#lemonaid
Image is everything. Which sucks. I, too, was brought up on the old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But despite efforts to the contrary, it’s hard not to. Who has time to read every book, sparkly or torn cover aside? We’re left with the reality that elevator pitches aren’t just for Mad Men anymore. We sell ourselves to potential co-workers, friends, and acquaintances every day and much of it stems from the way we look. But just because image makes the impression, doesn’t mean that a good impression can only be made by one kind of image. The word “beauty” encompasses a lot of things. There is no one beauty. Which brings me to my semi-recent vendetta against Abercrombie & Fitch. Many of us remember the brand’s embroidered script A&F as the unofficial seal of the middle school royals who haunt our adolescent memories; the jeans we strove to wiggle into, and the skirts we all just had to have in order to be “cool.” So I sucked in, donned The Seal, and thought I looked cool. Pictures show otherwise, and the braces probably didn’t help, but all that’s not so bad. What is so bad is that Abercrombie is the first brand I can remember that bred conformity and told us beauty could only be one thing. Beauty was stick thin, mostly blonde, with a just-so sprinkling of freckles, and a hot white guy who lost his shirt somewhere along the way on her arm. There was nothing else. And there still isn’t. The brand doesn’t even feature sizes XL and XXL on their size chart. The notion of “plus-size” is non-existent in Abercrombie world. And their CEO is fine with that. In 2006, A&F CEO Mike Jeffries
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