As George W. Bush so eloquently said, “”There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
That saying…well, the real one…exists everywhere in America. Yet in the past week I have seen grown adults act surprised when the CEO of “fashion” store Abercrombie and Fitch comes into the national spotlight and flat out admits he doesn’t want fat people wearing his clothing. In fact, not just fat people are excluded, anyone who isn’t “cool.” Such a clear cut standard is hard to deny. I mean, “cool” is clearly something that everyone agrees on, right?
Here’s the funny thing to me…everyone is acting like this shit is surprising.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Perhaps you didn’t grow up as a fat kid. Perhaps you didn’t grow up as an uncool kid. Perhaps you grew up in another country or on another planet or in another time. But I knew, just as well as I know my feet don’t fit in Manolo Blahniks, that Abercrombie and Fitch was not about people like me. Christ, just look at their infamous catalog and shopping bags with half naked teenagers in semi-erotic poses on them. If that didn’t scream “NOT FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME” I don’t know what does. I’m pretty sure they’re all in the middle of some “my parents caught me doing it with my schoolmate” pose.
This past week, a change.org petition went up asking the CEO to add larger sizes to their clothing line. The company has pretty much laughed this off and in the middle of this, the CEO’s comments from a 2006 interview in Salon came about. He said the following:
“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. 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. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
He goes further, saying that clothiers that try to serve all potential customers are boring.
“Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla,” Jeffries said. “You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”
Again, he said this in 2006. It’s not exactly current news. Nor should it come as a surprise. The two times in life that I have set foot in an Abercrombie and Fitch store were tense to say the least. I wasn’t wanted there, clearly, and I wasn’t going to be served. It wasn’t exactly sitting at a lunch counter as a black woman in the South, but it was obviously a taboo situation for me to be there and push the boundaries of what Abercrombie’s self-perceived coolness is.
I mean, they’ve been sued by employees who were fired when they gained weight or weren’t cool enough. They even made some employees do squats and pushups. Hell, they even have a full blown sex scandal in the past year. You know, because that helps sell clothing. Are you surprised now that they don’t want fat and uncool kids buying their clothes?
Now, I’m all for liberation of the fat kid. We have ridiculous beauty and “health” standards in this country that actually lead to greater health problems down the road. Bust down the doors of the oppressor. I’m all for that. But don’t expect the oppressor to accept you.
I have to say that this petition and the movement behind it is totally useless and a waste of time on a problem that doesn’t need solving. Want to get the attention of Abercrombie? Stop buying their shit. It shouldn’t be hard since it looks like ass.
As a teen, I know this must be hard. You’re trying every way you can to fit in. I remember purchasing men’s XXL clothing at Aeropostale and GAP just to try and fit in. But you know what? I was fooling myself and wasting my money. That stuff looked awful on me and those stores never gave a damn if I shopped there to begin with in the first place. The only thing I was doing was padding the coffers of companies that I should have been boycotting.
Don’t ask Abercrombie to sell bigger clothes. Don’t ask them to stop trying to promote a very narrow definition of cool. Don’t even make fun of the CEO for pushing a certain picture of beauty when he is extremely odd looking himself.
Just walk away and shop somewhere else. In this society, your money talks. You know what you’re doing for them right now? Giving them free PR. Don’t bother.
I’m all for petitions and movements, but this one has no happy ending. Even if you get what you want, that store will still not care about you. They don’t care now. They could be literally rolling in cash and wiping their ass with it on a daily basis if they sold plus size stuff for fat teens. They know that. They chose to sell overpriced stuff for skinny kids so that they stay cool and exclusive. Let them be so exclusive that they go bankrupt one day when the tide turns on their coolness.
I mean…do you need to drop $50 on this kind of nonsense:
Don’t ask the bully to change by giving the bully a bully pulpit. Shut them up by really taking them down a peg. They don’t want their clothes on uncool kids? Good. Give them to the most socially unacceptable people like this filmmaker who is giving the clothes to homeless people. Find them in second hand shops and deface them and wear them around with holes and spray paint on them to your comic book stores and Dungeons and Dragons games. Make that brand as “uncool” as it can possibly be. Don’t try and get them to accept you by asking nicely. Fool me once…
Stores like this will never change. People like this will never change. I have spent too much of my life hoping they would…starting movements over things that weren’t in anyone’s best interests. Don’t ask permission for the cool kids to accept you. Find the coolness in yourself and watch as the cool kids who wouldn’t give you the time of day implode. You’re a square peg…stop trying to fit in a round hole.
The fall from coolness happens sooner or later and the fall is enough to make a hater wince in sympathy. Don’t ask for permission to fall with them.
