Classiness Lost

Many moons ago, back when the world was young, my family and I would go down to New Orleans to see my grandparents. Part of every trip was a visit to the Riverwalk. We parked in the lot, went up the escalator, opened the door, and entered the Riverwalk. The first store we passed on the right was an Abercrombie & Fitch. At that time they sold nice, classy stuff. Started out as a sporting goods store that outfitted Presidents. Expensive and nothing I'd ever buy, but I always enjoyed walking around. The $300 leather pigs were fun to look at.

Then several years ago, classiness was lost, as whoever owned the chain sold their souls to some demon from the lowest pit of hell. They started whoring themselves to teen sluts and tramps of both sexes. Gone was any attempt at dignity or class. Of course, business went through the roof and the stock price with it. From a financial standpoint, it was a great move. And if you believe that all publicity is good publicity, then you must love the controversies surrounding their racy catalogue featuring dozens of people not even wearing the clothes they sell, t-shirts evoking the Asian dry-cleaner and inbred West Virginian stereotypes, and much more.

If you'd like to make the argument that I'm being a stuck-up prude, you've got a pretty good point. If you'd like to make the argument that I'm being a raging hypocrite, you've got another pretty good point. If you'd like to make just about any argument pointing out that it's dumb for me to rage against A&F, you've got a good shot at having a good point. My main beef comes from two places: 1) the current state of A&F tarnishes one of the fond memories of when I was growing up, and 2) I hate the company's target audience of ignorant raunchy people younger than me.

And so we arrive at what spurred me to go on this rant in the first place, the TMQ article I read while catching up on about six weeks of the best online football column around. The excerpt is as follows:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imagine Trying to Explain This to Someone in Bangladesh :The latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalog sells "premium destroyed" jeans for $198 a pair. The pants, which appear to have been found at the bottom of a mine shaft, offer "handcrafted abrasion details" and "one-of-a-kind destroyed elements on every pair." I know ugly pants are trendy, and I'll skip the obvious comment about a society so lazy we hire someone to wear out our jeans for us. (Guess I didn't skip that obvious comment). Let's hone in on the obscenity of spending $198 on worn-out jeans merely because the purchase confers transitory, shallow status. If you've got $198 to spare, spending that sum on this self-indulgent vanity item should make you feel awful about yourself -- it proves you are so insecure and weak-willed, a cynical marketing conglomerate can trick you into wasting your money. Whereas you could give the same amount to the Global AIDS Fund and feel really good about yourself. In the corporate suites of Abercrombie & Fitch, they are laughing out loud at their own customers for being so unbelievably stupid as to pay $198 for a product that's advertised as in poor condition. At the A&F website, be sure to click on the "Diversity and Inclusion" tab, a masterpiece of hot-air corporate gibberish. It should say, "Unless you're well-to-do, weak-willed and gullible, we don't want to include you."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TMQ rocks. A&F does whatever the opposite of that is.