Abercrombie and Fitch

A new Netflix documentary shows how the forces that made A&F an enormous brand also doomed it to failure.

The film spends a great deal of time recounting Abercrombie’s endless list of scandals, from the discriminatory hiring practices it maintained to the closet’s worth of racist graphic T-shirts it released. Featuring interviews with former A&F models and employees, including those who were involved in a class-action suit against the retailer, the documentary intends to shed light on how Abercrombie engineered its immense popularity and why it burnt out so quickly. Under Jeffries, Abercrombie wasn’t just a popular brand and logo—it created a totally dominant aesthetic with its preppy vision of American high schools and colleges.

The controversial figure in Netflix's new doc 'White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,' Mike Jefferies, has laid low since he stepped down in ...

A year later, it finally sold for $12.9 million, and there’s little sign of him on the Internet in the years since. Mike Jeffries became the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992, and transformed the brand into what it was in its heyday—loud, preppy, racy, and very white. As the new Netflix doc White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch shows, it worked, and it worked well.

A new Netflix documentary, 'White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch', tells the story of his downfall.

And his “terrible surgery” that made it seem like he was “chasing youth”, according to ex-employees in the film, was just the start of it. According to Salon, Jeffries “goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports”. Just before Jeffries left, he brought in his partner, Matthew Smith, to manage his affairs. Absolutely” and “Good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. At the turn of the millennium, there wasn’t a bigger high street fashion brand in America than Abercrombie & Fitch. In 1999, its mix of casual-preppy clothes and topless models prancing around to Steal My Sunshine in their nightclub-style stores pulled in $1.04 billion for the company. But slowly - just like the LFO song - people started noticing that there was something off.

"White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" director Alison Klayman talks the systemic racism that powered the brand.

It’s less about the pro- or anti-camp, and more about [how] this was a cultural phenomenon that touched everywhere.” Now, sitting where we are today, it’s easier to talk about and tease it out, but it was something that was reported at the time and we all lived through. The brand was decided to be more “golden retrievers and Jeeps,” as the documentary reports. “It’s a credit to the incredible people who spoke to us and shared their stories, because I think what you realize is that this is not an abstract harm. “I was kind of shocked at how much it took these abstract negative forces in society and systemized it,” Klayman continued. Buying something was akin to buying into a new you, but as it turns out, only certain customers were deemed worthy of the brand’s “all-American” message.

At its best, White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch offers a potent mix of nostalgia and schadenfreude.

The doc gives us a sense of getting caught up in such a grotesque, racist fashion phenomenon, so much that when a former employee of A&F Quarterly talks about a shattering realization he had watching Sam Raimi’s “ Spider-Man”—that Peter Parker's bully was dressed head to toe in A&F—you can almost understand his surprise. And we get to meet “armpit guy,” one of a few male models whose body was put on shopping bags, and who also clues us into the alleged predatory nature of Bruce Weber, the photographer who created the A&F image. With the on-screen inclusion of a lot of former brains and bods behind the company, it becomes clear how much the company used youth—one woman talks about how there were no copywriters for the graphic tees, it was just whatever young designers came up with. It is informative about the ways “mad genius” Jeffries perfected selling sex and popularity to teenagers, taking a brand name that used to specialize in outdoor wear and turning it into American prep. Klayman has a bit more direction when she directs the audience’s desire for outrage on how the company embodied the counter-intuitive approach of exclusionary business practices, showing how their focus on six-pack fascism and predominantly white leadership led to their downfall. At its best, “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” offers a potent mix of nostalgia and schadenfreude.

'White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,' out April 19 on Netflix, uncovers how the mall mainstay fell from grace.

Soon, Abercrombie again faced legal trouble when Muslim teenager Samantha Elauf alleged that she was rejected after a job interview at the store in 2008 because she was wearing a headscarf. O’Keefe says in White Hot that he was never able to wear Abercrombie because they never made clothing in his size. He also says he dealt with anorexia in high school, and felt especially sensitive to the store’s exclusivity. The settlement also required Abercrombie to increase diversity in its hiring process as well as in its advertisements and catalogs. For example, a former member of the Diversity and Inclusion team at Abercrombie recalls being in a meeting where her colleagues openly discussed what physical features they wanted in their employees. Weber has since been accused of sexual harassment and misconduct multiple times; in 2018, he became the subject of a sexual harassment and sexual misconduct lawsuit, with former models from Abercrombie and other brands accusing him of inappropriate behavior on shoots. This quote, which came out after the first round of discrimination lawsuits were settled, later came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the company. A quote from current CEO Fran Horowitz on its website reads: “Abercrombie isn’t a brand where you need to fit in—it’s one where everyone truly belongs.” While Abercrombie & Fitch was built on the exact opposite sentiment, White Hot shows why the company had to go in an extreme direction in order to survive in the modern day. The case was settled in 2004, with Abercrombie paying $40 million to the plaintiffs. While many fashion brands are implicit in their exclusion, Abercrombie was explicit about its mission, making it clear who they wanted to shop at and work in their stores. In the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, out April 19, director Alison Klayman tracks how the store, which thrived on promoting beauty standards that idealized thinness and whiteness, began to come apart when employees began calling out what made it so toxic. The documentary features interviews with former Abercrombie executives, retail employees, and models, as well as cultural critics and activists who helped bring Abercrombie’s troubling practices to light.

Mike Jeffries, who led Abercrombie & Fitch during its dramatic rise and fall, is featured prominently in Netflix's new documentary "White Hot," which is out ...

In 2012, Bloomberg reported on an “Aircraft Standards” manual for the A&F executive jet, written by Jeffries’s longtime life partner Matthew Smith. (The manual was made public in an age-discrimination lawsuit brought against the company by a former pilot, according to Bloomberg.) The manual included 40 pages of highly detailed instructions, including what kind of underwear aircraft staff should wear and the seating arrangements for Jeffries’s dogs. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. In the story, Jeffries is described as a “quirky perfectionist and control freak,” who always goes through the revolving doors at A&F headquarters twice and never passes other employees on the stairwells. Wexner, on the other hand, was the king of retail; he was the CEO of A&F’s then-parent company L Brands, which owned stores like The Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The documentary describes how it was Jeffries’ strategy to center this new iteration of A&F around elitism, sex, and exclusivity. At the time, Jeffries was known as the former president of Alcott & Andrews, a women’s retail chain that filed for bankruptcy in 1989. Netflix’s new documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch charts the messy trajectory of the once-cooler-than-cool mall store that peaked in the ‘90s and early 2000s, only to come crashing down after a string of racist, exclusionary controversies.

White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch is Netflix's latest documentary. Here's everything you need to know about former CEO Mike Jeffries.

For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey. Jeffries then took a role at Midwest clothing chain Paul Harris, before joining A&F in 1992. In 1984, Jeffries founded Alcott & Andrews, a brand targeted at career women.

A former Abercrombie & Fitch recruiter breaks down the brand's infamous “Look Policy” in this clip from Netflix's new "White Hot" documentary.

Once you finally made your way to the door, you were greeted by a pair of shirtless (and often white) employees that looked exactly like the models featured in the brand’s campaigns — if there wasn’t a queue to get inside, that is. That façade presented to customers was the epitome of the A&F branding during what was arguably its heyday in popularity, led by then-CEO Mike Jeffries. Unarguably, not all customers were represented and catered to. Even from blocks away, the pungently sweet A&F smell would “lure” you in — if you were resilient enough to bear it.

A new Netflix doc takes a scalpel to the layers to meaning in the rise and fall of one part of mall culture.

A male model for the company explains that he was drinking in a bar in Nebraska when a woman approached and invited him to come for a photo-audition. One had the slogan, “Wong Brothers Laundry Service – Two Wongs Can Make It White.” Asian-Americans protested outside the stores, 60 Minutes did a report and the internal culture of the chain was examined. As one of its former executives says, the idea was to create an aspiration: “I wish I had that Abercrombie thing.” But the “thing” was not a T-shirt or jeans. As one former executive says about the homoeroticism, “It went straight over the heads of the preppy white bro’s who consumed it.” We now look at the phenomenon of the Abercrombie & Fitch of the 1990s and early 2000s and see something approaching a campaign for white supremacy. White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch (new on Netflix) is a fast-paced but ultimately furious documentary about the clothing line that once was the fashion zeitgeist.