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Funny... this fixation with Abercrombie here at UT.

The clothing is nice if you are athletically built. The clothing is better constructed than most. They seem to have excited their target market demographic enough to open their wallets; so they are doing well - for now.

Their campus is a physically beautiful place.

http://www.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek02/tw1025/1025tw1af.htm

The imprint of the present CEO is all over this campus. He even chooses the food in the company cafe; and the piped in music - which never stops.

There is a Toronto angle to A&F. Many, many of their design staff came from Ryerson's fashion program. My daughter works there and has bought a home there. A staff picture [my kids' in there; Mustapha proud]: The CEO certainly likes to surround himself with young staff. Anybody over 30 must be sent to pasture.:p

Nov07promos.jpg
 
Roy G Biv said:
I hate Hollister. It's too pretentious to have a sign, and once you get inside and face the blasting music, dark corners and bamboo, you get those Vietnam flashbacks.
Click to expand...

This is part of their business model. I'm not kidding. Their retail strategy is to keep the lights so dim and the music blasting so loudly that shoppers don't know which way is up and can't tell how utterly crap the merchandise they're holding really is. Fortunately, their return policy is mercifully liberal. So much, in fact, that you might be purchasing clothing with sweat stains and skidmarks (based on horror stories from an employee of a Holister store in California).
 
There is an entire community of people who purchase Hollister and A&F clothing, wear it a weekend, then return it the following week. Its rather humorous, and its only for the most facetious in society.
 
No no, you don't understand. Its normal to do that as an individual.

But there are groups of people who are A&F obsessed where one individual will buy the product, wear it, then have a friend take it back so that it doesn't appear its the same person. Its especially effective for people who live in cities with more than one A&F location. I've even known people to pay other people they don't know well to return it and get the money back. Its literally an A&F thing because of the name. I don't know anyone who has a community of Walmart return goods.

Maybe I know too many A&F loving gay friends who are uber self conscious. ;)
 
I decided on a brief meet-the-people tour of A&F's Eaton Centre store yesterday evening. Their sales staff are restrained, polite, and pretty. The display lighting* creates contrast and mood: pools of light pick out merchandise here and there and the designers dared to use shadow. The scent was too strong for my liking, but it wasn't "cheap", and colognes are back big time with that demographic apparently, so taken together with the lighting it gave the place a distinctive identity. There's a traditional boys/girls division of the space, and within that division the spaces are broken up into "rooms" - perhaps to disguise the sameness of the clothes. The clothes were passably interesting, within the current range of mainstream fashion.

* compare it, if you will, with the shadowless, megawatt factory farm glare in Redford at Scotia Plaza - and the neurotic chickens who rush out to greet you.
 
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