A&F for me no more

I use to like A&F clothes.  I still have sturdy smart looking jacket from A&F.  And I must admit that their ploy of using shirtless good looking young white men as employee/model in their stores and catalog influenced me into buying their clothes.  And in the 90s, I was not the only one who got duped into buying those expensive clothes.  I could remember the time when every gay man online use some form of Abercrombie & Fitch variation as their online screennames when they chat in AOL m4m chatrooms or in Gay.com chatrooms.   Here are some examples:  AFboi, AFitchLakeview75,  AbercrombieGuy, A&FStud25, ChicagoAFboi, etc, etc.  One gets the drift.  This shows the popularity of A&F that every gay man want to create an image via their screenname that they look like the AF models.  Of course most of them don't but I digress.

Then as I get older and wiser, I realized that AF clothes are pretty much one dimensional.  It is the same and does not evolve.  Also I got more discerning that those shirtless good looking men are not enough to trick me into buying clothes from AF.  I also realize that AF sizes are not really friendly for asian men.  Since Asian men have smaller built, I barely was big enough for their size small.  And I am too tall to buy their kid's largest size.  Some of my shorter Asian guy friends at least got that deal working for them.  Evidently I am not alone who got smarter about buying AF clothes.  Now I heard that since AF sales in the USA declined, AF started opening stores in Europe and Asia.   First European store opened in 2007 and first Asian store opened in 2009.  We all know European and Asian are not as big as Americans.  I wonder if AF restructured their sizes to fit the slimmer frames of European and Asian men.

Then there is this controversy with AF recently when the CEO, Michael Jeffies, have been quoted saying that AF are only for cool good looking people.  That AF are not for plus size women.  That essentially AF discriminate the less fit people.  I suppose nothing is wrong with marketing for a certain crowd but seeing Jeffries' ugly appearance just made his discrimination more ridiculous and outrageous.  It is like seeing Hitler killing the non-Aryan race that are not tall, blond and blue eyes when he, Hitler himself, does not look anything Aryan at all.

Controversy or not, I have long stopped buying AF clothes.  I do not even buy from Hollister.  That dimly lit overly perfumed stores of Hollister can't trick me to buy from them.   And why would I use my dollar on a business that does not want me?  I hope this controversy is a wake up call for others.