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 tend
to lose my cell phone and so noticed a display ad for khaki pants
with a compartment just below the right knee which is perfect
for keeping electronic equipment, and that led me to Abercrombie
& Fitch. I waited at the counter for my cargo (!) pants
and looked down on the A&F summer catalogue featuring the usual
handsome young man on the cover. But my attention was drawn to the
subscription card alongside. "To subscribe: Fill out this card
and head to the nearest A&F store with a valid photo ID."
With a valid ID? I found that odd, and asked the young man behind
the counter, probably 19 years old, why IDs were required for subscribers
to an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue and he said, "Well,
uh, it's kind of porny inside."
I walked away
with it, and meditate the reaches of the sexualization of our culture.
Abercrombie
& Fitch was for time immemorial a sports equipment and men's
clothing store. I cherish the story recorded in The New Yorker
generations ago of the gardener on Long Island who yearned to buy
an A&F barometer, finally saving up the money to do so. He took
it back to his little house on the south shore, tapped it a few
times impatiently, and stormed back to Manhattan on the next train,
complaining that it was defective, its needle stuck at the mark
"Hurricane." Abercrombie returned his money, and the plaintiff
returned to Islip to find that his house had been blown away.
Abercrombie's
needle pointed surely at the hurricane of 1938, and presumably its
managers feel sure that the way to sell their current brand of clothing
is to flaunt the modern dress. This presents a difficulty, inasmuch
as clothiers live and die from the sale of clothes. But the current
A&F catalogue goes far in suggesting that young men and women
are better off wearing no clothes, which leaves the catalogue reader
wondering what it is that A&F will make money from. Perhaps
its catalogue, which of course is best advertised by the fiction
that one really needs, in order to purchase it, an ID establishing
that the purchaser is 18 years old.
Now this review
skirts fuddy-duddyism; on the other hand, to be entirely blasé
about what A&F is up to would be dumb acquiescence in its hypocrisy.
A&F is engaged in yet further expansion of advertising along
the line pioneered by Calvin Klein, which is torso-oriented and,
in the case of Abercrombie, oddly aimed more at the pulchritude
of the male than the female form. Very odd in a men's clothing store.
The catalogue
is introduced by a 150-word essay under the title, "The Pleasure
Principle." A definition ensues: "in psychoanalysis, the
tendency or drive to achieve pleasure and avoid pain as the chief
motivating force in behavior." And then an amplification: "Summer
being our favorite time of the year and all, we've worked extra
hard to bring you our best issue yet by letting the pleasure principle
be our guide through the hottest months."
The following
page gives us a jaunty blonde clutching her hair, wet from the ocean
she has just emerged from. If she is wearing anything, it would
be below her pelvic joint. Above it, which is all the viewer can
see, there are no clothes.
Next is a two-page
spread in which six young men are shown, above the navel, and one
woman. One spots a shoulder strap on the girl, which may be a bathing
suit, though it is not descried by the camera. But lo, she does
wear a watch band, sheltering the wrist's nudity. The men wear nothing.
A few pages on, the boy wears tennis shoes (unlaced) and a towel
over his head. At his waist a camera. The shorts are given perspective
by the young man's erection.
A few pages
on, the young man is entirely naked, leaning slightly over one knee.
Across the page are six narcissistic photos of his windblown face
in differing exposures. On to another young man entirely naked,
one knee (the windward knee) held up. He is reposing on the deck
of a sailboat, his back resting on an unfurled main. The very next
page gives us a girl wearing a T-shirt on which one can actually
make out the name of our hosts. "Abercrombie" is discernible,
and then something on the order of "Open Beauty Pageant."
That shirt tapers off at the lady's waist. Below the waist there
is nothing at all, except, of course, her naked body.
A few pages
later the young man is naked again on the boat, but wearing a drenched
jacket which reaches only as far as his waist. A few pages later
we have five beautiful blondes in full summer wear, draped about
a Byronic young man evidently lost in the poetry of his reflections,
a loose towel over his crotch.
And so on.
Speaking of
nakedness, there was never a pitch more naked than Abercrombie's:
the non-display of its products, in deference to sheer biological
exhibitionism. The last part of the book actually depicts clothes
of one kind or another, but the reader getting that far is hotly
indignant: What are all those shirts and shorts and pants doing,
interrupting my view of the naked kids! I mean, I showed you my
ID, didn't I?
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