thepittsburghhistoryjournal: Pride Street, Pittsburgh, 1955. W. Eugene Smith (via) 

176

Love

185

maplekoyo: The cultish ideology that drives the engine of Abercrombie is not unlike the ideology that led Disney’s Little Mermaid, Ariel, after falling in love with the beautiful white prince, to give up her birth identity (even as a princess of the Mer-people) in exchange for her legs (and more importantly her vagina, not to put too fine a point on t hat matter), so that she can, in the words of her principle number in the movie-musical, be “part of that world” (the world of people). Abercrombie, through its strategy of marketing “the good white life” in what is already a deeply racist society, has convinced a U.S. public—whites (some young and some not so young), some people of color, and gay men—that if we buy their label, we are really buying membership into a privileged fraternity that has eluded us all for so long, even if for such vastly different reasons. In order for such a marketing strategy to work, in all of the diverse ways that this one clearly does, the consumer must necessarily bring to his or her understanding that A&F, and what association with the the brand offers him or her, a fundamentally racist belief that this lifestyle—this young, white, natural, all-American, upper-class lifestyle—being offered by the label is what we all are, aspire to be, or are hopelessly alienated from ever being.

67