Fashion, of course, is rarely just fashion — it tells a story about whoever’s wearing it. And in the ’90s and 2000s, the preppy youthquake mall-fashion outlet Abercrombie & Fitch told a v…
Fashion, of course, is rarely just fashion — it tells a story about whoever’s wearing it. And in the ’90s and 2000s, the preppy youthquake mall-fashion outlet Abercrombie & Fitch told a very big story. It was a story of where America — or, at least, a powerful slice of the millennial demo — was at.
At colleges, Abercrombie reps targeted the hunkiest dudes at the hippest fraternities to wear the clothes, figuring that the image would spread from there. The mall stores were shielded by shuttered doors, and inside they were bathed in dance-club beats and musky clouds of A&F cologne. The ads were all about frat boys with the look of rugby and lacrosse jocks, who became, in the quarterly coffee-table catalogues, the stud next door.
Something comparable went on in America with youth fashion. Preppies, and the preppy look, had been around for decades. But the preppy as signifier, as advertising icon, as the image of whodidn’t come to the fore until the 1980s. The counterculture had been a scruffy, literally hairy affair; the ’80s, throwing over all that moralistic rebellion-against-the-system stuff, would be sleek, shaved, and beige.
did for the fashion revolution of the ’80s. There was a dumb-lunk misogynistic poetry to the LFO line, which should have read “I like girlsthe line inadvertently caught the essence of the A&F mystique. Namely: I like objects wearing objects.