Netflix Doc Exposes Abercrombie & Fitch's Dark Homoerotic Underbelly

Remember Abercrombie & Fitch?

If you are a child of the 80s or 90s, the affordably preppy clothing brand was likely a huge part of your high school experience. The brand sold a fantasy of the sexy All-American cool kid to young people across the world, but that vision came at a price to both the company and the consumer.

Netflix's new documentary, White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, dives into the brand's aspirational fantasy and the active discrimination it took to get there. Between casting models with a certain look that was usually white, blatantly racist t-shirts, and even firing people of color for not being "pretty enough," the film details the discriminatory practices the employers enforced to build the brand into a billion dollar company.

Between walking us through Abercrombie & Fitch's controversies, LGBTQ+ former employees also confirm that the brand was just as homoerotic as we remember it to be. 

"It was clear to anyone paying attention that there were many gay men involved in all of it," and we meet at least three of them in the doc. "The brilliance of the brand is that that went right over the head of their target customer, which was like the straight college frat bro."

Mark Beard, an out artist who painted murals of shirtless male gatherings for the company, says the vision from CEO Mark Jeffries and photographer Bruce Weber made it not only okay for guys to play around shirtless in a field, but sold it as a fantasy. "It takes away shame from the past" by distancing this homoerotic play "from immediate sex or sex jokes or gayness."

The doc quickly takes a darker turn when former models speak out about inappropriate behavior on sets. One claims that Weber would touch models' bodies inappropriately. Another says he was invited to his home for dinner and when he declined, he was let go from the ad in a matter of minutes. Weber has settled dozens of sexual misconduct charges out of court in the years since. 

While Jeffries wasn't accused of any sexual misconduct, a model said he would lurk around on sets and was definitely interested in men, later calling him "weird." Back then, Jeffries had a wife and kids and was seemingly in the closet.

The documentary then reports that gay men considered him somewhat of an icon at the time but was still a strict enforcer of a heteronormative gender binary. One employee recalls him picking up some genes and asking her, "who the fuck are you designing for, d*kes on trikes?" Jeffries shamefully retired from the company in 2014.

White Hot takes quite a few twists and turns to share the company's sordid past. If exclusion was the root of their success, what happens when exclusion stops being cool? 

White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch is available to stream now. Watch the trailer below: