I recently talked about how the AF on Fifth Avenue has a nearly naked boy standing outside. How hot he was and how ridiculous a ploy it is to sell clothing. This article is from the NYTIMES: (you need their upgraded access to read it and I can't find the link anymore). This is the full article which I am sure is shitty to do but oh well.
NEVER has a store that sells bluejeans and T-shirts more closely resembled a hookup joint.
The four-story Abercrombie & Fitch flagship on Fifth Avenue is a sprawling nightclub of a place with muscled young men standing guard at the front entrance, their smiles entreating passers-by to look. At their backs, the front windows are mysteriously shuttered. Inside, the lighting is a moody chiaroscuro, and the music thumps at such high volume that you have to shout to be heard. A central staircase with subtly lit frosted glass-block flooring is a dramatic sculptural counterpoint to the darkness. On a weekend afternoon, knots of conspiratorial-looking teenagers huddled out front, blowing on their cupped hands, talking on cellphones, casting eager gazes at one another from beneath eyelids at studied half-mast. In the store, which opened last month, hotties circulate the catwalklike floors, touching up their lip gloss, gossiping with one another. Only the fact that they occasionally lean over to fluff at a sweater, their hair fanning silkily across their shoulders, would lend you an inkling that they are actually employees.
Right. Because you are not in a nightclub. You are here to shop.
This is what Abercrombie does with distinction: the most
efficient way to move tons of jeans and T-shirts is not to sparkle with
antiseptic, anodyne cleanliness like Gap, but to sell these relatively
generic pieces of clothing using the sexual ideology of the new
millennium, an era informed by readily available pornography, the
strip-club aesthetic and a post-AIDS abandon. The nightclub setting and
the racy marketing campaigns make the clothes more appealing to the
kids. And tick off the parents. Which, in turn, makes the clothes even
more appealing to the kids.
For all the hype surrounding Abercrombie, the clothes are, well, just clothes. Upon entry, you find a row of glass cases displaying denim jeans. This is the denim ''bar,'' a term increasingly employed by public relations people to connect the act of shopping to the act of ingesting food or drink, to subtly convince shoppers that buying clothes is an intimate activity providing either nourishment or intoxicating pleasure. And the jeans are fine, priced from $69.50 to $198 for the Ezra Fitch premium styles.
For women the preppy Ezra Fitch collection includes tailored shirts, embroidered with a tiny moose on the front, and saucier camisoles, like a strapless beaded one with an Empire waist for $128. In gray or white, it was actually elegant. I would skip the holiday T-shirts with phrases that are as corny as lines from the 1970's show ''Love, American Style,'' like ''Santa loves a hot cookie,'' ''Never a silent night'' and, my personal favorite, ''Is that a candy cane in your pants?''
Men's clothes are simple: polos, fleece items, jeans, khakis, sweaters, overcoats. I liked the cable-knit sweaters in lamb's wool, nylon and cashmere, many of them bearing the embroidered moose. On the walls of the store a three-story mural depicts a kind of adolescent sexual Guernica: young male athletes in all manner of gymnastic contortion, mostly stripped to the waist, their torsos striated with muscle, their pants packed with cartoonishly provocative, eye-popping bulges of which even Porfirio Rubirosa would have been skeptical.
