Abercrombie & Fitch’s Dark, Racist Past Revealed
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White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch has all the subtlety of an LFO needle drop, but it’ll almost certainly become a viral hit for Netflix.
The TV-ification of our every scandal and scam, from Theranos to Anna Delvey, continues this week with a documentary unraveling the turmoil that nearly sank an iconic mall brand. Director Alison Klayman (Jagged, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) walks viewers through A&F’s transformation from an outdoorsman brand and Hemingway hotspot to a fratty paradise, then dives into the subsequent rollercoaster of revelations that nearly toppled teen retail’s prom king from his throne.
Viewers of a certain age (read: those who attended middle or high school when The O.C. dominated white suburban teen culture) likely remember at least a few of the scandals covered here. There’s the class-action discrimination lawsuit; allegations that workers were hired and fired based on their looks; the racist T-shirts; the sexual misconduct allegations against the brand’s photographer Bruce Weber during the early days of #MeToo; the “weirdo” vibes that followed disgraced former CEO Mike Jeffries; the Jeffrey Epstein ties plaguing former L Brands CEO and A&F owner Les Wexner; and the time the brand took its discriminatory practices to the Supreme Court and lost.
All of these sordid tales unfold in slightly jumbled but mostly sequential order in White Hot, which feels at times like a modern take on the gonzo VH1 specials of the early aughts. Still, the doc’s lens feels a little nearsighted.
More a summary of scandals that previously unraveled in the news than a search for new revelations, White Hot feels, at times, like it’s killing time with low-hanging-fruit references that late twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings will remember. As in, a bunch of talking heads singing LFO’s “Summer Girls” and former models and store employees reminiscing about the brand’s notorious musk. And when it’s time for us to face the exclusionary ugliness that nearly brought it all to a grinding halt? That’s when Nada Surf’s “Popular” starts blaring in the background.
It’s hard not to wish for a little more rigor at times. That said, the interviews with the plaintiffs and petitioners who forced Abercrombie & Fitch to do better over the years are genuinely valuable.
Class action plaintiff Carla Barrientos, who is among the former employees who sued the company for discriminatory practices, described wondering whether her experience—which included allegedly being forced to work cleaning-intensive night shifts, then taken off the board entirely when she pressed for day shifts—describes wondering whether her experiences were “bad enough” to join the suit.
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“When you look at things like racism or sexism or homophobia,” Barrientos says, “things don’t have to look that bad... Someone doesn’t have to call me a n----- in the middle of Abercrombie & Fitch for it to be bad enough.” It’s a worthy sentiment to remember as conversations about discrimination in the workplace continue to make headline news from the corporate world to Hollywood.
Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who beat A&F in the Supreme Court after the brand refused to hire her for wearing a headscarf to a job interview, says, “That was the first time anything had happened to me like that.” (A notable detail of Elauf’s case I wish the documentary had explored in greater depth: that seven orthodox Jewish groups stood up for Elauf by filing briefs with the Supreme Court.)
Benjamin O’Keefe, who started a viral petition calling on Abercrombie & Fitch to apologize for CEO Mike Jeffries’ remarks flaunting the brand’s exclusionary outlook, said Elauf’s case proves that discrimination is never “just a blip” with this brand.
“It was not just one quote from seven years,” he says in the doc. “It was their brand. It was their identity. They rooted themselves in discrimination at every level.”
As much time as White Hot spends on the ugly racism that pervaded Jeffries’ Abercrombie & Fitch, it allots surprisingly little attention to the sexual misconduct allegations that followed in the late 2010s, after the brand had already lost favor with Gen Z.
Still, we do hear from a couple accusers, including former A&F models Ryan Daharsh and Bobby Blanski.
“It was very well known that he liked young men,” Daharsh said of the brand’s photographer Bruce Weber. During photo shoots, the former model said, “You would put your hand on your chest and he’d put your hand on your hand telling you to relax. And then it was, ‘I’m gonna lower your hand. Tell me when to stop.”
Blanski said that minutes after he declined to spend time alone with Weber, he received a call notifying him he’d been fired—and that his flight home was already booked. “In that instant,” he said, “I was done.”
Weber was never charged or convicted of wrongdoing and has denied allegations of sexual misconduct. As the doc notes, he told the New York Times, “I have used common breathing exercises and professionally photographed thousands of nude models over my career, but never touched anyone inappropriately.”
And while White Hot notes that no former model has accused Jeffries of misconduct, Daharsh recalled the former CEO hanging around during photo shoots. “It was like he was just there to have fun on the shoots,” he said. “He was very clearly into young men, too. He was just so weird that who knows what the fuck—I don’t know what that guy was into.”
Also relatively unexplored in the doc is how A&F managed to turn things around. While it touches on the brand’s stunning about-face in the public eye, the behind-the-scenes details behind that transformation—which could actually be instructive as various institutions continue to look for ways to achieve systemic change—are nowhere to be found.
Then again, would anyone tuning into White Hot really be interested to hear those details in the first place? It’s a perfect execution of a burgeoning chunk of programming: recaps of scandalous sagas that let us relive a bit of schadenfreude. It’s no Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, but it’ll do.
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