Almost every time I walk into an
Abercrombie & Fitch store, I notice the all chiseled males and thin females on the pictures, images of a young, preppy white clique enjoying each others company while sporting the finest of clothes. All this looks cool and nice but I have to admit that each time I go in there, I find peculiar patterns and themes that have given me suspiscions of bigoted marketing and racist business practices. For example, whenever I go onto their sales floor, I get feelings of inferiority and confused identity. I look for minority models and racial representation in their pictures, and to my surprise I rarely find it almost every time I go in. In terms of affordability, I have bought very few garments because it’s usually out of my price range... All these experiences have led me to believe that Abercrombie might be trying to subtly impose a racial/ethnic boundary on who gets to wear their clothes.
I suspect that A&F executes high pressure and high intimidation advertising in a low-key way through their simplified pop-victorian sales floors, their higher retail pricing, and their high-quality black and white pictures with athletic/model shaped, fantasy white men and women to create a conglomerates of social discrimination toward who wears their brand. They purposely set the prices of clothes high enough to economically discriminate people who can't afford their clothes to not buy them, such as Latino's or African-Americans who are typically less successful economically than whites in the US, but low enough to attract the people who fit the profile of their advertising and are from an upper-middle class and higher lifestyle. Their models and their advertising themes are of a white, high-class, educated, preppy New England society, almost the complete antithesis of who I am: a Latino, working-class, state-educated, intellectual Angeleno-Californian. Also, the images of their models are pretty much the embodiment of the
Northern European Standard of Beauty western cultures are already bias towards, sending a strong aesthetic social message of discrimination and social hierarchy toward anyone who doesn't look like this (eg: Native Americans, African-Americans, Non-white Latino-Americans, Asians)
If A&F were really interested in maximizing their revenues, then they would do what other retail clothing companies are doing and have different races in their advertising to widen their market demographics, and the truth is that once in a while do display the occasional minority, but their choice of images to reflect their business ideals and a social injustice that still remains within some of our best and artistic fashion businesses...
-gs1r-
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