VIDEO: Campaign to Readjust Abercrombie & Fitch’s Snob Appeal by Donating Their Clothes to the Poor

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“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” says Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”

Okay, so Abercrombie absolutely feeds into high school clique culture: you know who were part of the douche-bag in-crowd even in the 90’s, when I was in high school. So how does Abercrombie and Fitch go about making sure that somebody dorky or nerdy doesn’t wear their clothing? Well they actually have a few policies to make it happen. First of all, they don’t make their products in plus sizes for women. If you are a plump or heavy teenage girl, you will discover that Abercrombie and Fitch doesn’t have a size for you. And this is on purpose: they don’t want you wearing their clothes. You aren’t cool enough.

  

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Furthermore, if their clothing gets damaged, they do not donate it to the homeless or shelters, as other companies do for clothes that can’t be sold in malls: they burn it. Wouldn’t want some homeless person wearing your clothing, right? After all, the CEO also said “We hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.”

All this has inspired enough blowback that Abercrombie is being popularly regarded as elitist bastards promoting their preppy clothes through snob appeal. It has lead Greg Karber to make a campaign to purposely donate all his Abercrombie and Fitch clothing to the poor, and to shop at second-hand clothes stores to also donate all he can to the poor to “readjust the Abercrombie & Fitch brand.”

The campaign has poignancy, a sort of “knock down the snob” excitement, though incidentally giving clothing to the poor specifically because they are undesirable and will ruin the image of the name brand isn’t exactly an act of charity. Check out this video, anyway, to see this young man’s campaign to troll the narcissistic company and its snobby products.