Clothier’s Image Is Ill-Fitting

If past adventures in marketing are any indication, Abercrombie & Fitch can expect a boost in sales after its recent announcement that the chain is pulling a line of T-shirts deemed racially insensitive.

The clothing retailer made headlines last week when a wave of protests from Asian American college students led it to stop selling a series of T-shirts that feature cartoonish-looking Asian men pulling rickshaws, bowling and hyping a Chinese laundry.

Abercrombie & Fitch officials said they were surprised by the “hundreds and hundreds” of complaints they received, most from California college students. “It’s not our intention to offend anyone,” a company spokesman told The Times.

But A&F; seems to have gotten offending people down to a fine art, and controversy has never hurt its bottom line.

Four years ago, the company came under heavy fire for the “Drinking 101” feature in its quarterly catalog, which suggested “creative drinking games” that seemed to promote binge drinking. After a public uproar, the company passed out knives to its employees and had them excise the article from store catalogs. The resulting publicity raised the company profile in a way no advertising campaign could have.

Since then, its racy catalog has made the company the target of boycotts by a variety of groups around the country, from local National Organization for Women chapters to Christian family groups to the Chicago City Council. And the resulting buzz has created a cult following for a company that claims not to want to offend.

It certainly found a way to offend a Westside mother, who wrote me a while back complaining about the slogan on a shirt her 14-year-old daughter bought while shopping with friends.

“Abercrombie and Fitch Girls’ Ski Team,” the powder-blue T-shirt read. “We go down at night.”

Her daughter “was oblivious to the double meaning of the message about to go across her chest,” the woman said. When she and her husband insisted that the shirt be returned, they had to explain why they objected to it, which entailed a description of “details of oral sex ... that I thought could wait,” she said. “It wasn’t fun.”

Her daughter was embarrassed and returned the shirt, but she’s since seen it worn by 12-year-old classmates at her private school.

My almost-17-year-old daughter rolled her eyes at the story. Part of the attraction of A&F; is its raunchy, risque image. “Kids know what it means,” she says. “That’s why they want to buy it.”

Company officials insist their marketing campaign is aimed at college kids, not teens. But Abercrombie & Fitch is considered the sixth “coolest brand” by teenagers, ahead of such products as Coca-Cola, Levi’s and Nintendo. And on my visit to the Abercrombie & Fitch at our local mall this weekend, the company’s 18- to 22-year-old target audience was clearly outnumbered by parents and kids.

Now, I’m no fashion maven, but the clothes--mostly T-shirts and casual pants and shorts--didn’t look much different from what you’d find at the Gap or Banana Republic, and neither did the customers. There were a few mothers with teenage daughters, a group of teenage boys sifting through a table of sale T-shirts, a young couple in their 20s shopping for clothes for a Hawaiian vacation. A woman who looked to be about my age emerged from the fitting room with an armload of sweaters and shirts. Someone’s hip-looking middle-aged dad put a couple pairs of cargo pants on his A&F; credit card.

Just ahead of me in line were two girls who couldn’t have been more than 16. Each was clutching a pair of $6 turquoise briefs. “Can I have a shopping bag for that ... the one with the guy,” one girl asked the clerk, who nodded and dropped the panties into a giant shopping bag emblazoned with a photo of a buffed, blond surfer-type.

“I suppose you want a bag, too,” the clerk asked her friend, as she stepped up with her briefs. The girl nodded, then flushed bright red as the clerk handed back her tiny purchase in its giant package.

Does that happen a lot?” I asked, when my turn came. “All the time,” the clerk said.

Middle school girls have pictures of naked boys cut from the magazine and posted on their lockers. The rooms of some high school girls are a shrine to the boys. The clerk reached under the counter for a surfer boy bag for me. I was buying a copy of A&F; Quarterly, their summer catalog, shrink-wrapped and covered with warning labels.

“I’ll need to see your driver’s license,” the clerk told me. “But I’m paying cash,” I said, handing her my $6.

“I still need to see your driver’s license,” she said. “The register won’t let me ring it up unless I put in your birth date.”

It was the first time I’d been carded in a clothing store. You have to be 18 ... but that’s to look at the clothes, not wear them.

It took me just a moment to figure out why the magazine’s off-limits to kids. It makes the Victoria’s Secret catalog look like a version of Ladies’ Home Journal.

On the cover is a nude couple facing each other, with lithe, perfect bodies and flowing blond hair. On the inside cover, they’re walking nude through a park, with nothing covered up. On the next page, they’re cavorting naked in the water. On the next, you get a close-up of the woman’s bare breasts.

You’re 10 pages into this clothing retailer’s magazine before anyone appears in clothes. And every few pages you get what we used to call pinups, full-page nude shots of young men and women in provocative poses.

Officials say they’re not trying to sell clothes. They’re trying to create a magazine that “reflects the college lifestyle,” which would seem to be a lot of well-built white kids groping each other and lying about naked.

And it’s not hard to figure out it didn’t occur to company officials that the Asian T-shirt would offend anyone. Every model in their 280-page catalog appears to be white.

I suppose that’s all right. Just as clothing lines by Tommy Hilfiger and FUBU have became the brands of choice for urban teens, A&F; has become the standard for the suburban white kid, the private-school crowd.

The message is as clear as the tan lines on their models’ perfect naked bodies.

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Sandy Banks’ column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. She can bereached at [email protected].