Abercrombie & Fitch Debuts New Look Featuring More Clothes, Less Abs
You know the teen-movie trope where the popular jock gets told off by the nerdy girl he only pretended to like on a bet? And then he walks around all morose for a while before realizing he needs to change his cocky ways and like, have feelings about things other than football and stuff? That’s sort of where Abercrombie & Fitch has been for the past few years.
The brand that once dominated high school halls with its preppy aesthetic and premium-priced polo shirts lost the zeitgeist around the same time people stopped popping their collars, while teenagers moved on to more trend-focused retailers like Zara and Forever 21. Amid slumping sales, Abercrombie & Fitch has spent the last few years in amends-making mode — first replacing its controversial CEO Mike Jeffries (who proclaimed that A&F was “for cool kids” with “lots of friends” and was “exclusionary” on purpose), later ditching its hypersexualized ads, hiring a new designer, and shifting its aesthetic away from “prep princess” to something more modern and minimalist.
While we can’t hate on a brand that’s trying to evolve away from its exclusionary roots, we also can’t help but miss the good old days when Abercrombie was top dog, supremely confident, and, yes, unabashedly sexual. It’s almost hard to conceive of now, but there was a time in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s when the brand’s in-house magazine A&F Quarterly was a lightning rod for controversy that had a spot in cool kids’ backpacks, and sniffy arty types’ coffee tables alike.
The seasonal mag, featuring spreads lensed by Bruce Weber, wasn’t anything so quotidian as a catalog, and it didn’t dispense any chirpy, J.Crew-style tips on how to jazz up a sequin tee. Instead, it offered an overheated, yet tongue-in-cheek vision of teenage life on top. Guys with obliques not commonly seen outside classical sculpture lounged shirtless. Female baseball players mooned the opposing team. For a Christmas issue, a model floated naked on a surfboard with a present perched on the small of her back. Group road trips, camping trips, football games, picnics — all were equally likely to devolve into naked debauchery. In a stunning reversal of the status quo, AFQ often featured dudes wearing fewer clothes than women. Yes, it was porny as hell. But it was also an exhilarating vision of teenage life. There were no zits, algebra, or parents, and nothing hurt!
Alas, the unchaperoned life was not meant to last forever. A&F Quarterly stopped publishing in 2003 after parent’s groups protested its publishing explicit sex advice (which yeah, we get that).
Today, the brand debuted its new fall campaign starring model Neelam Gill. It’s A&F’s most trend-focused collection yet, featuring a very au courant mix of leather jackets, high-waisted skinnies, and boyish parkas. It’s undeniably cool-looking. It also features a model of color, a very welcome change after the overwhelmingly lily-white models of the A&F Quarterly days. There’s lots to love about the new Abercrombie — but part of us misses the days when it was the raunchiest, cockiest popular kid in school. Even if we only ever got to see the photos, not ride along.
Click ahead for some of our favorite moments from the old Abercrombie.
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