A&F – Faithfulness still pays off

By: American Decency Staff

For those of you who have followed our ministry for a number of years, you are aware of our campaign against the pornographic advertising schemes of Abercrombie & Fitch in the early 2000s.  American Decency led a nationwide campaign against A&F, which included calling for consumers to boycott the retailer.  We circulated postcards, petitions, and even “Ditch Fitch” bumper stickers!  Thousands of people joined the effort by expressing outrage to A&F over their pornographic marketing campaigns.

The cornerstone of A&F’s sexualized advertising campaign for many years was their quarterly “catalog.”  Four times a year A&F would send out a 300 page magazine, devoted to selling sex to teens, rather than merchandise.  Each magazine was filled with dozens of erotic photos of nude young people in explicit poses – often implying group sex.  In 2002 the television show “Entertainment Tonight” described the A&F quarterly this way:  “It is a clothing catalog that is so controversial it comes with a XXX rating.  Nudity, topless women cavorting and a young man seemingly in bondage are just some of the images in the summer issue of the Abercrombie and Fitch quarterly.”

As we kept the pressure on Abercrombie & Fitch, together with thousands who boycotted A&F, we made an impact and Abercrombie finally stopped the production of their quarterly “catalog” in the last few years.

And yet A&F continued bombarding shoppers with large, explicit window displays and shirtless male “greeters” at A&F stores in local malls.   A&F has never completely rid themselves of pornographic advertisements.

Abercrombie & Fitch has continued to arrogantly and intentionally push and encourage a lifestyle of sexual promiscuity, destruction, and deviance with no regard for the thousands of expressions of outrage and concern they received over the years and no regard for the damage done to the young people from whom they profited.

However, as Abercrombie & Fitch found out, sex doesn’t always sell.  Over the last decade, A&F sales have dropped nearly every quarter – including for the last 11 quarters straight.  All of this was under the direction of A&F CEO Michael Jefferies who stubbornly pushed forward with his controversial marketing ploys.

After years of seeing the A&F brand drop in regards to sales and public opinion, there is now new leadership at the retailer.  And with a new CEO, very overdue changes are coming to A&F. 

As The Wall Street Journal headline stated:  “Abercrombie is Dialing Back the Sex”, reporting that: “In a set of personnel policies announced Friday, the company said it would stop hiring sales staff on ‘body type or physical attractiveness’ and will relax its infamous ‘look policy’ so that employees can dress in a more individualistic way. Brand Representative will replace Model as the title for sales staff.”

They go on to report,  “Store openings and events will no longer be decorated with shirtless models, and the company’s sex-tinged marketing is being dialed back as well.”

An Abercrombie & Fitch news release stated this:

“By the end of July, there will no longer be sexualized marketing used in marketing materials, including in-store photos, gift cards and shopping bags …”

What had become obvious to observers, the chain plummeted under the offensive marketing schemes of Michael Jeffries.  As the Wall Street Journal opined:  “The changes—many of which were championed by the new heads of the Abercrombie and Hollister brands—amount to a broad repudiation of the highly sexual tone set by former Chief Executive Mike Jeffries. He created a cult following with teens, who clamored for Abercrombie’s logo-emblazoned T-shirts and sweatshirts, and willingly paid full price for tattered jeans.”

Yet we are not naïve.   A&F is driven by profits.  Their change in advertising did not come due to a sudden concern for our youth, but only by a loss of profits. 

However, Dr. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, points out lessons to be learned from A&F’s failed marketing ploys.

The Abercrombie story comes as parable to those who operate out of a biblical worldview. One of the realities we come to see here is that the highly sexualized marketing approach undertaken by Abercrombie simply can’t fulfill on its promises. You can adopt a highly sexualized approach like this but eventually it’s, almost like the case with pornography, very revealing in terms of the pattern of sin. There’s no way to keep dialing up the sexuality and remain in a mall, and at some point even the teenagers and the young adults to whom Abercrombie had been marketing these highly sexualized images, at some point they are no longer interested in seeing the same old thing even from Abercrombie.  …

This gets back to the Christian worldview affirmation that truth and goodness and beauty are always united. The Christian worldview tells us that we can never separate those things without creating a sinful fissure that will eventually crack apart. And the crackup has now reached Abercrombie and Fitch. Choosing this highly sexualized marketing technique, putting out what amounted to soft core pornography in advertising for many years, trying to entice teenagers and young adults to come into its doors with a highly sexualized aesthetic, all this began to break apart when it became immediately clear that putting on Abercrombie’s clothes did not make one physically attractive. And it became an absolutely repulsive marketing technique when the CEO of the company admitted that they were actually trying to sell to good-looking people by the definition of this company and they were trying to use good-looking people in terms of physical and sexual attractiveness in terms of their advertising. It should tell us a great deal that for Abercrombie and Fitch that eventually became a losing strategy. But you can read that right out of the book of Genesis.

Another lesson that we have learned over time as God has led and leads us is this:

This was a long term battle that we fought faithfully and diligently in the later 1990s and into 2000s.

We monitored the store windows, diligently documenting the window displays.  We documented each of the troubling catalogs quarter after quarter for a number of years.  We "beat the drum" on this issue for a number of years as well as making other ministries aware of this degrading catalog.  Our national interviews and emails kept the concern going and expanding.

There was no glory in it as we saw A&F discontinue producing the highly sexualized catalog, but we knew God was in it as we fought, by His grace!  We are thankful for this good news!

 

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