Abercrombie and Fitch

The controversial figure in Netflix's new doc 'White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,' Mike Jefferies, has laid low since he stepped down in ...

A year later, it finally sold for $12.9 million, and there’s little sign of him on the Internet in the years since. Mike Jeffries became the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992, and transformed the brand into what it was in its heyday—loud, preppy, racy, and very white. As the new Netflix doc White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch shows, it worked, and it worked well.

"White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" director Alison Klayman talks the systemic racism that powered the brand.

It’s less about the pro- or anti-camp, and more about [how] this was a cultural phenomenon that touched everywhere.” Now, sitting where we are today, it’s easier to talk about and tease it out, but it was something that was reported at the time and we all lived through. The brand was decided to be more “golden retrievers and Jeeps,” as the documentary reports. “It’s a credit to the incredible people who spoke to us and shared their stories, because I think what you realize is that this is not an abstract harm. “I was kind of shocked at how much it took these abstract negative forces in society and systemized it,” Klayman continued. Buying something was akin to buying into a new you, but as it turns out, only certain customers were deemed worthy of the brand’s “all-American” message.

At its best, White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch offers a potent mix of nostalgia and schadenfreude.

The doc gives us a sense of getting caught up in such a grotesque, racist fashion phenomenon, so much that when a former employee of A&F Quarterly talks about a shattering realization he had watching Sam Raimi’s “ Spider-Man”—that Peter Parker's bully was dressed head to toe in A&F—you can almost understand his surprise. And we get to meet “armpit guy,” one of a few male models whose body was put on shopping bags, and who also clues us into the alleged predatory nature of Bruce Weber, the photographer who created the A&F image. With the on-screen inclusion of a lot of former brains and bods behind the company, it becomes clear how much the company used youth—one woman talks about how there were no copywriters for the graphic tees, it was just whatever young designers came up with. It is informative about the ways “mad genius” Jeffries perfected selling sex and popularity to teenagers, taking a brand name that used to specialize in outdoor wear and turning it into American prep. Klayman has a bit more direction when she directs the audience’s desire for outrage on how the company embodied the counter-intuitive approach of exclusionary business practices, showing how their focus on six-pack fascism and predominantly white leadership led to their downfall. At its best, “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” offers a potent mix of nostalgia and schadenfreude.

Netflix dropped its new documentary 'White Hot' about the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch. But what happened to former CEO Mike Jeffries and his net ...

The townhouse appears to have finally been sold in September of 2018 for just $12 million, according to Zillow. "It has been an honor to lead this extraordinarily talented group of people," Jeffries said in a statement at the time. And he is also credited in the doc for its meteoric downfall as a result of exclusionary and discriminatory hiring and marketing practices. Jeffries does not appear to have a public LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram account. Elle Décor described his pad as a vine-covered townhouse featuring floor-to-ceiling windows, polished nickel, and rooms covered in mirrors. Jeffries led the mega-popular brand to great success in the '90s and early 2000s.

Mike Jeffries, who led Abercrombie & Fitch during its dramatic rise and fall, is featured prominently in Netflix's new documentary "White Hot," which is out ...

In 2012, Bloomberg reported on an “Aircraft Standards” manual for the A&F executive jet, written by Jeffries’s longtime life partner Matthew Smith. (The manual was made public in an age-discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by a former pilot, according to Bloomberg.) The manual included 40 pages of highly detailed instructions, including what kind of underwear aircraft staff should wear and the seating arrangements for Jeffries’s dogs. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. In the story, Jeffries is described as a “quirky perfectionist and control freak,” who always goes through the revolving doors at A&F headquarters twice and never passes other employees on the stairwells. Wexner, on the other hand, was the king of retail; he was the CEO of A&F’s then-parent company L Brands, which owned stores like The Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The documentary describes how it was Jeffries’ strategy to center this new iteration of A&F around elitism, sex, and exclusivity. At the time, Jeffries was known as the former president of Alcott & Andrews, a women’s retail chain that filed for bankruptcy in 1989. Netflix’s new documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch charts the messy trajectory of the once-cooler-than-cool mall store that peaked in the ‘90s and early 2000s, only to come crashing down after a string of racist, exclusionary controversies.

A new Netflix doc takes a scalpel to the layers to meaning in the rise and fall of one part of mall culture.

A male model for the company explains that he was drinking in a bar in Nebraska when a woman approached and invited him to come for a photo-audition. One had the slogan, “Wong Brothers Laundry Service – Two Wongs Can Make It White.” Asian-Americans protested outside the stores, 60 Minutes did a report and the internal culture of the chain was examined. As one of its former executives says, the idea was to create an aspiration: “I wish I had that Abercrombie thing.” But the “thing” was not a T-shirt or jeans. As one former executive says about the homoeroticism, “It went straight over the heads of the preppy white bro’s who consumed it.” We now look at the phenomenon of the Abercrombie & Fitch of the 1990s and early 2000s and see something approaching a campaign for white supremacy. White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (new on Netflix) is a fast-paced but ultimately furious documentary about the clothing line that once was the fashion zeitgeist.

Looking back on the racist and toxic past of the popular mall retailer led by controversial CEO Mike Jeffries.

But even within all of that, Abercrombie was just so flagrant and you could kind of really point to how it was executing what it was doing from the top down,” the director continues, pointing to Jeffries and the rest of the corporate team at the time. “Good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. What the director is referring to is allegations brought against the photographer. “He’s on the right side of history,” Klayman says. “That was the first time anything had happened to me like that,” Elauf says of her experience. “And when you brought it up, people immediately shared personal memories or stories about their own identity” as it related to the retailer.

The film details the ways the clothing company had proudly put its "exclusionary" cool kids branding into practice.

As the documentary outlines, a specific theme for the shirts was called "Buddha fest" and featured a cliché portrait of an oversized Buddha drawing. According to the company, Elauf's scarf went against its "Look Policy" and its "classic East Coast collegiate style" dress code. Employees were no longer called "Brand Representatives." Instead, they were divided into two categories with two distinct titles: "Impact" employees were mainly people of color who worked in the back and "model" employees were mainly white people who worked up in the front. And to a nearby female mannequin, Jeffries criticized, "We don't want her to look too butch." The brand's most notorious shirt featured an illustration of the "Wong brothers" who wore matching conical hats and advertised a fictional laundry service. Despite the stereotypical portrayals and offensive rhetoric, the tees were a hit among A&F consumers. A settlement was eventually reached and included a consent decree, requiring the company to change its policies to promote diversity within the workforce, prevent discrimination and appoint a Vice President for Diversity. It goes on to state that a "neatly combed, attractive, natural, classic hairstyle" worn on an image of a white model is acceptable while dreadlocks, which are showcased on a Black model, is unacceptable for both men and women. According to journalist Moe Tkacik, A&F had weekly employee review sheets, which required store managers to rank each of their employees on a look-based scale of "cool to rocks." To help make the process easier, store managers were provided a literal book that strictly outlined "what good-looking looks like." By the 1970s, A&F tanked financially — eventually filing for bankruptcy — and was forced to revamp their brand in order to rejoin the market. "We are selling an experience for our customer, an atmosphere that people want to experience again and again.

Netflix's new documentary "White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" considers darker side of the onetime mainstay of mall culture.

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BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – If you spent any time inside a mall in the late '90s and early 2000s, then you're likely familiar with the bass-heavy ...

A former Abercrombie & Fitch recruiter breaks down the brand's infamous “Look Policy” in this clip from Netflix's new "White Hot" documentary.

Once you finally made your way to the door, you were greeted by a pair of shirtless (and often white) employees that looked exactly like the models featured in the brand’s campaigns — if there wasn’t a queue to get inside, that is. That façade presented to customers was the epitome of the A&F branding during what was arguably its heyday in popularity, led by then-CEO Mike Jeffries. Unarguably, not all customers were represented and catered to. Even from blocks away, the pungently sweet A&F smell would “lure” you in — if you were resilient enough to bear it.

Netflix's Abercrombie and Fitch documentary, White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch, exposes shocking secrets about the clothing store.

Weber, who declined to be interviewed for the film, denies the allegations, and last year settled two sexual assault lawsuits for an undisclosed amount. The case went to the Supreme Court, with the court siding in Elauf’s favor, 8 to 1. Jeffries resigns in 2014, and sure, there was some boycotting of Abercrombie stores, but at the end of the day, the brand is still in business. Former employees and journalists interviewed for the movie described the A&F aesthetic as an affordable mix of Calvin Klein’s sensuality and Ralph Lauren’s WASP-iness. It was, essentially, for the preps. If you went to any mall in America between the years 2000 and 2010, you remember the distinct experience of an Abercrombie and Fitch store. But first, it starts with an introduction to the brash, unapologetic former A&F CEO Mike Jeffries, who declined to be interviewed for the film.

'White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,' out April 19 on Netflix, uncovers how the mall mainstay fell from grace.

Soon, Abercrombie again faced legal trouble when Muslim teenager Samantha Elauf alleged that she was rejected after a job interview at the store in 2008 because she was wearing a headscarf. O’Keefe says in White Hot that he was never able to wear Abercrombie because they never made clothing in his size. He also says he dealt with anorexia in high school, and felt especially sensitive to the store’s exclusivity. The settlement also required Abercrombie to increase diversity in its hiring process as well as in its advertisements and catalogs. For example, a former member of the Diversity and Inclusion team at Abercrombie recalls being in a meeting where her colleagues openly discussed what physical features they wanted in their employees. Weber has since been accused of sexual harassment and misconduct multiple times; in 2018, he became the subject of a sexual harassment and sexual misconduct lawsuit, with former models from Abercrombie and other brands accusing him of inappropriate behavior on shoots. This quote, which came out after the first round of discrimination lawsuits were settled, later came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the company. A quote from current CEO Fran Horowitz on its website reads: “Abercrombie isn’t a brand where you need to fit in—it’s one where everyone truly belongs.” While Abercrombie & Fitch was built on the exact opposite sentiment, White Hot shows why the company had to go in an extreme direction in order to survive in the modern day. The case was settled in 2004, with Abercrombie paying $40 million to the plaintiffs. While many fashion brands are implicit in their exclusion, Abercrombie was explicit about its mission, making it clear who they wanted to shop at and work in their stores. In the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, out April 19, director Alison Klayman tracks how the store, which thrived on promoting beauty standards that idealized thinness and whiteness, began to come apart when employees began calling out what made it so toxic. The documentary features interviews with former Abercrombie executives, retail employees, and models, as well as cultural critics and activists who helped bring Abercrombie’s troubling practices to light.

New documentary 'White Hot' narrates how the sprawling brand made a mockery – and a multimillion dollar marketing concept – of masculinity.

As the concept of masculinity moves into something more fluid and more open-minded, a quick browse of Abercrombie's webstore shows that the high school jock wears boxy sweater vests, and shorts with five inch inseams, and even Pride hoodies that are on par with the diversity ranges of every other middle bracket brand. For now though, 'Everybody Belongs' at Abercrombie. The plain white tees even say so in rainbow typeface (what else?). But just as A&F cannot be blamed for branded, corporate sexualisation, it was by no means ahead of the curve for inclusivity. It cemented a Eurocentric, quasi-Olympian ideal of masculinity that is still pervasive not just in the gay community, but within pop culture at large. So powerful was the logo that White Hot recounts the induction of one head office employee who was told that they could spell 'Abercrombie' in dogshit on a baseball cap and still sell it for $50. But homogeneity wasn't just a bug with Abercrombie & Fitch. As the Netflix documentary chillingly tells us, it was the feature. It is this strain of whiteness – and the ensuing problematic template for excellence – that built the foundation of Abercrombie and Fitch. For a time, it was one of the most successful American retail stories. And the models – the focus of this sex – sold these clothes despite being shot in very little clothing. Where we were once pummelled with rippling torsos in the darkened corners of an Abercrombie store, we now face them 24/7 from the bright corners of an iPhone. Instagram and TikTok are awash with abs from their respective userbases even as companies push for more body inclusion and diversity in their outputs. White athleticism was the brand. Bruce Weber, the photographer behind Abercrombie's infamous campaigns, worked in tandem with Jeffries to build this image that "fetishized the all-American boy" as one former employee puts it. An official sales report released by Abercrombie in 2003 posted sales of $1.708 billion. But at its peak, the brand was making an absurd amount of cash. "I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch" the lead whined to the musical equivalent of a K-hole by a campfire.

There are people of color, sizes up to 3XL and even a Pride-themed collection featuring "gender inclusive" rainbow tees. The brand's Instagram account, ...

"But they didn't have the platform to be able to voice it and now they do." But, like various other documentaries revisiting troubling elements of our not-too-distant past, "White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" is less an exposé of what happened under his leadership and more a reflection on what we, as a society, allowed to happen. It would be well into the next decade before Jeffries' quote -- and the brand's history of problematic marketing and advertising -- became more of a corporate liability. For all the current messages of inclusion, millennials (and older) will remember an altogether different Abercrombie -- one that took over malls and billboards with an army of attractive models and ripped male torsos. Through interviews with former models, recruiters, store workers and executives, the 88-minute film suggests that appearing cool, attractive and White wasn't just an exercise in branding: it was an active corporate strategy that came at the expense of non-White employees and consumers. The brand's Instagram account, meanwhile, proudly promotes models in wheelchairs, stories of body-positivity and statements of LGBTQ solidarity.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — If you spent any time inside a mall in the late 90's and early 2000's, then you're likely familiar with the bass-heavy ...

Netflix's new documentary paints a portrait of a shifting popular culture.

In the UK, a woman with a prosthetic limb successfully sued the company, which made her work in a stockroom in order to keep her out of view of customers. While White Hot hones in on the company’s racism—there’s more than enough of it to fill the film’s 90-minute runtime and then some—Abercrombie also courted other forms of controversy. Within its pages you might find photos of a naked football game, or copy extolling the merits of a good old-fashioned circle jerk, which the magazine described as a “ pleasant and supersafe alternative” to an orgy. Directed by Jagged filmmaker Alison Klayman, the doc offers a portrait of a time in popular fashion when wearing a giant logo on your chest was the height of chic, and carrying around a shopping bag with a half-naked guy on it was the ticket to in-crowd. It’s a film about a single brand at a very particular cultural moment—but it’s also about the swinging pendulum of American popular values. A new Netflix documentary, White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, covers the brand during its 1990s and 2000s heyday, when it was synonymous with a very white, very preppy brand of cool.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — If you spent any time inside a mall in the late 90's and early 2000's, then you're likely familiar with the bass-heavy ...

Netflix documentary 'White Hot' tackles racial and religious discrimination lawsuits against Abercrombie & Fitch. The brand rose to popularity in the '90s ...

However, is the new strategy of trying to appeal to everyone, and wanting to be liked in the way that is cool now, really just a rebranding of the same problem? This shift forced the company to shift leadership and focus on creating a sense of belonging and inclusion. People shared negative experiences of feeling like the brand purely focused on clothing for a small majority of thin people, while many others were interested in the clothes. During that time, the goal was to sell that “all-American” lifestyle of being preppy, sexy, yet more affordable than competitors such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Mike Jeffries, the man who took over as CEO in the ’90s, recognized this crucial aspect of a clothing brand — you weren’t selling clothing, you were selling an aspirational life. I remember walking past the store with other teenage girls, and we would be giggling and daring each other to go in.

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — If you spent any time inside a mall in the late 90's and early 2000's, then you're likely familiar with the bass-heavy ...

It was 1999, I was seven years old, and I wanted a purplish-red Abercrombie & Fitch crewneck so badly I could almost taste the microfibers.

I mostly knew the basic facts that the film laid out: Founded in New York City in 1892, Abercrombie had struggled over the years until it rebranded as a teen retailer best known for wildly sexy ads in the 1990s. It was 1999, I was seven years old, and I wanted a purplish-red Abercrombie & Fitch crewneck so badly I could almost taste the microfibers. What if I did extra chores in exchange for a pair of jeans with rhinestones up the sides?