“She didn’t give me a reason until I pressed,” Ocampo said. He was promised a job if he wanted to come back in the summer, but when he returned, a brand representative told him they were unwilling to rehire him, he said. Ocampo acquired a few Abercrombie pieces on discount and ended up working at one of the stores during the winter season. Surrounded by the Abercrombie aesthetic, Ocampo said he unintentionally bought into it, as well. Ocampo said that during his first year at Stanford University, in 1999, the clothing practically became the campus’s unofficial uniform. Pauli Wai of the Chinatown Community Development Center works on posters before a demonstration in San Francisco on April 18, 2002, to protest a line of five T-shirts depicting stereotypes that were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch. The brand claimed it hired and fired on the basis of attractiveness - but the subtext was clear: People of color did not belong in Abercrombie’s exclusive culture. Meanwhile, workers of color, including Ocampo, were fired. “We’re focused on inclusivity - and continuing that transformation is our enduring promise to you, our community.”įeaturing testimonies from former Abercrombie models, employees and executives, the documentary examines how the brand’s marketing and hiring practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s were meticulously constructed to produce an era-defining version of all-American “cool.”īut this vision of “cool” was discriminatory: Brown and Black employees accused the company of segregating them to the backrooms, and the company recruited conventionally attractive, thin, white college students from fraternities and sororities to work in the front of the store, according to the documentary. “We’ve evolved the organization, including making changes in management, prioritizing representation, implementing new policies, re-envisioning our store experiences and updating the fit, size-range and style of our products,” Horowitz said in the statement. “I realized that as much as masculinity shaped my life, there’s nothing necessarily that we should valorize about masculinity,” Ocampo added.Ībercrombie’s current CEO, Fran Horowitz, said in a statement that the documentary is “not reflective of who we are now” but acknowledged that it had, in its past, taken “exclusionary and inappropriate” actions under former leadership that have since been overhauled. “I’m not white, no matter how hard I exercise, no matter how much I deprive myself of food - I was never able to achieve anything even in proximity.” “What I realized after that Abercrombie incident is that when it comes to that version of masculinity, I’m completely ineligible to play the game,” Ocampo said. Today, Ocampo - a sociology professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona - is vocal about the toll that selling such a narrow idea of cool, sexy and masculine had on him and other Asian American men, a group that had already been portrayed as emasculated in U.S. While Ocampo said he was happy to rail against the company’s racist practices two decades ago, the brand’s aesthetic affected his own sense of attractiveness for some time. Abercrombie settled the suit in 2004, paying out $40 million, but never formally admitted guilt.
But Ocampo said he was unexpectedly barred from working at the store - because, he was later told, he's Filipino - and he became one of several employees of color who joined a 2003 class-action lawsuit accusing the company of discriminatory practices.