Isegoria

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch, a 61-year-old “dude” named Mike Jeffries, “is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry”:

A quirky perfectionist and control freak, he guards his aspirational brands and his utopian chocolate factory with a highly effective zeal. Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. “He’s weird and probably insane, but he’s also unbelievably driven and brilliant,” says a former employee at Paul Harris, a Midwestern women’s chain for which Jeffries worked before becoming CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992.

Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of “lucky shoes” he wears when reading financial reports.

His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips. But while he can’t turn back the clock, he can — and has — done the next best thing, creating a parallel universe of beauty and exclusivity where his attractions and obsessions have made him millions, shaped modern culture’s concepts of gender, masculinity and physical beauty, and made over himself and the world in his image, leaving them both just a little more bizarre than he found them.

Much more than just a brand, Abercrombie & Fitch successfully resuscitated a 1990s version of a 1950s ideal — the white, masculine “beefcake” — during a time of political correctness and rejection of ’50s orthodoxy. But it did so with profound and significant differences. A&F aged the masculine ideal downward, celebrating young men in their teens and early 20s with smooth, gym-toned bodies and perfectly coifed hair. While feigning casualness (many of its clothes look like they’ve spent years in washing machine, then a hamper), Abercrombie actually celebrates the vain, highly constructed male. After all, there is nothing casual about an A&F sweatshirt worn over two A&F polos worn over an A&F T-shirt.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure if Abercrombie & Fitch was an authentic brand with a long history or simply a faux old-school institution:

Founded in 1892, in its heyday it served Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower (they bought their fishing equipment there), Ernest Hemingway (guns), and Cole Porter (evening clothes). During prohibition A&F was where the in crowd went for its hip flasks. But by the 1970s it had become a fashion backwater, holding on for dear life.

Leslee O’Neill, A&F’s executive vice president of planning and allocation, remembers what the company was like before Jeffries got there. “We had old clothes that no one liked,” she says. “It was a mess, a total disaster. We had this old library at our headquarters with all these really old books. There were croquet sets lying around. It was very English.”

Is it wrong not to be offended by these?

In the latest episode, last fall a group of high school girls from Allegheny County, Penn., made the rounds of television talk shows to protest the company’s “offensive” T-shirts. Of particular concern were shirts that read “Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?” “Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol’ Bitties” and “Do I Make You Look Fat?”

“Abercrombie has a history of insensitivity,” the group’s well-spoken Emma Blackman-Mathis, 16, told me, “and there is no company with as big an impact on the standards of beauty. There are kids starving themselves so they can be the ‘Abercrombie girl,’ and there are guys who think they aren’t worthy if they don’t look exactly like the guys on the wall.”

The protest (which resulted in A&F pulling “Who Needs a Brain When You Have These?” and “Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol’ Bitties” but retaining “Do I Make You Look Fat?” and others) began after my visit, so I couldn’t ask Jeffries about it. But I did ask him about other T-shirt dust-ups, including “It’s All Relative in West Virginia” (which West Virginia’s governor didn’t find funny), Bad Girls Chug. Good Girls Drink Quickly (which angered anti-addiction groups), and Wong Brothers Laundry Service — Two Wongs Can Make It White (which triggered protests from Asian groups).