Here is the (bafflingly) short-lived Abercrombie & Fitch “Life as a Greeter” web series. It premiered back in February, but it’s fashionable to point and laugh at A & F right now, so here we go.
They’re what you’d expect: slick production values, upbeat empty music that makes you feel bad because you’re not as perky as it is, virtually identical male models that seem at mental capacity verbalizing a sentence they probably didn’t compose themselves, consciously crafted homoerotic imagery that you just know they’d deny orchestrating on purpose and a lake of abdominal muscles. A LAKE.
Yes, these may actually not be about anything (I still don’t know what it means to “greet” – I mean, what goes through their minds as they’re actually greeting? What makes a “greet” successful? Who are their historical “greeter” influences? When did they know that “greeting” was their passion?) but I am strangely drawn to the flagship store on Fifth Avenue all of a sudden, in fact, I may very well be typing this on my phone as I walk uptown right now.
While A & F is like the fashion line equivalent of an Aaron Spelling show about mean spirited teenagers or LA professionals in their mid twenties, and they are a stunning embodiment of that American sexually bipolar thing where they aggressively allude to sex but then just leave you with a washed out bland nothing experience that is essentially robotic and therefore safely inoffensive to delicate Midwest sensibilities, their stores are admittedly a cultural and visceral phenomenon. The A & F marketing department know exactly what they’re doing with the human mind to the point where it’s possible they’re actually just super hypnotherapists.
A & F manage to zero in on some primal urge so effectively by simply using the power of underwearless, shirtless, jeans-wearing male models that by the time you’ve finished trying to articulate why the clothes are generic looking and how buying them somehow feels politically discrediting, you’ve already been through the store and are back at home, wearing a new pair of A & F jeans, and you have no memory of how you got them or even got home. I’m terrified to admit it, but that may actually be what just happened to me.
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“Life as a greeter”…really? I blame those fucking Kardashian bitches for this. Because they made a small empire out of doing nothing but turning on a camera and being plastic, now everyone thinks they need to do it too. Unfortunately it’s working because we all love looking at train wrecks like that apparently.
Now get to stepping Dewitt and take those jeans right back down to the store and just say “Oh I forgot that your CEO is a douche so I’ll need to return these jeans now.”
Haha, I didn’t write this post! I would never step foot into an A&F store.
Aw, damn it. I knew I should have looked. It just seemed like your words to me. Oh well, Charley, get to steppin’.
I always love to see the A&F debate whenever it is raised! I don’t live in a country with an A&F store but lots of guys come here on holiday who like to wear the T-shirts. Its all the same guys..either aging muscle marys trying to preserve their fast dwindling sex appeal or fat-skinny (you know those guys – slim bodies that look like raw cold pastry with not an inch of muscle of all ages swooning about believing they are beautiful)
Clearly the A&F fantasy works but the brand’s consumers make me think the fantasy is just that – a sad fantasy
Oh and when I saw the CEO’s pic, I couldn’t believe such a minger could have such an attitude about youth and beauty
It’s quite sad really, looking at these boys fighting over something so transient and vacuous. You could see it in their eyes as if they have discovered the pot at the end of the rainbow, but how wrong are they. Just like the clothes, they’ll be cast aside soon after they reach their sell-by date, which isn’t far ahead.
This. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O95DBxnXiSo
The problem with Mike Jeffries is that he’s judgmental of people based on their looks. You seem to have the same problem.
Thank you for posting this.