Abercrombie & Fitch's Blue Christmas
The dirty little secret behind the racy catalog: lousy sales.
By Daniel Gross in Slate
Posted Monday, Dec. 8, 2003, at 11:53 AM PT

The 2003 Christmas shopping season may be only a few weeks old, but it's already pretty clear who the big loser is: Abercrombie & Fitch. In November, in the face of a boycott led by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, the company recalled its racy catalog, the A&F Quarterly, which bears more resemblance to Playboy than to the Wilson Quarterly.

The "Christmas Field Guide" featured cover language promising "group sex and more" and photos of wholesome-looking youths in not very wholesome poses. On Sunday night, 60 Minutes charged that Abercrombie is the apparel industry's version of Hooters, hiring hotties to work on the sales floor and relegating less bodacious associates to the stock room. The company also faces a class-action lawsuit filed by former Clinton Justice Department civil rights hand Bill Lann Lee, which claims the all-American retailer discriminates against nonwhite job applicants.

The problem is that the teen audience, raised in a climate of highly accessible pornography and lewdness, requires an ever-higher level of raunchiness to be shocked into consumption. A&F's catalogs have been banking on illicit activities for years. In 1998, the Center for Science in the Public Interest slammed the back-to-school catalog's "Drinking 101" promotion. Here are some fun facts about the 2002 magalog. And this summer's back-to-school catalog was dubbed "The SEX ED Issue."

But people in the business of selling sex to teens face a law of diminishing returns. For Britney Spears, simply gyrating and groaning used to be enough to send teens into paroxysms of consumption. With each passing year, however, she's been forced to raise (or lower) the bar. And even though she audaciously sucked face with twice-her-age Madonna on national television, Britney has seen her album sales slide.

Every year Abercrombie & Fitch goes to greater lengths to appeal to teens' prurient interests, too, hoping hormones will translate into sales. It's not working. It may be that the firm has signally failed to understand its customer, which is the most fundamental rule of retailing. The catalogs titillate teens, but they're increasingly angering their parents. While 16-year-olds may be able to go to the mall by themselves, most still rely on their parents to pay for the clothes they buy.