“They Created A Brand Built On Exclusion,” Says Ben O’Keefe Of Abercrombie & Fitch

metroweekly.com:

White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, he was just the visionary micromanager to heat up the retailer’s image and sales.Jeffries sought to encapsulate the brand’s lusty, youthful mystique in their stores — dimly-lit, permeated by cologne and thumping club beats, guarded by statuesque, shirtless “brand representatives.” Abercrombie became a pop culture phenomenon.“That smell.

That music. Those hot, shirtless guys,” recalls activist-producer Ben O’Keefe. “They created a brand — a brand built on exclusion.”O’Keefe appears in White Hot to chronicle his own illustrious role in the history of A&F, and in the controversies that eventually brought the house that Mike Jeffries built crashing down around him.“When you think of White Hot, first of all, you have to think of white, because white was the vision of Abercrombie & Fitch,” says O’Keefe. “White, hot, all-American kids with a lot of friends — and anyone who didn’t look like them didn’t belong in their clothes.

Their CEO said it himself.”In fact, Jeffries notoriously defended the retailer’s discriminatory recruiting practices and limited clothes sizing by proclaiming the brand simply wasn’t meant for the overweight or unattractive.As a self-described “fat, gay, poor kid,” who also happens to be Black, O’Keefe read Jeffries’ comments years after the fact, and took the diss personally.“I stumbled upon a quote that was seven years old, where Mike Jeffries said, ‘Are we exclusionary?

Absolutely.’ And it absolutely changed my life. But it also kind of ticked me off. I thought to myself, ‘It’s been seven years.