Abercrombie & Fitch sold clothes to teens by showing teens sans clothes.
These marketing campaigns shocked in the 1990s. The current accusations against the man behind the company’s semi-pornographic turn should not. Lawyer Monthly nevertheless described the federal sex trafficking and interstate prostitution charges embroiling former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries (that also ensnare his partner and an associate described as a procurer of sorts) as “shocking.”
Predictable seems a more apt word.
He pushed nude male models to the world. He pulled them toward himself.
And then on Tuesday, almost a year after a civil lawsuit, the feds arrested him.
Under Jeffries, who led Abercrombie & Fitch from 1992 to 2014, the company marketed thongs for middle-schoolers emblazoned with such slogans as “Eye Candy.” Its quarterly catalog geared toward young males instructed readers on group sex, and featured images depicting four topless young women tearing off the boxers of a smiling male model, a naked young man sliding down a wet rock into the surf, and two naked young men standing quite close in a river. One four-story-tall urban billboard featured a faceless young male pulling his jeans down to his pelvis.
A 2006 Salon profile of the surgically altered and socially awkward Jeffries described him as “creating a parallel universe of beauty and exclusivity where his attractions and obsessions have made him millions, shaped modern culture’s concepts of gender, masculinity and physical beauty, and made over himself and the world in his image, leaving them both just a little more bizarre than he found them.”
That public image of the company — surprise! — reflected the most private activities of its CEO. The same young white men appearing in the advertising campaigns with sculpted abs appearing as though they had just stepped out of a frat house or off of a surf board allegedly stepped into his lair — for thousands of dollars.
“Men who attended these events told the BBC Mr. Jeffries and [his partner] Mr. [Matthew] Smith would engage in sexual activity with about four men — or ‘direct’ them to have sex with each other,” the news outlet reports. “Afterwards, the men said staff at the event handed them envelopes filled with thousands of dollars in cash.”
One model alleged a photographer instructed him to allow him to perform oral sex upon him for his career’s sake and that Jeffries later placed “poppers” under his nose at a party.
The BBC further explained that a straight model was flown to Marrakesh, along with dozens of other twentysomething models, to dance. Jeffries’s sexual middleman instructed him to perform oral sex upon him. “I had debt, I wanted to support my family,” he told the BBC. “I performed the job and I was, like, disgusted.” At a later such event, he says he fended off advances only to wake up with a condom inside of him.
Models allege enduring high-pressured enemas, the insertion of sex toys, and penile injections designed to prolong erections.
Sex remains private business. But when one as powerful as Jeffries makes a business out of it, trouble often awaits.
When powerful figures purvey bizarre activity in their product line, such as Vince McMahon compelling wrestlers to kiss his buttocks in front of an arena of fans, it often foreshadows revelations of strange and demeaning offstage activity, too. The sexualization of teens in A&F’s marketing campaigns under Jeffries similarly signaled something ominous occurring outside the eyes of the public. Notably, Jeffries, McMahon, and others who sexualized their product did not repel the masses and their dollars but instead attracted them.
That 2006 Salon article, which managed to simultaneously depict Jeffries as both uncool and the determiner of cool, listed the successful CEO’s enemies as including “‘girlcotting’ high school feminists,” “thong-hating parents,” and “uptight moralists.” On this one, the unfashionable scolds got it right.
