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The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch

…Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot. He’ll say, “What a cool idea, dude,”

…If looks could kill, everyone here would be dead. Jeffries’ employees are young, painfully attractive, and exceedingly eager, and they travel around the campus on playground scooters

…Valued at $5 billion, the company now has revenues approaching $2 billion a year rolling in from more than 800 stores and four successful brands.

…Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. “He’s weird and probably insane, but he’s also unbelievably driven and brilliant,”

…Later I brought up the brouhaha surrounding the A&F Quarterly, which, until it was discontinued in 2003, boasted articles about the history of orgies and pictures of chiseled, mostly white, all-American boys and girls (but mostly boys) cavorting naked on horses, beaches, pianos, surfboards, statues and phallically suggestive tree trunks. The magalog so outraged the American Decency Association that it called for a boycott and started selling anti-Abercrombie T-shirts: “Ditch Fitch: Abercrombie Peddles Porn and Exploits Children.” Meanwhile, gay men across America were eagerly collecting the magazines, lured by photographer Bruce Weber’s taste for beautiful, masculine boys playfully pulling off each other’s boxers.

Cons: Jeffries does seem to try too hard to appear hip. It is one thing to be high on your product or service another to cross the line into evangelical purity about what your employees and others should wear. I wear some AF stuff, but it always mixed with stuff from other brands – that I would show up for work wearing Gap jeans and an AF shirt and be harassed by by boss for lack of brand purity is disturbing in an employer, especially someone that sells the celebration of personal freedom as part of their public image. His vision of what constitutes attractive is too rigid; on a personal level that’s his business, but culturally is a soft form of xenophobia. He states at one point in the interview, “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.” Looks bias strange actually, but within his rights on a personal level and not a phenomenon that he created as much as exploits.

Pros: The AF workplace is described as campus like with plenty of time for employees to hang out, they’re not chained to their cubicles like most of corporate America. Much of the sometimes visceral reaction to the catalog and Bruce Weber’s photo compositions are off base. What people see has been is to a large degree a projection of their own purient thoughts about sexuality, Jeffries, ” “I think that what we represent sexually is healthy. It’s playful. It’s not dark. It’s not degrading! And it’s not gay, and it’s not straight, and it’s not black, and it’s not white. It’s not about any labels. That would be cynical, and we’re not cynical! It’s all depicting this wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness that exist in this generation and, candidly, does not exist in the older generation.” Without some kind of psychic sub conscience mind reading device one assumes that he believes that and his emphasis on traditional beauty aside I tend to believe that “healthy sexuality” and the celebration of youth was his and Weber’s intention. Jeffries has a vision, is driven and obsessive – not bad things if directed in a positive direction. When he took a public relations beating on the lack of diversity at AF he made changes – how many people do we know that respond to criticisms by just become more entrenched in their attitudes.

Photographer Bruce Weber has a decent, but not great Wikipedia entry here and has his own exceptional web site. Looking back over Weber’s work gives one a better idea of at least his aesthetic sensibilities when interpreting the AF cataloges.

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