Pitchin’ a Fitch: Why we’re angry about Abercrombie CEO’s definition of cool

“We hire
good-looking people in our stores, because good-looking people attract good
looking people, and we want to market to cool good-looking people.  We don’t want to market to anyone other than
that.  A lot of people don’t belong [in
our 

Is A&F only for cool people? (Loris Hutchinson)

 clothes], and they can’t belong.  Are
we exclusionary?  Absolutely.”  as spoken by Mike Jeffries, CEO of U.S.
clothing retailer, Abercrombie and Fitch in a 2006 interview with Salon.

Just who is
this guy? How could he make such an
insensitive statement? Who made him the
authority of what is and is not cool?
Apparently, Jeffries, the brains behind this multi-billion dollar label
and its consumers have done so.  In order
to spew forth venomous remarks, you would think that the person speaking would
be cool and good-looking, but a quick Google search proved otherwise. Is there
such a word as “overplastisurgerized”?

Not only was
I unnerved by this 68-year-old man’s obsession with wearing ripped jeans,
flip-flops, windblown, blonde surfer hair, and the word “dude,” but also his preoccupation
with the all-American male, who according to Jeffries is cool, beautiful,
funny, masculine and optimistic. His 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods
is a sort of Neverland, and that in itself is brow raising.

Jeffries is
under fire but I’m sensing that this golden boy (Is that a spray on tan?) can
take the heat. Critics are saying that
A&F only offers clothing to the ultra thin and refuses to make any sizes
for plus sized women, which is anything above a size large. According to the size charts for women on the
A&F site, a large top fits a 38 inch bust.
The large bottom is a size 10-12, 30-31 inches in the waist. This dismisses the argument that he only
offers clothing for the ultra thin.

So what exactly is plus sized
and why are people so outraged that he will not offer those sizes? Historically, plus
sized referred to clothing larger than the average wearer and is not the same
as being overweight. In the U.S., plus
size generally begins at size 14.  It’s
all so complicated when different clothing lines have their own standards of
where plus sizes start.

I think the real issue is that we are
angry about being labeled, by a label.
A&F is for the cool, good looking people, and if we can’t wear them,
we must not be cool and good looking.  I
can’t fit into any of his clothing, but am I pitchin’ a fitch because of it?  No! We
have this poor old guy who surrounds himself with what he can never, ever be
again.  He has Peter Pan syndrome, a
young boy in an old man’s body who failed to learn a valuable lesson in his
youth. “If you can’t say anything nice,
don’t say anything at all.”  He’s put his
foot in his mouth again, but it’s not a child size foot. It should still be an easy feat though; just
kick off the flip flops, and chug it right into his foot sized mouth!