with clear growth potential for your own selfish little career, or stay in a job that planned to surround its social media statement about Stop Asian Hate with every UGC pic of Asian models they could find?
I don’t know. I don’t have the answer.
I will probably always be soul-searching with whatever is left of my soul as to why I am someone who wants to work in marketing, always battling the bad parts with the good parts, existing in writerly purgatory until I finish that novel and Netflix pays ME some damn MONEY.
I’ll say it again: “White Hot” ultimately didn’t tell anybody anything that we didn’t already know.
But here are some other things I know:
Abercrombie is not the worst place to be as a creative, as a marketer, as a person.
The way Abercrombie handles social justice, or trying to market to today’s socially conscious consumer, is not solely unique to them, for better or worse.
Abercrombie is not operating on feel-good vibes, Abercrombie is operating on cold-hard cash.
Abercrombie can try to be good and can still be evil.
Abercrombie is a brand, and brands aren’t people.
Despite everything—despite the souring end of my tenure there, or the shit they did in the past that we’re somehow still spending 90 minutes digesting in the year of our lord Rihanna’s first born, I really, really do know that (some) good people work at Abercrombie & Fitch.
Abercrombie shaped my career, changed my life, and I will always be grateful for the positive impact it had on me, for the people, mentors, friends I met, and even for the times it taught me how to toughen up and leave a place that wasn’t fulfilling me. I’m allowed to hold space for being grateful for an experience, and to criticize it.
Also, I am so sorry, but — their bodysuits are bomb.
Because all these things can be true: Abercrombie can have a terrible past, can have a selective use of standing for something, can have a hard-working, dedicated team of brilliant marketers who do want to stand for something, can be a totally different company than it was 20 years ago, and can still just be a corporation trying to sell you shit.
“White Hot” fails to admit that A—NO M HERE—bercrombie & Fitch is just a place, ran by people who have to make money, who have to prioritize money over people. It fails to acknowledge that it wasn’t the cause of society’s problems, but a result of society idolizing rich, white people. It fails to acknowledge that we’re all slowly realizing there were some BIG YIKES in the past, and we have to make big changes—personally, professionally, where we spend our emotional and actual bank—now.
One of Abercrombie’s core values is “embrace change.”
And I think you can certainly expect brands to keep coming for your change.
hi, i’m holly. 