Give Me a Break/Kate Holmquist:I'm standing in an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Massachusetts surrounded by semi-nude Adonises wearing nothing but boxer shorts. They ask if there's anything they can do to help? Would I like another size? I don't know where to look.
Up at the tanned pecs, lower towards the gym-toned six-packs, down towards the waxed thighs, or somewhere in the middle? My first reaction is to giggle like the schoolgirls in my company, but feeling appalled wins out. This is blatant in-your-face exploitation and I'm not going to contribute my cash to the cause.
Why are so many teenagers in my neighbourhood wearing Abercrombie & Fitch? It's as necessary as a pair of Ugg boots if you're a so-called D4 - a label that kids don't always appreciate. The attraction seems to be partly to do with the brand's association with all-American, white, Anglo-Saxon preppiness and partly to do with its perceived exclusivity. You can buy it only in the US, Canada and (since March) London.
And now some Irish youth have embraced the brand as a key cultural signifier. They identify with its image of vapid California sex mixed with upper-class Boston Brahmin privilege (two things that didn't traditionally go together). The brand sells an ideal: the Caucasian, tanned, blond Ivy League trust-fund brat who spends his time on boats, country estates and in bed having rampant sex because he is so excruciatingly attractive girls can't resist him.
A&F started out 100 years ago as an outfitter for elite adventure sportsmen. It is said that Hemingway bought the gun he shot himself with from an A&F catalogue. Somebody should be shot for some of the slogans A&F has put on its T-shirts - slogans that ridicule anyone who doesn't fit the A&F ideal. "Two Wongs Can Make it White" didn't go down well with the Asian community; West Virginia's governor protested against "It's all Relative in West Virginia"; and there was a "girlcott" of T-shirts for women that said "Who Needs a Brain When You Have These", "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties", and "Do I Make You Look Fat?".
This is more than just a humour problem. The brand's multimillionaire chief executive, 61-year-old Michael Jeffries, is so in love with his ideal boy, and sexualised youth in general, that he's had plastic surgery to reconstruct himself as one. His bleached blonde hair, white teeth, torn jeans and flip-flops seem incongruous - even grotesque. He hires "store models" who embody his ideal and markets his clothes through soft-porn imagery.
Jeffries says he only hires good-looking people in his stores. He had to settle a class action suit for $40 million (€28 million) after minority employees claimed they were shunted to the backroom to work because they weren't white and preppy enough to be seen on the floor.
The label has since used black models. Jeffries says he doesn't care what anybody thinks, because he only wants to sell to his target consumer.
And he's got his target consumer - the insecure teenager - completely sussed. He admits that he only wants to sell clothes to the "cool" kids in school. He doesn't want the "not-so-cool" kids wearing his label.
Whether they're in the "cool" group or pushed to the fringes is a daily agony for many teenagers. And to be "cool" they need the merchandise.
What's a parent to do? A 12-year-old of my acquaintance says there's no point giving a teenager advice such as "be yourself" and "it's what's inside the matters", because in school that's not the way it works. You have to conform if you want social success, she says. Once you have been accepted within a group, then you can be yourself. But you have to be "cool" on the surface first.
So when parents spend the money on Abercrombie & Fitch or any other label, they're not just buying clothes, and they know it. They're buying confidence for their child.
I hate to admit it, but the reality is that if you refuse to let your child wear a label or two, you're doing as much damage as not letting them watch TV - you're creating a "freak". Because that's how other children and teenagers see them.
Given the choice between having children who are walking brands and having children who are reviled as freaks, it's no wonder so many parents choose the former. It's a cruel world and no amount of counselling teenagers that they're good enough without labels is going to fix it.
The best approach is probably a sensible compromise, rather than a boycott. You can give your kids a tight clothing budget, forcing them to mix non-logo clothes from Dunnes and Penneys, for example, with the occasional designer label and encouraging them to buy the €25 imitation "Ugg" boots instead of the real thing at €200. But there will always be parents willing to give their children almost limitless money for clothes, and those are the kids that will be seen as the coolest.
Maybe these clothes horses are the kids whose parents have the most invested in being part of the elite. I don't know. But I do know that while people such as Jeffries will always exploit teenagers' insecurities about appearance and sexuality, our children - unlike him - will grow out of it.
kholmquist@irish-times.ie
