Abercrombie & Fitch is a retailer that sells overpriced T-Shirts and other similar shapeless apparel you could buy better quality versions of from your local Costco. To sustain these profit margins, they leverage the power of marketing, and try to give themselves a lily-white college preppie image. They recently settled $50 million in damages in a
racial discrimination lawsuit, for instance. Their brand image is explicitly sexualized with
illustrations of group sex and paeans to alcohol abuse (I guess it's more frat boy than preppie, then) &mdash it's the crassly commercial exploitation that's objectionable, not the sex per so. They have also courted controversy in the past with
racist T-Shirts.
From what I can see of the San Francisco store, diversity has yet to make inroads into their posters. This one is creepy in a Soviet-era Socialist Realism propaganda poster sort of way — even the model's name is Russian. New face indeed...
