Overreacting at Abercrombie
Bookworm on Feb 20 2010 at 11:04 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
As you may have gathered from my reference to Disneyland the other day, we’ve been visiting Southern California, where we have family. (Very nice family, I might add.) In addition to Disneyland and the family stuff, my husband took my star struck almost-teen daughter to the Grove Shopping Center, because she might see a star there. We didn’t see stars there, but I was very struck by the Grove. I’ve never had a more over the top shopping experience, with ordinary stores (Gap, Barnes & Noble, Apple) battling each other for hedonistic supremacy.
The store that made me freak out, though, was the Abercrombie store. I have to start by saying that I loath Abercrombie. I loath the soft porn advertisements, the loud music, the high prices, and the foul perfume (unisex, of course), that wafts through the ventilation system. As my husband says, that store is parent repellent. To my daughter, it’s “heaven.”
What troubled me about the Abercrombie at the Grove is that it has live models manning the floors — both boys and girls. One of the young men was shirtless, and another had his shirt entirely open. I have to say as a preface that I’m no prude. One of the reasons I like the dojo (yes, here comes the dirty old lady confession) is that I get to see truly beautiful male bodies (waist up only, of course). When the guys are really overheated after a hard workout, they’ll sometimes strip off their shirts and, wow!, some of them look fabulous. They have real muscles that they’ve earned through hard work and healthy living. They’re genuine warriors. They can make those muscles work.
At Abercrombie, however, the muscles on these young men existed only for show. It is conceivable, of course, that all or some of these young men were Scott Browns — driven people who, blessed with a good face and body, use their looks to finance more meaningful careers — but there was something about their faces that seemed to negate this thought. Unless they were being willfully blank for show, these guys were nothing more than LA pretty boys, whose raison d’etre was the pursuit of “the look.” And I found that terribly embarrassing. Seeing men stripped of their manliness this way made me as uncomfortable as I would have been if they’d stripped down entirely in the middle of a grocery store. It was just wrong.
Related posts:
- Burberry goes the way of Abercrombie’s *UPDATED*
- Remind me not to buy American Apparel clothes
- Recapturing lost moments in our lives
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7 Responses to “Overreacting at Abercrombie”
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Book, did your daughter explain why A&F is “heaven?”
I’ve forgotten how old she is…
She could just be her mother’s daughter – without the taste that maturity brings…!
“(yes, here comes the dirty old lady confession)”
lol
Beauty is a philosophical ideal. This is why in brainwashing children, one must necessarily make them see America as ugly, in order to make them see America as evil, and the Social Justice of the New World (dis)Order as the next best hope for Utopia.
young people necessarily don’t have enough internal pillars to support their own vision of beauty most times, so they pick it up from their peers and from the perspectives of others.
But a vision of beauty is very important, because often this will motivate people to fight and die for and it will motivate people to excel in challenging situations. After all, only by seeing human dignity and liberty as beautiful could the United States ever have been constructed in the first place. These things matter. But children are not necessarily born with this knowledge.
I hope you went into the Original Farmers market, which is right there. A wonderful old world place that will erase all memories of A&F from your mind.
Also I must say I really enjoy the people watching at the Grove, it really is an interesting mix of humanity, gay, straight, Orthodox Jews, every color of the rainbow all mingling in a capitalist paradise. Many simply come to walk around and never enter the shops.
Drat it, we never get anything interesting in the midwest. We have an A&F here in the middle of all the soybeans, but all I get to see is those posters of boy models with their anguished pouts and their hands poised protectively over their crotches. I’m left wondering if they think they’ll fall off and they need to be ready to catch them.
Abercrombie is disgusting. I would not take my kids in there – I wouldn’t go there myself. Is that overly judgmental?
It makes me weep….because in the ’50s and ’60s, we LOVED to go and look at all the cool stuff in Abercrombie and Fitch. It was just a block and a half off Union Square, under the parking garage to the NE, right next to Goldberg Bowen’s, where we would go through the line directing the construction of our (enormous) sandwich for lunch.
One of my favorite memories is the (nearly) life-size rhinoceros made of leather standing in front of the doors as you entered….wonderful! And I hate what they’ve turned into – reminds me of what I think every time I hear the word “progressive”…..”progressing” towards WHAT?