Netflix’s ‘White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch’: Film Review

Toward the end of White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, a frenetic and uneven documentary from Netflix, the historian Dr. Treva Lindsey observes that the once coveted “all-American” lifestyle brand “is illustrative, more so than it is exceptional” of the society in which it thrived.

The statement, stitched into a series of other similar comments, gestures toward an interesting question that this documentary about brand ascendance, destruction and renovation should ask, but never does: Why — instead of how — was Abercrombie & Fitch committed to its exclusionary mission?

The doc circles its subject with a mix of fascination, reverence and minor disgust. Its director and producer Alison Klayman, who most recently directed HBO’s Jagged, assembles a wide range of speakers, from historians like Lindsey and journalists like Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan to former employees and activists. (Klayman produces along with Emmet McDermott, who once worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter, as well as with Hayley Pappas.) The subjects sit before the camera and readily divulge their experiences and opinions about a brand that built its fortunes off popularizing — or maybe the word is preserving — a specific image of white America.

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Before Abercrombie & Fitch represented “cool” — a word frequently employed throughout the film — it was a retailer of elite masculinity. It was both aspirational and practical. The store, founded in 1892, was a place where men like Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway bought fishing gear, books and shaving cream. Images of old catalogues show a brand already committed to promoting a simultaneously genteel and rugged lifestyle. When the company fell on hard times, retail mogul Leslie Wexler, whose brands include Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works, pulled it back from the brink. He bought it in 1988 and hired Mike Jeffries as CEO in 1992.

This installation marked the beginning of a new era for Abercrombie & Fitch, which fell somewhere between the sexiness of Calvin Klein and the more conservative Ralph Lauren. It was provocative but down-to-earth, sexy but attainable. It narrowed the definition of “cool” and made consumers feel bad about not fitting it. The company’s marketing strategy — highly curated stores, a quarterly magazine, campus ambassadors — feels familiar in this age where brands are lifestyles marketed to you by micro and macro influencers. But at the time it was relatively cutting-edge.

White Hot, which moves in roughly chronological order, considers how this promotion strategy, which included hiring the infamous fashion photographer Bruce Weber, created a feverish buzz around the brand. The only thing better than owning Abercrombie was working there.

Klayman moves quickly from chronicling the brand’s popularity to observing its downfall. As she and her team dig into the brand as an employer, they uncover cracks in the pristine façade. Interviews with former employees capture the brand’s allure for its target demographic (18- to 22-year-olds) and those younger, hinting at how it shaped conceptions of being American. But it can be hard to keep track of all the voices and their various narratives, which touch on different and equally heavy parts of the brand’s failures, from hiring practices to workplace culture. Tighter edits and a more cohesive structure would have helped.

Ironically, Abercrombie’s hiring practices and workplace culture were also a reflection of America at large, too. Klayman investigates the criteria individual stores had to follow when considering who could represent the brand. Dreadlocks were a no, as were gold chains. Watches had to be understated. “Classic” haircuts — never defined — were OK, as were “delicate” jewelry on women. The employees we heard from earlier return, this time to reveal their involvement in a 2003 class action lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch for discriminatory practices toward anyone who wasn’t white. The brand was selling a dream that wasn’t promised to everyone.

In 2015, the United States Supreme Court would decide on another discrimination case, this time against Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who was denied a job at an Abercrombie store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, because she wore a headscarf to her interview. She appears in the documentary, too, recounting her journey to the highest court in the land — and noting, ironically, how the only dissenting opinion came from Justice Clarence Thomas — and the tenor of both the support and backlash she faced along the way.

Abercrombie & Fitch usually couched their racist practices in vague phraseology. Words like “cool” and “classic” were aggressively employed, while their meaning remained elusive. Although White Hot bills itself as an exposé, its biggest disappointment comes from analyzing Abercrombie & Fitch on its own terms. What were “cool” and “classic” actually codes for?  What anxieties did the brand tap into in order to make people accept its particular vision of aesthetic appeal and desirability as universal? The brand, like the America it sought to protect and preserve, thrived on elision and obfuscation — and still does even now.

In 2017, Abercrombie & Fitch hired Fran Horowitz-Bonadies as CEO. “Moving a brand forward is not always easy,” she says in a CNBC interview from that year. Determined to fix the company’s reputation, she adds, “we are no longer the brand that we used to be. We could wipe clean our social channels; wipe clean the history.”

To “wipe clean” the history of the brand, as Horowitz-Bonadies puts it, is a chilling but unsurprising proposition. America is a country obsessed with remaking itself, changing without accountability. Now that Abercrombie & Fitch stands to lose money, now that they can no longer be exclusionary without scrutiny, they decide to move in a different direction. But what use is a future that does not grapple with its past? That, too, is a question I wish White Hot tried to answer.