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We start our brand-new season with the story of Mike Jeffries, the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO who turned a bankrupt old-school outdoors brand into a late-90s/early-00s temple of exclusionary “cool." Surely you remember the ads, or maybe you remember the stores: the pumping music, the blasts of cologne that made your throat close up, the shutters across the front of the store, as if this little corner of a suburban shopping mall was actually an exclusive nightclub. Or maybe you remember the Bruce Weber-shot soft-porn catalogue, which once featured an essay by (yes! no!) Slavoj Zizek. Clothes for homophobic bullies were made in marketed from a self-hating gay sensibility: and the story of Mike Jeffries might be the single solitary key to understanding how the aesthetics of the closet became mainstream marketing, how a gay aesthetic was used to sell homophobic masculinity and how that tension crushed employees and turned its visionary into a monster now credibly accused of sexual assault and harassment.
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For more on Mike Jeffries, read the sources we used to research this episode:
Netflix: White Hot - The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch (netflix.com/de/title/81323741)
BBC: World of Secrets - The Abercrombie Guys (bbc.com/audio/series/p0ghg45g)
netflix.com/tudum/articles/an-oral-history-of-…
newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-story-b…
theguardian.com/fashion/2012/oct/18/abercrombi…
wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/feature/fa…
bbc.com/news/articles/ce8vmy56yero
huffpost.com/entry/abercrombie-fitch-ceo-corpo…
advocate.com/crime/abercrombie-fitch-mike-jeff…
theguardian.com/global/2024/sep/14/i-constantl…
cnbc.com/2024/10/22/former-abercrombie-ceo-mik… (cnbc.com/2024/10/22/former-abercrombie-ceo-mik…)
businessinsider.com/michael-jeffries-partner-i…
theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/02/former-abe…
dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/55905/1/aberc…
justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/former-ceo-abercrombi…
thecut.com/2014/02/why-abercrombie-is-losing-i… (thecut.com/2014/02/why-abercrombie-is-losing-i…)
monoskop.org/images/d/db/A_and_F_Quarterly_Bac…
complex.com/style/a/emilyl/revisiting-absurd-c…
theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/19/abercrombie-f…
classaction.org/media/abercrombie-indictment.pdf
theguardian.com/business/interactive/2012/oct/…
wsj.com/articles/SB876176611622798500
nytimes.com/2018/01/13/style/mario-testino-bru…
web.archive.org/web/20170614225056/https://www…
Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix (freemusicarchive.org/music/Yan_Terrien/Piano_L…) by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. (soundcloud.com/oswellm) Michael Oswell is the voice of Slavoj Zizek.
