Entry #16 McBride, Dwight "Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch"

Brian Gerker
ETHN 101
Reading Journal Entry #16
11-12-2007

Dwight McBride, “Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch”

1. Thesis from “Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch” would be that McBride hates the store because of their idealization of whiteness. Abercrombie is only focused on selling clothes to the upper-middle class of society, and mainly white people. The whiteness is displayed everywhere in stores and ads. McBride hates them because the store sets whites above others in many ways.
2. In “Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch,” McBride is stating mostly his reasons for hating the store and their policies. She begins by giving a brief history of the creation of the store, starting out as an outdoorsman, wilderness shopping store. McBride states that the store really didn’t become the way it is until 1988, when the ownership changed. McBride is mostly concerned with the “Look Good Book” which displayed how people should dress to “look good.” Once he establishes the main points and details of what certain people should wear, as well as accessories, he moves to the lawsuit against Abercrombie which did not come about until 2003. Some points to the lawsuit were the “Look Book” and the unfair hiring of employees, as well as advertising billboards. After this, McBride moves on to his interviews he had with former employees of Abercrombie and their experiences their. In most cases the interviewees were in lower management positions and ended up quitting or getting fired because they did not have the “Abercrombie” look. McBride’s main reasons for hating Abercrombie and Fitch seem to be that they cause white supremacy and privilege, and also cause society to need to follow these ideologies of being included in the Abercrombie society.
3. One question that can be raised against McBride is, is it necessary to hire “good looking” employees and advertise good looking people to eventually earn them maximum profits as a business? For the people that Abercrombie is trying to seduce into buying their products, their ways of business apparently are working. However, they do seem to single out whites for their target customers. This is being discriminatory, in agreement with McBride, because they only want to sell to whites, and they only want to hire whites to work for them. And on top of everything else, they only want the whites that “look good.”
4. In much of the same ways I agree with what McBride had to say. I personally hate the store myself because their stuff is just too expensive. Now, after the reading, I realize this is because I am not the type of person Abercrombie wants to sell to anyways. I am not an upper class person so really I don’t appeal to the “Abercrombie look.” For the reading itself I thought it was rather lengthy and strayed away from the main subject at times. Overall though it was a good reading and will be great for class discussion.