I don’t think I was the only one who cringed when I read that Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries only wants “thin, beautiful people” shopping at his stores.
In a Business Insider interview May 3 with retail industry analyst Robin Lewis, Jeffries made several controversial claims about his target audience for the brand.
The attack on Jeffries mainly stems from Abercrombie’s mysterious lack of women’s clothing above a size large, or a size 10 for jeans, despite the availability of extra large sized clothes for men. According to Lewis, Jeffries claims the availability of larger men’s sizes is to compensate for big muscles.
This isn’t the first time Jeffries has been attacked for pushing the envelope. In October 2012, Bloomberg News published an article about Jeffries’ dress code for the cabin workers on the Abercrombie private jet. Requirements include Abercrombie polos, jeans, boxer-briefs, flip-flops and cologne.
Jeffries has not directly responded to the limited sizing in his stores, but rather made extremely general claims about his brands. He normally declines contact with the media, and the last official interview he agreed to regarding Abercrombie was with Salon magazine in 2006.
“Candidly, we go after the cool kids,” Jeffries told Salon. “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.”
No wonder so many girls develop eating disorders when grown men are going around saying that any girl who wears an extra large is not a “cool kid” and doesn’t deserve to wear Abercrombie. Hearing a man who’s worth billions of dollars be so outwardly rude to girls with larger frames makes me sick to my stomach.
Several petitions on Change.org encourage consumers not to shop at the store until they start carrying larger sizes. Protesters stood outside an Abercrombie store in Chicago May 13 carrying signs displaying messages like “EveryBODY is Beautiful” and “Beauty Comes in all Sizes”. They were outraged that the store doesn’t carry a size 14, the most common size among American women, according to an ABC News report May 15.
H&M, another retail clothing company, recently took an opposite stance on the body image debate. In their most recent swimsuit campaign, they featured size 12 American model Jennie Runk. She received a flood of positive comments on Facebook and other social networks from girls, relieved to see a beautiful girl with a “natural body” in a popular store’s ads.
If stores made a shift to models with frames larger than a double zero in their advertisements, it would benefit both the brand and the consumers. Displaying the clothes on models with varying frames would show girls what styles look like on different figures. It also sends the positive message that you don’t have to be six feet tall and weigh 100 pounds to look socially acceptable.
When I was getting ready for my AP exam, I mindlessly put on an Abercrombie sweatshirt.
When I looked in the mirror, I felt uneasy. I’m not comfortable wearing anything that represents such a discriminatory philosophy.
I went through my closet and pulled out all of the Abercrombie. It doesn’t look as good as it did when I bought it.
