You might not recognise Mike Jeffries, the disgraced former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, but if you were around in the early to mid-Noughties, you will recognise the aesthetic empire he built. Jeffries was the man behind the brand at its most infamous period. In 1992, he took over the company – then an unfashionable, outdoorsy clothing brand – and recreated it as the preferred outfitter of teenagers all over the world. Under Jeffries, stores were underlit, overperfumed and well-staffed by noticeably good-looking young people dressed in polo shirts and relaxed beachwear. More remarkable, though, were the more scantily clad employees. Under Jeffries, the brand introduced their shirtless “greeters”: chiseled, handsome young men paid to stand outside their stores and entice shoppers in. People would take photos stood next to them. This was the era of The OC, when teenagers were aping preppy Californian style by bravely squelching down rainy British high streets in overpriced flip-flops. It was the aspirational brand, for a time.
This week, Jeffries and his partner Matthew Smith were arrested and charged with running a prostitution ring and an international sex trafficking operation. This reckoning has been coming for a while. A 2022 Netflix documentary, White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, explored the brand’s “exclusionary” aesthetics. In 2023, a BBC Panorama film The Abercrombie Guys: The Dark Side of Cool uncovered allegations of sex trafficking against Jeffries, prompting the FBI to start their investigation. The BBC spoke to 12 men who made allegations against Jeffries: since then, eight more men have come forward with similar accusations. The media coverage makes for grim reading. It is claimed that Jeffries and his partner targeted vulnerable straight men they could force and coerce into gay sex by dangling the promise of modelling for the brand. It’s also alleged that many victims were injected with “an erection-inducing substance”. Jeffries and Smith have previously denied any wrongdoing, and Jeffries’s lawyer told the BBC they would “respond in detail to the allegations after the Indictment is unsealed”.
Jeffries left Abercrombie & Fitch in 2014 as a number of employees brought discrimination lawsuits against him, claiming they were mistreated on the basis of their race or their looks. The company has changed a lot in the past decade. The shirtless greeters were axed in 2015, shortly after Jeffries left the company, and the infamous “look” policy requiring employees to adhere to strict appearance guidelines have been abandoned. Not that Jeffries ever apologised for any of that. In a 2006 interview with Salon, he put his brand ethos in plain terms. “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, and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
Abercrombie & Fitch made the attractiveness of young people something that could be bought and sold. In 2021, I interviewed a number of former shirtless store models. Many of them seemed bemused that any of it happened – that they were paid to stand shirtless outside a clothing store and have their photo taken with shoppers – but had not personally experienced anything they would call sexual harrassment. This was before the Netflix documentary and the BBC investigation. The tone of my piece was mostly light-hearted. That feels strange now.
Looking back at the era my friends and I grew up in, I see something nasty that didn’t seem nasty to me then. Where I grew up in London, it was generally known to be possible to get scouted for an Abercrombie job at Westfield shopping centre – and that if you had a job at Abercrombie, it said something about you. Namely: you were hot. Abercrombie & Fitch weren’t the only ones in this game. There was also American Apparel, whose employees were notoriously unfriendly, attractive types, and whose advertising featured over-exposed, lightly pornographic photographs of young people wearing their clothes. (The then-CEO of the American Apparel, Dov Charney, has also been accused of a number of sexual assaults.)
It seems very grubby now that 17-year-old girls of my acquaintance were interviewing for after-school and weekend jobs at a shop where part of the hiring process was an adult assessing whether or not they were attractive. At the time it didn’t seem grubby, but downright enviable. I remember feeling lesser because I wasn’t the kind of person those stores wanted to hire.
Today, that thought makes me sad – not for myself, really, but for the condition of being young. To be too ill-equipped to rise above the hype and aspirational branding and see the sinister emptiness at the heart of the thing we ardently desired. Maybe teenagers today have their eyes more open than my peers and I did. I hope so.
