I'm watching the Abercrombie & Fitch documentary on Netflix and the ONE thing I remember the most about working in a store next to one was the constant smell of cologne. It was so pervasive that even once the store closed permanently, the entire area still stunk. The other thing that was most noticeable would be the giant photo of a half naked man at the entrance. He would be attractive and white. I didn't really think much about the company as a teenager because I didn't have access to a mall and never really thought about how exclusionary the company was. ALL of their models were attractive and white. You didn't ever see any variety of people. No gays, no blacks, Asians, Hispanics. Just white.
When the company first started in 1892 by David Abercrombie (Ezra Fitch was a frequent customer who bought into the company in 1900), they catered to people like Teddy Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Ernest Hemingway- rugged, heavy outdoorsmen and carried such items like fishing gear, guns, camping gear. When they moved to a Madison Avenue location, they started to carry sportswear for women. The store filled the entire building and housed a shooting range in the basement, on the mezzanine paraphernalia for lawn games, archery, skiing, and free diving. The second through fifth floors were for clothing for different climates or terrains. On the sixth floor were a picture gallery, a bookstore (focused on sporting themes), a watch repair facility and a golf school (fully equipped with a resident professional). The seventh floor included a gun room with hundreds of shotguns and rifles, decorated with stuffed game heads, as well as a kennel for dogs and cats. The eighth floor contained fishing, camping and boating equipment and included a desk for a fly- and bait casting instructor who gave lessons at the pool which was located on the roof. The fishing section alone was stocked with over 48,000 flies and over 18,000 fishing lures.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Abercrombie_%26_Fitch)
It was founded as an upscale sporting goods store that was completely revamped into what it is today by Mike Jeffries after the company was purchased by Limited Brands in 1988. In 1910, they began selling women's clothing, becoming the first store in New York to sell clothing for both women and men in one store (citation needed).
This is very similar to both Orvis and LL Bean as they both focus on the outdoors, camping, fishing, hunting and spending time in the outdoors.
As a teenager in the 1990's growing up in a very rural area where the nearest shopping mall was an hour away, MTV was only accessible to families who could afford satellite (cable wasn't available in my town and still isn't) or those who subscribed to magazines like Seventeen, Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc.. What they did was discriminatory and illegal and while they were sued and settled, they never admitted any guilt nor faced any real consequences for their hiring practices.
I think that documentaries like this one (White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch) are hugely important because they not only show the illegal business practices, but they also show how some of the employees felt about working there and the sexual assault that some faced and the blatant discrimination (hiring employees of other races and then either scheduling them for only night shifts and scut work or not putting them on the schedule at all).
