There’s an article over at Jezebel about Rian Dean, a woman employee of Abercrombie who was banished to the stockroom because her prosthetic arm didn’t fit the “look” the company wants. Before I say more about Rian’s story, I want to mention Hortense Smith, the author of the Jezebel piece. I am an old blind guy. I’ve fought all my life for inclusion in the mainstream. I know a thing or two about being banished. Accordingly I love prose like this:
Just in case their racism, sexism, and general awfulness hasn’t been enough to turn you away from Abercrombie & Fitch after all these years, here’s another glimpse of the inner workings of the horrible store.
When I previously (and gleefully) wrote about the economic troubles that Abercrombie was having a few months back, I mentioned that my personal hatred for the store comes from the fact that one of the women I was in the intensive inpatient unit with during my treatment for anorexia was heavily recruited by the store just days before her hospitalization (she was incredibly underweight) because she had “the look” they wanted. Turns out that this horrific “look policy” doesn’t just revolve around being stick-thin; according to Riam Dean, she was forced to work in the stockroom, as opposed to on the floor, at Abercrombie’s London flagship store because her prosthetic arm didn’t fit the company’s attractiveness standards. You stay classy, Abercrombie!
Oh be still my old grumpy blind man’s heart! Hortense is giving Abercrombie a good spank! In the bloody monolith of commodity fetishism and corporate greed Abercrombie wants its employees to stand alertly at the cash register, half starved, tricked out in skimpy tee shirts and pre-washed jeans, and by God they need all their limbs in order to suggest emaciation. By God! A prosthesis might look too healthy!
Here’s what Rian had to say:
“A worker from what they call the “visual team”, people who are employed to go round making sure the shop and its staff look up to scratch, came up to me and demanded I take the cardigan off. I told her, yet again, that I had been given special permission to wear it. A few minutes later my manager came over to me and said: “I can’t have you on the shop floor as you are breaking the Look Policy. Go to the stockroom immediately and I’ll get someone to replace you. I pride myself on being quite a confident girl but I had never experienced prejudice like that before and it made me feel utterly worthless. Afterwards I telephoned the company’s head office where a member of staff asked whether I was willing to work in the stockroom until the winter uniform arrived. That was the final straw. I just couldn’t go back.”
As a blind person I don’t always trust the “visual team” but when I do, I trust people who have, at least once, read the Communist Manifesto. Or Hannah Arendt. Or Kristeva. Or, or. or…
The best article about Abercrombie is by Benoit Denizet-Lewis over at Salon. Here’s why I like it:
Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot. He’ll say, “What a cool idea, dude,” or, when the jeans on a store’s mannequin are too thin in the calves, “Let’s make this dude look more like a dude,” or, when I ask him why he dyes his hair blond, “Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.”
This fall, on my second day at Abercrombie & Fitch’s 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods, Jeffries — sporting torn Abercrombie jeans, a blue Abercrombie muscle polo, and Abercrombie flip-flops — stood behind me in the cafeteria line and said, “You’re looking really A&F today, dude.” (An enormous steel-clad barn with laminated wood accents, the cafeteria feels like an Olympic Village dining hall in the Swiss Alps.) I didn’t have the heart to tell Jeffries that I was actually wearing American Eagle jeans. To Jeffries, the “A&F guy” is the best of what America has to offer: He’s cool, he’s beautiful, he’s funny, he’s masculine, he’s optimistic, and he’s certainly not “cynical” or “moody,” two traits he finds wholly unattractive.
Jeffries’ endorsement of my look was a step up from the previous day, when I made the mistake of dressing my age (30). I arrived in a dress shirt, khakis and dress shoes, prompting A&F spokesman Tom Lennox — at 39, he’s a virtual senior citizen among Jeffries’ youthful workforce — to look concerned and offer me a pair of flip-flops. Just about everyone at A&F headquarters wears flip-flops, torn Abercrombie jeans, and either a polo shirt or a sweater from Abercrombie or Hollister, Jeffries’ brand aimed at high school students.
When I first arrived on “campus,” as many A&F employees refer to it, I felt as if I had stepped into a pleasantly parallel universe. The idyllic compound took two years and $131 million to complete, and it was designed so nothing of the outside world can be seen or heard. Jeffries has banished the “cynicism” of the real world in favor of a cultlike immersion in his brand identity. The complex does feel like a kind of college campus, albeit one with a soundtrack you can’t turn off. Dance music plays constantly in each of the airy, tin-roofed buildings, and when I entered the spacious front lobby, where a wooden canoe hangs from the ceiling, two attractive young men in Abercrombie polo shirts and torn Abercrombie jeans sat at the welcome desk, one checking his Friendster.com messages while the other swayed subtly to the Pet Shop Boys song “If Looks Could Kill.”
And of course Denizet-Lewis has hit the nail on the head. The look, enforced by the visual team, is for a thrillingly expensive deadness.
Planet of the Blind 