A once-trendy fashion brand is a target for anti-bullying groups
When you're the CEO of major fashion brand you can be as elitist as you want to be. You may admit, "Candidly, we go after the cool kids" and "a lot of people don't belong in our clothes."
Even if you make these comments about six years ago to a magazine reporter, that's fine.
But the Internet never forgets, and you will have to answer to consumers and shareholders.
Abercrombie and Fitch's first-quarter sales fell by 17 percent and their stock dropped 8 percent before the Memorial Day holiday.
PR people spent the weekend apologizing for the CEO Mike Jeffries.
"In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," Jeffries said in a 2006 Salon article.
"Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong," he said. "Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."
And then, there was Ellen's take on it. I think she sums it up nicely:
Thanks to Grace Asher, who first informed me of this story by sharing her desire on Facebook to 1) stop wearing the clothes and 2) donate them so they can look stylish on homeless people, whom I suspect Mike Jeffries would definitely see as un-cool. :)
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