blogthingses...

Your Makeup Look Is

Punk Glam Eyes You're the perfect mix of rock and roll meets glamour!

What's Your Signature Makeup Look?

Booyah. So true--at least when I bother with it, lol.

You Are Lightning

Beautiful yet dangerous People will stop and watch you when you appear Even though you're capable of random violence You are best known for: your power Your dominant state: performing

What Type of Weather Are You?

Except for the "beautiful" part. XD

I am ANTIcrombie...

...and this is why.

Thanks to thehobbitwaffle for bringing this to my attention--I've never been a fan of THIS A&F because of the pressure to fit in and all, but this has really pushed me over the edge. I am HOPPING mad about this. Here is her entry on it.

Full article on Abercrombie's top guy, Mike Jeffries.

Outstanding thoughts from that article--[brackets] indicate my clarifications:

To Jeffries, the "A&F guy" is the best of what America has to offer: He's cool, he's beautiful, he's funny, he's masculine, he's optimistic, and he's certainly not "cynical" or "moody," two traits he finds wholly unattractive.

If looks could kill, everyone here would be dead. Jeffries' employees are young, painfully attractive, and exceedingly eager, and they travel around the campus on playground scooters, stopping occasionally to chill out by the bonfire that burns most days in a pit at the center of campus.

As his A&F brand has reached iconic status, Jeffries has raised prices, only to find that the brand's loyal fans will gladly pay whatever he asks.

He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen.

Much more than just a brand, Abercrombie & Fitch successfully resuscitated a 1990s version of a 1950s ideal -- the white, masculine "beefcake" -- during a time of political correctness and rejection of '50s orthodoxy. But it did so with profound and significant differences. A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair. While feigning casualness (many of its clothes look like they've spent years in washing machine, then a hamper), Abercrombie actually celebrates the vain, highly constructed male. After all, there is nothing casual about an A&F sweatshirt worn over two A&F polos worn over an A&F T-shirt. (A&F has had less of a cultural impact on women's fashion. Its girls' line is preppy, sexy and popular, but the company has mostly remained focused on pleasing the all-American college boy.)
For many young men, to wear Abercrombie is to broadcast masculinity, athleticism and inclusion in the "cool boys club" without even having to open their mouths.

Our first bump [in the smooth interview] came when I mentioned the 2002 uproar over the company's thongs for middle-school girls, which had "Eye Candy" and "Wink Wink" printed on their fronts. "That was a bunch of bullshit," he said, sweating profusely. "People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls. But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls."

The A&F Quarterly, which, until it was discontinued in 2003, boasted articles about the history of orgies and pictures of chiseled, mostly white, all-American boys and girls (but mostly boys) cavorting naked...

For example, when I ask him how important sex and sexual attraction are in what he calls the "emotional experience" he creates for his customers, he says, "It's almost everything. That's why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that."
As far as Jeffries is concerned, America's unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," he says. "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."

"I don't think we were in any sense guilty of racism, but I think we just didn't work hard enough as a company to create more balance and diversity. And we have, and I think that's made us a better company. We have minority recruiters. And if you go into our stores you see great-looking kids of all races."
In the latest episode, last fall a group of high school girls from Allegheny County, Penn., made the rounds of television talk shows to protest the company's "offensive" T-shirts. Of particular concern were shirts that read "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" and "Do I Make You Look Fat?"
"Abercrombie has a history of insensitivity," the group's well-spoken Emma Blackman-Mathis, 16, told me, "and there is no company with as big an impact on the standards of beauty. There are kids starving themselves so they can be the 'Abercrombie girl,' and there are guys who think they aren't worthy if they don't look exactly like the guys on the wall."
The protest (which resulted in A&F pulling "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?" and "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" but retaining "Do I Make You Look Fat?" and others) began after my visit, so I couldn't ask Jeffries about it. But I did ask him about other T-shirt dust-ups, including "It's All Relative in West Virginia" (which West Virginia's governor didn't find funny), Bad Girls Chug. Good Girls Drink Quickly (which angered anti-addiction groups), and Wong Brothers Laundry Service -- Two Wongs Can Make It White (which triggered protests from Asian groups).
Remarkably, Jeffries says he has a "morals committee for T-shirts" whose job it is to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. "Sometimes they're on vacation," he admits with a smile. "Listen, do we go too far sometimes? Absolutely. But we push the envelope, and we try to be funny, and we try to stay authentic and relevant to our target customer. I really don't care what anyone other than our target customer thinks."

[Whilst supervising the arrangement of a mannequin]  "We want it bigger at the top and skinnier at the legs. Yes, that's sexier. Much better. That's less butch." (Jeffries isn't a fan of the "butch" look, though when they were all the rage he grudgingly incorporated camouflage army pants into his Hollister line for girls.)

This man is a pig of the first degree. I am, to use a term from the article, "girlcotting" him and all his brands--no Abercrombie, Abercrombie & Fitch, or Hollister for me. EVER. (Not that I'm going to have to throw anything out of my closet, lol--I've never owned any.)

This is an icon made by thehobbitwaffle that says it all:

From now on the only A&F worth any consideration is Always and Forever.

Since I have t-shirt transfers, I'm so totally making a shirt that looks like it has the "Abercrombie" logo, then "spray-painting" "ANTI" over the first four letters. This is intolerable in modern America--PERIOD.

LOST!

Apparently they got all the letters about "not enough shirtless Charlie!" XD

I am happy.

( Okay, okay...spoilers here. )