How Breathtaking and Glorious!

The flagship store included many different amenities. In the basement there was a shooting range, on the mezzanine there was paraphernalia for skiing, archery, skin-diving, and lawn games. The second through the fifth floors were reserved for clothing that was suitable for any climate or terrain. On the sixth floor, there was a picture gallery and a bookstore that focused on sporting themes, a watch repair facility and a golf school, fully equipped with a resident professional. The seventh floor included a gun room, stuffed game heads, and about seven hundred shot guns and rifles. The eighth floor was dedicated solely to fishing, camping, and boating. It also included a desk that belonged to a fly- and bait-casting instructor who gave lessons at the pool, which was located on the roof. The fishing section of the store alone was stocked with over 48,000 flies and over 18,000 fishing lures. The clerks hired at Abercrombie & Fitch were not professional salesmen, but rugged outdoorsmen. Talking was their pleasure and selling was performed only at the customers' insistence.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abercrombie_and_Fitch

One could feel good about the beast of modernity at that point. That was the only store like it in the world. Entering it was to enter a wondrous realm. It was modern, but it was also authentic. Comfortable. Entering the boring two story mall now, every store is the same, everything is of the same mediocre quality. Nothing outstanding exists. Such a word should be marked as archaic, because nothing corresponds to it anymore. I do not exonerate the era this existed in, but I do not have to. Things such as this should be preserved not

"purchased by The Limited in 1988 and revamped as a lifestyle brand."

Humiliation and degredation of the founders names:

"The company strictly regulates the store environment in an effort to provide a consistent, pleasureful experience for customers in a manner that can be replicated in each store. Factors such as visual presentation, music, and fragrance are not left to chance. The company also specifies in painstaking detail how lighting, layout, visual displays, marketing, and fixtures are to be placed and used in every store. Each store is spritzed hourly with men’s cologne in order to ensure a pleasant sensory experience. Every store plays the same pre-produced music segment for a period of four to five weeks and has instructions on how loud the music is to be played at certain times of the day or week."

Ah, rugged outdoorsmen, wild men, untamed, free. Where is the museum?

"Abercrombie & Fitch has become notorious for loud, pulsing dance music, often eliciting complaints from mall operators and tenants for disrupting other customers and stores."

"The A&F Quarterly became a lightning rod for controversy shortly after it was published. It featured photographs of male and female models, often nude, posing in pairs or groups. Despite a company policy restricting sale of the publication to adults, critics charged that the publication was readily sold to minors. Several states threatened to pursue legal action, though the company was never charged with violating any related statutes.

The publication was also criticized on moral grounds, for featuring sexually explicit interviews with porn stars, and articles that, according to critics, glamorized alcohol consumption, group sex, homosexuality and self-performed oral sex."

Why do we take such pleasure in corrupting and degrading the past? Can we not allow the present and the past to exist together, or must one consume the other?

"In November 2005, the Women & Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania launched a "girl-cott" of the store for selling T-shirts bearing phrases like "Who needs brains when you have these?" The campaign went national on NBC's The Today Show, and the company pulled the shirts from stores on November 5, 2005."

I also hate the women and girls foundation. Who needs brains when you've got stupid catchphrases? Getting a nazi to take down his nazi flag doesn't make him any less of a nazi.