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But from a reader’s point of view, the result was exactly the kind of 360-degree experience Jeffries wanted to achieve: one-third scandalous photos, one-third magazine articles that could have appeared in GQ or Esquire, and one-third rugby shirts going for $49.50.Ĭlose Encounters With An Abercrombie & Fitch Catalog (Medium, 2014) – The author on how his early exposure to A&F Quarterly impacted his sense of himself as a gay man. “It created this weird interplay where we’d have an essay by Michael Cunningham after he won the Pulitzer beside these nude, nubile 19-year-olds,” says contributor Guy Cimbalo. That’s what made it so cool.”Ī&F Quarterly: The Story of Abercrombie’s Highbrow, Controversial, Sort of Amazing Magalog (2014, Racked)īehind the scenes, the book was split, with only limited overlap between the racy photos up front and the editorial content in back. And you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from Abercrombie. “Not only were we the first brand to do this kind of advertising, we were also the first big brand to normalize gay culture for a mainstream audience, expose America’s youth to some of the era’s most progressive thinkers and use our platform to address sexuality in a useful, hands-on way. Mel calls the Quarterly “one of the least-discussed, most under-appreciated items of queer history” for its normalization of queerness and non-monogamy. Sex, Lies and Cheap Cologne: An Oral History of Abercrombie & Fitch’s Softcore Porn Mag (Mel Magazine, 2021) It hit a peak circulation of 1.2 million and was the subject of ire from organizations including Mothers Against Drunk Driving, NOW and the Catholic League. Also extraordinary was that in addition to featuring future stars like Taylor Swift and Channing Tatum, as written by Racked, “issue after issue, the staff was somehow able to convince the era’s biggest literary and intellectual stars to sit down for interviews.” They interviewed Spike Lee and Gus Van Sant! According to Mel, the magazine apparently had a cult following amongst actual journalists and many appreciated its candor around sex and general bizarreness. But it did send me down a rabbithole of demented nostalgia for a terrible company who loomed so very large in my life and the lives of my peers.Ī & F Quarterly: Naked Boys Wrestling, Group Sex, Polo Shirts, Jonathan Franzen?Ībercrombie asked you to pay real money ($6!) for their magazine that was also an advertisement.

The documentary does a good enough job exposing “the dark side” of its American dream, describing the discrimination, exclusivity, sexual misconduct and offensive products that eventually led to lawsuits and turning of public sentiment against the brand, which led to the ousting of its CEO, Mike Jeffries.Īfter watching White Hot: Abercrombie & Fitch, I didn’t feel the rush of obsession I get from a good documentary or movie-based-on-a-true-story where I want to know everything there is to know about the story - none of the main players in this tale are especially intriguing, even Jeffries. They were always just about to throw a football. Those pictures were displayed prominently in stores, but also adorned the cinderblock dorm room walls of the gay boys I was friends with at our boarding school in Northern Michigan.Īs detailed in White Hot: Abercrombie & Fitch, Abercrombie & Fitch - once an outfitter for outdoorspeople, sported by esteemed personalities like Ernest Hemmingway and Amelia Earhart - rose up into wild, inescapable popularity in the late ’90s and early ’00s and did so with marketing, merchandising and hiring rooted in bigotry, misogyny and racism. They liked to wrestle in amber waves of grain or lie on checkered blankets in the backseats of trucks with sinewy girls in camisoles and bikini bottoms. It was Abercrombie & Fitch’s homoerotic imagery that reached us first - shopping bags and mag-a-log pages of shirtless, muscled, clear-faced American boys with low-slung half-buttoned jeans and happy Golden Retrievers. Graphic by Autostraddle / Photo by Carley Margolis/FilmMagic for Paul Wilmot Communications