Abercrombie & Fitch was renowned for outfitting manly men like Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Shackleton, Ernest Hemingway, and, uh, Cole Porter?
?Do you have any men?s shirts for men???Joe Pesci in Easy Money
I recently came across a pair of child?s boxing gloves from the ?20s or ?30s, nostalgically similar to the ones my father gave me some 50 years ago. To my surprise, they were manufactured by Abercrombie & Fitch.
What?s this, Abercrombie & Fitch? Retail?s answer to Alfred Kinsey? Boxing gloves? But then I remembered what A&F once was. Founded in New York City in 1892, the year Corbett took the crown from Sullivan, by David T. Abercrombie and Ezra H. Fitch, the establishment was renowned for outfitting hunters and fishermen, explorers and adventurers. Manly men like Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Shackleton, Ernest Hemingway, and, uh, Cole Porter.
Calling itself ?The Greatest Sporting Goods Store in the World,? by the close of the ?50s ?the main floor sported heads of buffalo, caribou, moose, elk, and other big game, stuffed fish of spectacular size, and wastebaskets made from elephants? feet,? according to Robert Halasz, Mark Swartz, and Nelson Rhodes in ?Abercrombie & Fitch Company,? an historical overview.
?The store sold an unmatched variety of contraptions for indoor and outdoor pursuits: one corner held dog and cat items; the basement was a shooting range; and the mezzanine contained paraphernalia for skindiving, archery, skiing, and lawn games,? continues the report. ?Floors two through five were reserved for clothing suitable for any terrain or climate. Floor six had a picture gallery and bookstore concentrating on sporting themes, and there was a watch repair facility and the golf school, complete with a resident pro. On the seventh floor was the gun room with about 700 shotguns and rifles, constituting the most lavish assemblage of sporting firearms on earth. The eighth floor was devoted to fishing, camping, and boating, and housed a fishing instructor who gave lessons at the pool on the roof. He also handled mail and telephone inquiries on fishing, hunting, and skiing. The fishing section alone stocked about 48,000 flies and 18,000 lures.?
A&F went the way of all things masculine, closing its flagship store on 45th and Madison, ?Where the Blazed Trail Crosses the Boulevard,? in 1977. It eventually reappeared, catering to the wants and needs of ?the cool kids,? as then-CEO Mike Jeffries unfortunately put it. Unfortunate for him, because the remark cost him his job.
I?ve never been to A&F?s new flagship establishment, at 720 Fifth, but tourists are lined up around the block, bizarrely eager to have their barely pubescent (never mind legal) daughters photographed with the bare-chested pretty boy pin-up du jour stationed in the doorway. Not that they?d let me in, of course. I?m more, much more, James Gandolfini than Justin Bieber. And proud of it, let me tell youse.
Ah, but ?are the days of women in denim underwear and men with washboard abs over at Abercrombie & Fitch?? asks Mary Bowerman of USA Today. By the end of July, A&F ?will be using marketing tactics that focus on showcasing products rather than skin,? reports Bowerman. ?That means shirtless male models will no longer be greeting your pre-teen daughter at the door.?
And about bloody time, too. Not that I?m a prude. You won?t find me voicing priggish and prissy protestations about scantily clad women promoting whatever products they?re paid to promote. But sexualizing children is something else, the Chester the Molester approach to marketing is not at all my keg of beer, and the A&F Quarterly, at least under Jeffries, looked ?more like a 300-page soft-core porn magazine than the mail-order catalog it purports to be,? editorialized The Wall Street Journal in 2002, no doubt in reaction to A&F?s line of thongs, emblazoned with ?Wink Wink,? ?Eye Candy,? and ?Kiss Me,? and marketed to girls seven to 14. A&F pushed the pedophile envelope even further in 2011, selling push-up bikini tops to girls young enough not to need any kind of bikini top at all.
?People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls,? says Jeffries (no relation to James J., I?m sure). ?But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls. And I think anybody who gets on a bandwagon about thongs for little girls is crazy. Just crazy!?
Oh yeah? Well, ?Abercrombie & Fitch is no longer cool,? says Paul R. La Monica of CNNMoney, neither with investors nor with buyers.
Little-girl thong panties don?t sell. Little-boy boxing gloves?they sell.
