Abercrombie models gay
Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of trendy clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch, has been accused of using his authority to lure new male models to parties hosted in his home with his partner, Matthew Smith, and at hotels around the world. These parties were sexual in nature, and the men were all paid to attend.
Twelve men spoke with BBC news during a two-year-long study of Jeffries and his behavior. Six of the men claimed to acquire been misled about the purpose of the parties, while the others said they knew they were sexual but not that they were expected to participate in any way.
This was facilitated through a middleman, James Jacobson, who would recruit the men, all aspiring models, by promising them that he was the gatekeeper to a manage line to Jeffries. Jacobson would often tell the men that if they performed sex acts with him, he could make sure they got seen by the right people at the company. He used this method to traffic the immature men to distinct parties around the world. Each day the men would be paid, and each time were expected to hire sexually in some way, either with Jeffries and his contemporaries or with other men recruited for the parties.
Abercro
Soft porn, white supremacy, and Epstein: Abercrombie & Fitch’s sordid past
Shopping centres smelt differently in the mid-00s. From Wisconsin to West London, cavernous barns pumped a blend of woody musk, surf spray, and neurotoxins into the brains of pubescent passerbys, setting off a tinderbox of hormones, flushed cheeks, and cash register ker-chings. Instantly recognisable as Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce, the scent was collected, exclusively, from the ravines of sweat that gathered in the clavicles of all-American sports scholars, bodies hairless and buff like a shit-tonne brickhouse. It was like huffing the inside of one of their team jerseys. It was “aspiration”, bottled.
Inside the label’s mahogany-panelled stores, bare-chested assistants gun-fingered to floor fillers and spritzed piles of rough-hewn graphic tees with yet more of those pheromones. To initiative into the darkened belly of a flagship Abercrombie & Fitch was love taking a trip to Le Raidd, a blue-lit homosexual club in Paris where amateur pornstars foam themselves into a lather in claustrophobic shower cages. The walls, covered in monochromatic portraits of college existence – a puppy pile of Greco-Roman limbs
The Hunks Are All Right
In the midnoughties, the era that fashion forgot, there was one brand in the mall that loomed larger than any other. Abercrombie & Fitch had more than 1,000 stores and held teenagers all over the world in their thrall, desperate for a slice of the California beach bum illusion in the form of a $30 pair of flip-flops. But what these stores had that others didn’t was not just wildly high markups and levels of lighting so low it verged on the unsafe. They had the Shirtless Guys. There were the pictures of buff men rippling on the front of the store’s bags and staring in their ad campaigns. But there were also the ones that hung out in the flesh, as greeters, available for photo-ops. They were chiseled and beaming with abs for days, if not weeks, and absolutely no body hair whatsoever.
Abercrombie’s reputation has suffered over the years. The brand was always kind of exclusionary; you were either the kind of teen whose parents could afford to buy you Abercrombie polo shirts or you felt keenly the fact that you weren’t. Racism and sexism were rife in its employment practices, and countless staff members own spoken publicly of their mistreatment. As part of the
Case study: Abercrombie & Fitch
Successful male lover marketing, est. 1892
Arguably one of the most successful brands that crossed over from ‘gay’ to mainstream via a launch in the gay market. Or rather: after a (re)launch in the gay market.
Abercrombie & Fitch, also known as A&F (with sub brands Abercrombie kids, Hollister Co., and Gilly Hicks, and until 2010 Ruehl No.925) was originally founded in 1892 in New York, as an elite outfitter of sporting and excursion goods, particularly noted for its expensive shotguns, fishing rods, and tents.
It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, finally closing its flagship Manhattan store in 1977, but the name was revived shortly thereafter, when in 1978 Oshman's Sporting Goods, a Houston-based chain, bought the defunct firm's call and mailing list. Oshman's relaunched A&F as a mail-order retailer specializing in hunting wear and novelty items.
In 1988, Oshman's sold the company name and operations to The Limited, a clothing-chain operator based in Columbus, Ohio.
The current version of A&F sells mostly clothes for the youth market, and describes its retailing niche as an aspirational "