Op-ed: Abercrombie Says No Fat Chicks And Weirdos

I hope you're ready to feel nostalgic for those summer days of 1998, when LeAnn Rimes and puka shelled necklaces ruled your world.

"Summer Girls" by that prolific, enduring boy band, LFO created a hit among the suburban set, sort of telling the story of a first love, mixed with about 90% nonsensical verses: "You're the best girl that I ever did see / The great Larry Bird Jersey 33" or "Fell deep in love, but now we ain't speaking / Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton."

But the hook of "Summer Girls" was key: "I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch."

Now, I had only lived in the suburbs of Long Island, N.Y., for the year prior, and thanks to the powers of divorce, I had spent most of the summer of 1998 in Queens, N.Y., at my mom's house, where I had actually grown up. In Queens, LFO was basically non-existent. Boy band fever hadn't quite permeated the boroughs yet because hip-hop was still listenable back then. I hadn't heard That Song, so I had no idea what was going on during homeroom on the first day of high school, and every fool had their bleached blonde tips poking out of an A&F visor, singing That Song as the homeroom teacher called the roll (true story. Seriously).

What song is this? Who are Abercrombie & Fitch? Why don't these song lyrics make sense? Does all Chinese food really make these guys sick?

To be clear, my style was wannabe skateboarder/raver with a dash of thugette. On any given day I was probably wearing a pair of JNCO jeans, hideously clunky Fila sneakers, a Queens School of Hard Knocks shirt (just to constantly remind people I was a city kid), a really ridiculous spiral weave, and glittery makeup that I bought at either Woolworth's or Hot Topic. Looking back at it now, I was playing with gender and rebelling against my peers who dressed like they were stand-ins for Spice World. Also, I was really self-conscious about my body -- size 2 everywhere except my boobs, which were ridiculously gigantic for a 14-year-old. I was on a mission to hide the twins under many layers of gigantic t-shirts and my dad's old button-downs.

Once I figured out who the hell Abercrombie & Fitch were, I quickly realized those clothes were never made for me. Despite having a generally friendly demeanor, I still never wanted to fit in with the crowd in high school. I actually liked being an outsider, and so did most of my closest oddball friends at our 4,000-student high school.  

But my suspicions that A&F is not for weirdos were solidified in a new book, which examines the creepertastic, seedy world of mall retail shops. According to Robin Lewis's book, The New Rules of Retail, Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries only wants cool kids shopping at A&F.

"He doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people,” Lewis said. “He doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing. People who wear his clothing should feel like they’re one of the 'cool kids.'"

So you know, cool = No Fat Chicks! But it's OK to wear XL shirts if you're a dude because you've got all that muscle from being a defender on the varsity lacrosse team, brah.

There's a reason the chunkier female mall shoppers couldn't find the right pair of jeans at A&F: they were discouraged from entering the store after one frustrating trip, faced with only sizes 0-10. Even being quite petite, I went into that store once and shouted to my younger sisters about how ridiculously small everything was, and screeched something about never coming back there because none of those shirts would fit across my monster boobs. There, I showed those airheaded cool kids from my high school who folded hoodies for minimum wage!

But wait, there's more.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” Jeffries said in a 2006 interview with Salon. “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. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”

Abercrombie supplied the official cool-kid uniform of my high school's preppy popular kids, as well as every other high school across the country. And on top of it, us weirdos who wore all black, or dressed like they were in the middle of a rave, couldn't afford the A&F sweatshirts, couldn't fit into A&F bellbottoms, or just didn't want to wear that mess were often mocked, and sometimes bullied for how they looked or what they wore.

And sadly, the culture of cool-kid clothes had ramifications. In April 1999, a couple of months after LFO's ridiculous song lyrics had finally fell off the Total Request Live charts, I sat in art class watching CNN on a television my teacher wheeled into the studio. Two kids in trench coats shot dozens of their classmates, killing 12 before taking their own lives. Sure there were theories as to why they did it -- Marilyn Manson, video games, it was Hitler's birthday -- but the weirdos and outcasts knew the real deal. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were  bullied for being weird; for what they looked like, and the clothes they wore. It doesn't make their actions right or excusable. But as we know from far too many highly publicized teen suicides of late, the weight a teenager feels of being shut out, mocked, or physically harmed can push them over the edge.

With that in mind, Jeffries' statements have led me to only one conclusion: In high school, this guy was a retainer-sporting, chess-playing, Coke-bottle-glasses wearing, corrective-shoed not-so-cool nerd who couldn't make it up the rope in gym class, and had dream-like visions of what it's like to be one of those so-called cool, popular kids.

To quote what my high school self probably would have said in this situation, "Screw that guy -- the actual cool kids don't wear Abercrombie & Fitch, the conformist lemmings do." Just kidding, that was my 28-year-old self. But my 28-ear-old self would also welcome him to my lunch table, where Abercrombie & Fitch was never even on the charts.

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