What is the Abercrombie documentary about?
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch documents the brand’s rise to popularity and its impact on culture. The film explores the dark side of the preppy fashion retailer, including Abercrombie’s emphasis on whiteness and thinness being their ideal vision of the aspirational, “all-American” ideal. It also delves into Mike Jeffries, who largely drove the racist and sizeist image of the A&F brand. Jeffries stepped down as the brand’s CEO in December 2014.
Is the Abercrombie documentary on Netflix?
Yep! In fact, Netflix is the only place you can watch the White Hot documentary. White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch is streaming right now on Netflix.
What is the Abercrombie documentary release date?
White Hot was released on Netflix on April 19, 2022. It is available for streaming now.
Does Abercrombie still exist?
Abercrombie & Fitch is still around! Though they fell out of public favor in the mid-2010s, the brand has since bounced back. With a new CEO, the retailer actually has won widespread praise for their Curve Love denim line—a far cry from A&F’s history of deliberately refusing to carry plus sizes at all and putting a premium on thinness.
Why did Abercrombie get in trouble?
Abercrombie & Fitch got into hot water for various reasons. The brand’s racist designs and hiring practices, as well as its overall focus on whiteness and thinness to the point of extreme exclusivity, drew massive criticism. There were also sexual misconduct allegations against the brand’s most famous photographer. For more details, see the spoilers below.
White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch Documentary Spoilers
Abercrombie & Fitch started as an outdoorsman brand.
Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in 1892 as a rather rugged brand and retailer, selling not just apparel, but also items like shaving cream, hunting gear, books, and more for men. Their first customers included none other than President Teddy Roosevelt and author Ernest Hemingway. Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White described the elite sportsman’s store as “the masculine dream,” writing, “the clothes men want to wear all the time and don’t; they carry the residual evidences of what men used to be before they became what they are.”
Male Abercrombie & Fitch models accused photographer Bruce Weber of sexual misconduct.
At least 15 male Abercrombie & Fitch models accused Bruce Weber, the snapper for the infamous A&F Quarterly catalog-magazine, of sexual misconduct, per The New York Times. Later, five models sued Weber for his alleged misconduct; Abercrombie, as well as other major brands and publications, ceased to work with the photographer afterward. One former A&F model, Bobby Blanksi, said in White Hot, “There was a guy that would get a call from Bruce. He would get invited to come over for dinner. Then they’d go over, and I would not see them the next day.” Weber, who didn’t participate in the documentary, categorically denied the allegations against him.
Abercrombie & Fitch was unabashedly racist in some of their graphic T-shirt designs.
White Hot examines some of the logo and graphic T-shirts Abercrombie & Fitch sold in its heyday, and, well, there is nothing subtle about its racism. Some former staffers boasted that they came up with the slogans themselves and didn’t hire copywriters for the designs, which were often shockingly anti-Asian. “They really wanted us to be irreverent,” former Abercrombie & Fitch graphic design director Kelly Blumberg said in White Hot. “They really wanted us to be funny, relevant to that late teen, early 20s college crowd.” One design famously sparked protests against the retailer for its “Wong Brothers Laundry Service” shirts, which read, “Two Wongs Can Make It White.” Former Abercrombie employees said that the retailer burned the shirts when the protests occurred, but that no real repercussions came beyond that, and that other racist messaging (including references to Native American, Hispanic, and Asian ethnicities) was allowed to continue.
Abercrombie & Fitch got sued for discriminating against Black, Asian, and other minority employees.
Abercrombie & Fitch was accused of employing discriminatory recruiting practices for its staffers, even explaining racist policies in its handbook. In one section, the guide dictates that hairstyles must be “neatly combed, attractive, natural, classic,” and lists a white woman with long straight hair as acceptable and a Black model with dreadlocks as a no-no. Robin Givhan, a veteran fashion reporter, explained in the documentary, “No other mall brand went to the extreme that Abercrombie did in micromanaging the look of everything from the store down to the person who was cleaning up the stockroom.” What’s more, once workers did get hired, minority employees were often allegedly still hit with discriminatory practices: The A&F in-store ranking system required employees to rank one another on a bizarre scale of “cool” to “rocks” in terms of attractiveness, and if you didn’t get called “cool” (read: attractive by A&F’s skinny white standard), you were removed from the schedule and essentially fired. Journalist Moe Tkacik said in White Hot, “All that mattered was that the employees that you took pictures of and sent back to headquarters were hot.” In 2003, nine former Abercrombie employees, three of whom spoke out in White Hot, sued the retailer for discrimination, alleging that their race got them fired from their jobs in A&F stores. The retailer agreed to a settlement for $40 million, plus more than $7 million in legal fees to the plaintiffs.
Abercrombie & Fitch appeared to only make surface-level improvements to diversity after the discrimination lawsuit.
Another condition of Abercrombie & Fitch’s settlement in the discrimination suit was that the brand had to employ a consent decree and improve its diversity and inclusion policies. Part of that included the creation of the position of Chief Diversity Officer. Todd Corley was hired in the role and reported to chairman and CEO Jeffries. Other Black and Brown recruiters followed, but practices were largely unchanged. Now, instead of being considered “brand representatives,” store workers were divided into two groups: “Impact” employees worked in the back, while “models” worked up front, and the “models” were almost entirely white, while minority employees were often relegated to the “Impact” arena. Tkacik alleged that the “model” label was deliberate, explaining, “The idea was that calling their minimum wage retail employees ‘models,’ you know, Abercrombie could get away with anything that a modeling agency could get away with.”
Abercrombie & Fitch got sued over their anti-head scarf policy—and lost.
Samantha Elauf, then 17, applied for a job at an Abercrombie & Fitch store in her native Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2008 and was rejected because she was wearing a black headscarf. At the time, she was told it was because the company had a “no black” policy for employee wardrobes at work, but she was allegedly later informed that no headscarf, regardless of color, was acceptable within A&F’s “classic East Coast collegiate style” dress code. Elauf took the matter up with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who subsequently filed a lawsuit against Abercrombie for religious discrimination against Elauf’s Muslim faith. Instead of settling again, A&F fought the suit until it went all the way up to the Supreme Court—who ruled against the company, 8 to 1, with even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia claiming it was an “easy” case to decide. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.)
Former Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO Mike Jeffries was proud of being exclusionary.
Abercrombie CEO and chairman Mike Jeffries was bizarrely proud of his policies, which centered on thinness, whiteness, and heteronormativity that A&F peddled under his watch. In 2006, he told Salon that the “emotional experience” was merely that of being attractive. “That’s why 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,” he said. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. 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.” Jeffries stepped down in 2014, but insiders say that he wasn’t alone in his exclusionary thinking. White Hot director Alison Klayman told The Guardian, “It’s really convenient to put all the sins on Mike [Jeffries] and that era because he was so closely associated with the company’s rebirth in the 90s and early aughts. And he definitely deserves real criticism, but it takes more than one guy to do what A&F did.” Next, find out how and why Abercrombie & Fitch is getting so good again.
