We start our brand-new season with the story of Mike Jeffries, the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO who turned a bankrupt old-school outdoors brand into a late-90s/early-00s temple of exclusionary “cool." Surely you remember the ads, or maybe you remember the stores: the pumping music, the blasts of cologne that made your throat close up, the shutters across the front of the store, as if this little corner of a suburban shopping mall was actually an exclusive nightclub. Or maybe you remember the Bruce Weber-shot soft-porn catalogue, which once featured an essay by (yes! no!) Slavoj Zizek. Clothes for homophobic bullies were made in marketed from a self-hating gay sensibility: and the story of Mike Jeffries might be the single solitary key to understanding how the aesthetics of the closet became mainstream marketing, how a gay aesthetic was used to sell homophobic masculinity and how that tension crushed employees and turned its visionary into a monster now credibly accused of sexual assault and harassment.
For more on Mike Jeffries, read the sources we used to research this episode:
Netflix: White Hot - The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch
BBC: World of Secrets - The Abercrombie Guys
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/an-oral-history-of-abercrombie-and-fitch
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-story-behind-fitch-the-homeless
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8vmy56yero
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abercrombie-fitch-ceo-corporate-jet-rulebook_n_1980960
https://www.salon.com/2006/01/24/jeffries/
https://www.advocate.com/crime/abercrombie-fitch-mike-jeffries-dementia
https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-jeffries-partner-is-too-involved-2013-5
https://www.thecut.com/2014/02/why-abercrombie-is-losing-its-shirt.html#
https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/A_and_F_Quarterly_Back_to_School_2003_The_Sex_Ed_Issue.pdf
https://www.classaction.org/media/abercrombie-indictment.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB876176611622798500
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/style/mario-testino-bruce-weber-harassment.html
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.Michael Oswell is the voice of Slavoj Zizek.