Abercrombie & Fitch

A while back I posted in one of the menswear forums:

I find everything about A&F creepy, even by the standards of the genre. I mean, I don't go into Pac Sun or American Eagle or Buckle when I pass by them in the mall, but they don't actively weird me out. A&F does (as well as the commonly owned Hollister). It's dark in there, and there are these slatted fronts that don't let in much light, and there are these gigantic photographs of shirtless beach trash that I find distinctly unappealing even though I'm gay, for goodness sake, and there's always some pouty on-staff guy hanging out in the doorway in flip-flops and jeans strategically ripped in forty places, and...

Oh, I can't go on. The horror. The horror.

Of course, I know full well where the Abercrombie & Fitch photographic style comes from: the (in)famous fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who commenced his notoriety with the unforgettable Calvin Klein underwear billboard ads of the Eighties. I feel conflicted about Weber: he is unquestionably a successful iconographer, even if I sometimes can't abide what he is elevating for worship. And, fueled by his taste for beautiful boys, he has been a sometimes inspired film-maker: his documentary portrait of the Fifties jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, is rightly celebrated as one of the most gorgeous and compelling films of the last quarter-century. (It is currently available on a Region 2 DVD, for those of you with multi-region players. I cannot fathom why it hasn't been released on DVD in the U.S.)

Speaking of Abercrombie & Fitch, it is striking when one walks around a mall nowadays just how many of the stores are targeted at the tween / teen / extended adolescence demographic. Since all those stores depend on the "premature affluence" in those age groups, one can't imagine them lasting as a force into an economically depleted era. I won't miss them, but the malls will.