The Unbranding of Abercrombie
How the problematic mall brand pulled off the most exciting makeover in American retail.
It’s a summer afternoon at one of our country’s most popular malls, the Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, and teens are doing what they’ve done for decades: roaming around in groups of twos and threes, browsing and gossiping and passing the time. Near the center of the complex is a renovated Abercrombie & Fitch store, brightly lit and covered in wood panels. Two teenage girls stop to review a wall of flouncy cotton-poly knee-length floral dresses. Each garment has the same distinctive horizontal pleats across the bust — Abercrombie’s comfortable but polished take on the cottagecore trend. One girl reminds her friend that two of their classmates wore that exact style, called the Emerson, in their senior pictures. “I hate that dress,” she says. “I love it, actually,” says the other.
The Fierce cologne–drenched Abercrombie of the aughts sold hardly any dresses. Now it can’t keep them in stock. In the Easton store, a collection of wedding-guest-friendly dresses are displayed just inside the entrance, framed by a floral arch and a sign that reads “The A&F Wedding Shop.” Another shopper pulls out a long, satiny, olive green strapless style from the rack to show her mother. “My friend just got married and all of her bridesmaids wore this exact dress,” she says, reminding me of weddings in the 2010s, when so many dutiful friends wore similar matching silky dresses bulk-ordered from J.Crew. “Huh,” says the mom, moving on to another section of linen blazers and shorts.
“Huh” just about sums things up. The Abercrombie brand, once an easy cultural punching bag, now brings in more revenue than it did when it dominated teen culture in the aughts. (Last year, sales reached $2.2 billion.) Its namesake parent company, which also includes the beachy teen retailer Hollister, is now the toast of Wall Street and a curious case study for business reporters. The stock is one of the best-performing of the last two years, with growth outpacing even AI-chip giant Nvidia.
To get here, Abercrombie’s leaders did something deceptively simple. They killed almost everything the preppy, testosterone-driven brand once stood for — sex, privilege, wealth, good breeding. Today’s Abercrombie has replaced that fantasy with a humble practicality, offering a reasonably priced uniform for the TikTok-adjacent life where every outfit is familiar but unidentifiable, minimalist but just trendy enough. The result is less a rebranding than an unbranding, untethered from any particular aesthetic. And yet this iteration of Abercrombie says just as much about American style today as it did 20 years ago. Because without the logo, what exactly are we buying?
The day after my trip to Easton, I head to Abercrombie’s Columbus headquarters to visit one of the strangest offices in the fashion industry. But office is the wrong word. On 400 acres of woods and streams sit 16 Sea Ranch–style modernist wood-and-concrete buildings, like a hybrid liberal-arts college and summer camp, and two distribution centers. Silver Razor scooters are lined up in tidy rows throughout the campus — outside the cafeteria, by an outdoor fire pit. Over the course of the afternoon of my visit, I don’t see a single person riding one. Here, Abercrombie employees design clothing, create samples, photograph campaigns, and ship e-commerce orders, handling almost every aspect of the business except for the actual manufacturing. The clothing is still made in many of the same factories in Asia and South America that have been mass-producing the brand’s jeans and T-shirts for over 20 years.
Inside one of the buildings, I walk by a photoshoot in progress where a young, expressionless male model rotates in front of a photographer and stylist, both young women. He’s wearing a version of Abercrombie’s comparatively chaste men’s uniform of today: roomy, clean, dark-wash jeans and a worn-in Rutgers sweatshirt. Two decades ago, Abercrombie was famous for its often cheeky and sometimes offensive graphic tees, all designed in-house. Now, its T-shirts, updated with crewnecks and boxier shapes, are printed with faux-vintage licensed images: Britney Spears gyrating with a python (for a Pride collection); the logo from the 2004 Olympic games in Athens. The Abercrombie shopper doesn’t mind that the tees are artificially worn down. The vintage look is in style and the shirts look authentic enough. (Remember, this was a company that once artfully destroyed almost every pair of its jeans with a sand-blasting machine, which now lays idle in the basement, banned because it causes horrible lung issues for garment workers.) Anyway, a real vintage Olympics tee could cost more than double the price of Abercrombie’s version and would probably be shaped wrong — too long or too wide.
The person in charge of picking up on these subtle and not-so-subtle trends is Corey Robinson, Abercrombie’s chief product officer, in charge of merchandising and design. “Every single night, I get in bed and I look at #Abercrombie on Tiktok,” he says. I’m sitting with him and his counterpart, Carey Collins Krug, chief marketing officer, in a conference room designed to look like the average Abercrombie customer’s living room. A huge jute rug covers the floor, an oversize gold-trimmed mirror leans on the far wall along with framed images of vintage cars, and a pair of black-and-silver Marcel Breuer–looking chairs are pulled up to a coffee table. (There’s another room themed for Hollister nearby, Krug tells me. “It may have a few Squishmallows in it.”)
Krug and Robinson started working together in the fall of 2018, when the brand was still struggling to find a post-aughts identity. By then, Abercrombie had a new CEO with good instincts, Fran Horowitz, who had come up through Hollister from Ann Taylor Loft and Express. And the company had a new head designer, Aaron Levine, who arrived in 2015 and began to redesign as much of the collection as possible. He updated the fits and fabrics and while incorporating some nods to Abercrombie’s first chapter, after its launch in 1892, as a high-end sporting-goods store. Levine tackled the denim that had been largely unchanged for more than a decade. But much of the store still looked like aughts Abercrombie with its brand-name T-shirts and ripped skinny jeans. Fully letting go of the past seemed too risky. (Levine left in 2021.)
In 2018, Horowitz hired Krug, who had been at David Yurman and Ralph Lauren, and promoted Robinson, who was at Hollister. That year, after the last in a series of everything-on-the-table strategy meetings with all the brand’s top executives, Abercrombie’s leaders resolved to formally abandon its past as a retailer for frat boys and sorority girls and focus instead on the post-grad, the millennial, the 25-year-old. It was a risky choice. At that point, most of its remaining customers were either teens or older Abercrombie fans still hanging on from the early aughts. But there were solid business reasons to switch courses. One was that Abercrombie already had a sister brand for teens. And the other was an opening in the market between fast fashion and luxury, targeting young, employed people who wanted a better option than fast fashion but weren’t going to spend $300 on jeans or $500 on dresses. Shoppers who felt Gap and J.Crew had fallen off, Zara was too cheap, Uniqlo wasn’t trendy enough, and department stores never had what they needed. So after years of telling American youth what was cool, Abercrombie finally shut up and listened to what its former customers wanted.
As it turned out, the Abercrombie that millennials grew up with was, well, as dark and toxic as its famously musky stores. In 2004, the company settled a class-action discrimination lawsuit that alleged the brand hired and promoted store employees based on race (white) and gender (men). Former CEO Mike Jeffries, who left the company in 2014, now faces allegations from young men who told the BBC they were coerced into participating in sex parties at his homes and hotels around the world. In October, a former model filed a class-action civil lawsuit against Jeffries, his partner Matthew Smith, and Abercrombie & Fitch, alleging a “widespread sex-trafficking operation.” Jeffries’s lawyers denied the suit’s allegations, and lawyers for Abercrombie & Fitch said its current executives had no knowledge of the executive’s sexual misconduct. In January, the BBC also reported that the FBI is investigating Jeffries.
In the more than 20 years Jeffries led Abercrombie, turning a failing catalogue with a storied history into an international house of preppy, ripped denim, he micromanaged every detail. He tweaked every sagging waistband and interviewed every high-school quarterback turned Abercrombie model; he turned the lights down and the music up at the stores. He was famously superstitious, wearing the same lucky Tod’s loafers to review the fantastic financials each quarter and parking his black Porsche at the same off angle each morning.
Jeffries came, in part, from the school of Les Wexner, the Columbus billionaire behind the Limited and Victoria’s Secret who realized the best mall brands were not just trendy — they were highly specialized, easily identifiable, and unabashedly theatrical. Wexner bought Abercrombie, hired Jeffries, advised him to put the logo on everything, and profited handsomely when he set the company free as an independent public entity in 1998. The Abercrombie campus is still located in New Albany, the highly regulated luxury suburb Wexner started building in the late 1980s. Every street is lined with white wooden-plank fences, adding to an eerie, Stepfordian quality. To honor its history, Jeffries named one of Abercrombie’s central campus buildings, the cafeteria, after Wexner. For more than a decade, the red steel-paneled barn gym was topped with a sign that proudly read, in sans serif, lowercase lettering, “wexner commons.”
But Wexner’s reputation soured when sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2019. Wexner and Epstein had been uncommonly close for over a decade starting in the 1980s, when Epstein was his financial adviser and Wexner seemed to be his only client. (Wexner has said he was never aware of the allegations that led to Epstein’s 2019 arrest.) In the aftermath of that scandal, which led to Wexner stepping down as CEO of Victoria’s Secret, the “wexner commons” sign on Abercrombie’s campus quietly disappeared. (Driving around Columbus and the suburb he built, Wexner’s name is still everywhere, especially on the campus at Ohio State, where he’s donated hundreds of millions of dollars.)
Now the Abercrombie cafeteria is just known as the cafeteria, albeit an unusually beautiful one, with high ceilings, a fireplace, and outdoor seating. I ask Robinson and Krug if there is a storage space somewhere here filled with the stuffed moose heads that once hung in every Abercrombie store. They look at me, slightly horrified. (Later, a taxidermy dealer tells me that over the past decade, many of the moose heads were sold back to dealers, who in turn sold them to private buyers or film and television set designers.) I ask Robinson to tell me something, anything, about what it was like to be here during the Jeffries era, since he lived through so much of it. He’s polite, but the most I can get out of him is: “It feels like I’ve worked for two different companies.”
Instead of the past, Krug and Robinson talk a lot about inclusivity, company values, and “putting the customer at the center” of everything. By the time the Netflix documentary on the company, White Hot, arrived in 2022, much had already changed at Abercrombie, starting with the clothing itself. Women had been the first to notice the brand’s changes, shopping its breezy dresses and paper-bag-waist pants despite its corny history. The brand extended its sizing and adjusted its fits but kept using higher-quality fabrics than the typical fast-fashion brands. Today, about half of Abercrombie’s jeans sales come from a “Curve Love” line, which offers a few extra inches in the butt and thighs up through size 37. Robinson says the idea for the collection, which debuted in 2019, came in part from seeing women complaining about waist gaps online.
Krug updated the marketing strategy to highlight the actual clothing, not the models wearing it, the idea being that if the brand’s perception changed one item at a time, it would be more convincing than saying “We’ve changed” over and over. “If they’re not yet ready to say, ‘I love Abercrombie,’ they can say, ‘I love this Abercrombie shirt,’” she says. Krug’s team created a “life résumé” for the 25-year customer to guide design and marketing, a crib sheet of millennial activities illustrated by screenshots from, among other sources, Instagram: engagement parties, concerts, baby showers, vacations. And weddings. In early 2019, Krug and Robinson spent a day in Austin shopping with a dozen 25-year-old women who complained about never finding nice wedding-guest dresses that didn’t cost hundreds of dollars, which helped spark the idea for Abercrombie’s wedding category.
Instead of investing only in high-concept photoshoots with professional models, Abercrombie started sending clothing to smaller-scale influencers who represented its new target customer, older and more responsible. One viral moment in 2022 came from an unexpected place — a 61-year-old former fashion executive turned influencer named Gym Tan, whose TikTok posts in a very flattering and practical $88 strappy black maxi dress spiked sales. (That dress was another milestone of change: Nothing sold by Jeffries-era Abercrombie was black.) These releases and viral pops have added up, steadily growing the business, which exploded in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024.
I ask Krug and Robinson to describe Abercrombie’s style today, but they resist assigning it any label like “preppy” or “varsity.” I realize that vagueness is the point. Once, Abercrombie tweaked trends to fit its indelible brand identity. Now that the brand is less dogmatic, it’s free to chase the trends that many of us have seen online and recognize as current, even if we don’t care to know where they started. When I see Abercrombie’s core Essentials line of T-shirts and sweatpants in muted colors, for example, I think of Fear of God and its Essential line. Or when I see Abercrombie’s wide variety of crocheted men’s short-sleeve shirts, Bode comes to mind. The Emerson reminds me of the Hill House Nap dress. And those faux-vintage T-shirts, many of which resemble retro souvenir shirts for dreamy destinations like Capri and Beverly Hills, remind me of what I see on Depop. Recently, one of my favorite influencers wore a Modelo flat-bill hat on Instagram, and I assumed it was vintage until I tapped the image and saw she had tagged it as Abercrombie.
Such is the hook of the new Abercrombie: The brand’s pieces are easy to wear at a time when getting dressed is confusing and stressful, especially for young adults shopping for a hybrid work schedule, date night, or early parenthood. They’re wondering: What’s cool but not edgy, classic but not preppy, young but not too young? Abercrombie offers safe and reliable answers at a reasonable price, understanding that most people don’t have the time or interest to spend hours hunting for the perfect vintage tee or waiting for the perfect designer dress to go on sale. And if they have the money, they’re probably more interested in spending it on concerts and vacations anyway.
Before I leave campus, I walk through an open-plan floor of desks with clean and tidy beautiful wood surfaces everywhere. People are quietly working at their computers or sitting in PowerPoint meetings. Small television screens inside the lobbies of the various buildings flash the latest campaigns and slogans — stylish images of the Brooklyn Bridge and phrases like “Your Personal Best,” the name of Abercrombie’s new fitness line. It’s all very wholesome and responsible and corporate and boring, I have to admit. But this is probably as it should be at a multibillion-dollar public company that was long overdue for boring. If Abercrombie once monetized our insecurities, now it profits from another mind-set: a pervasive fashion malaise. We want our jeans priced well and baggy enough to fit the trends, not to promise to turn us into different kinds of people. We all know sex sells, but, it turns out, so does boring. Perhaps each era gets the Abercrombie it deserves.
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