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pimped by Abercrombie & Fitch

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As you might have figured out, in an age where there is no such thing as bad publicity, Abercrombie hit a gold mine. The kind of publicity they received was so priceless they might as well have paid for the production of the t-shirts with a MasterCard. Email messages are flying right and left, newspaper articles are being written, local and cable TV news crews are broadcasting the story, and protesters are attracting attention toward the stores they picket. It’s millions worth in publicity, all for the cost of a few measly T-shirts.

And what marvelous T-shirts… For a day, Abercrombie sold four or five T-shirt designs with what they considered to be an Asian American theme. There’s the infamous Wong Brothers Laundry T-shirt, with that tagline “Two Wongs Can Make it White.” The Buddha Bash Tee, “Get your Buddha on the Floor,” features a grinning Buddha wearing a lei. Others include the “Wok and Go” Pizza Dojo, the “Wok and Bowl” Bowling Alley, and Rick Shaw’s Hoagies, “Good Meat, Quick Feet,” with a diminutive Asian delivering a giant hoagie on a rickshaw. Each shirt features cartoon depictions of Asians with conical hats and eastern garb, most of them were of a stunted size and prominently featuring bucktooth smiles and slant eyes — all of which are reminiscent of anti-Asian propaganda drawings popular 90 years ago. It’s as if they produced the Asian equivalent of a T-shirt depicting blacks picking cotton or Latinos picking lettuce. While perhaps one of the shirts was barely distasteful, the others were at the least disrespectful, and at worst derogatory, demeaning, and repulsive.

Or are they really that repulsive? Abercrombie and Fitch, before announcing they were pulling the shirts, was able to sell some of the shirts at their stores — and they sold out mighty quickly. These collectors’ items are now being auctioned on eBay, selling upwards of about $250 a shirt. And while Asian American students and activist groups throughout the country leap into action, protesting at stores and phoning in their complaints, other Asian Americans have shelled out their $25 plus tax to get this unforgettable piece of Abercrombie memorabilia.

The whole episode reeks suspiciously of pre-planning — something this good can’t just happen by accident. What makes these suspicions more believable than your average conspiracy theory is that Abercrombie has shown in the past they are not above such tactics. This is the third time the company has courted controversy and public outrage to enhance the brand’s image and notoriety.

Back in 1998, Abercrombie released a controversial piece in an issue of their magazine/catalog, A+F Quarterly, entitled “Drinking 101,” which included drink recipes and a cut-out quick reference guide to cocktails. The problem with that piece is that Abercrombie’s target demographic were kids 16-22, a bit below legal drinking age. MADD backed a nation-wide protest against the article, and Abercrombie responded by pledging to remove the article from future reprintings of the offending issue. In the meantime, the story garnered massive media attention. The Washington Post wrote on the controversy with the headline, “Basking in the Cross-Fire for Abercrombie and Fitch, Catalogue Created Heat — But Also a Spotlight.”

Also starting in 1998, Abercrombie decided to take a page out of Calvin Klein’s marketing playbook and feature models in sexually provocative positions for other features in the A+F Quarterly. Knowing about the outcry against Calvin Klein’s 1996 “soft child-porn” campaign, where Klein featured under-aged models in suggestive positions, Abercrombie launched their version of the campaign as a reoccurring feature in Quarterly. This time the models were a bit older, more naked, and groping each other. As expected, this drew the ire of anti-pornography advocates, accusations that A+F is encouraging underage sex, which resulted in even more press coverage. Abercrombie further enhanced its rebellious image in the process.

The focus of Abercrombie & Fitch’s marketing angle has been to celebrate whiteness. While somewhat different from the White Pride ideologies of racial supremacists (but not too far off), they have promoted, as the meaning of their brand, the lifestyle of the rich and affluent offspring of WASPs. As one commenter on Plastic.com noted, “I’m Scot-Irish-German…and I don’t feel Caucasian enough to shop there.” Instead of celebrating racial purity however, it celebrates the power and privilege symbolized in the WASP. To be the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful meant freedom, access to an active lifestyle, and the ability to skirt rules and get away, scot-free.

And this image can be seen in Abercrombie’s catalogs and ads. Their idea of diversity is mixing in an occasional brunette. In an era where youth orientated fashion labels have actively promoted diversity in their ads, whem you can see examples of racial diversity on the website homepages of The Gap, Tommy Hilfilger, Banana Republic, Old Navy, American Eagle Outfitters, Eddie Bauer, Timberland and Nautica, Abercrombie is a notable exception. As for rules skirting, their A+F Quarterly stunts encourage behavior that flaunts social conventions.

So why would Asian Americans, or anyone else not a WASP, wear Abercrombie? Well, it is fashionable. Many of us don’t really pay attention to that marketing stuff anyway, opting to wear whatever our friends wearing. But some of us do. For these folks, to wear Abercrombie is to assimilate into what it represents — to pry their way into their gated communities, to perhaps shed whatever excess baggage of difference (everyone looks pretty much the same in Abercrombie’s ads), and to assimilate wholly into the establishment. And as you would expect from a company with a capable market research department, whose marketing efforts have lead to 38 straight quarters of record-breaking earnings and sales, Abercrombie knows it.

But what does it say when a company that is so staunch in its whiteness acknowledges its non-white customers with shirts that make fun of their ethnicity? And so to add levity, ethnic jokes are used? Also, notice that the Asian characters are in roles of servitude. They make pizza, run the bowling alleys, wash the laundry and deliver the hoagies that are enjoyed by people at leisure. They work, and their work is menial. On the other hand, none of the Abercrombie models are working. Even Abercrombie’s other T-shirts, with topics like road trips, music fests, beach life, and sex, all emphasize leisure. It’s as if they’re resurrecting the old racial hierarchy where whites are of the privileged class to be served and minorities are designated their servants. Abercrombie is welcoming Asians into their gated community, but only if they’re houseboys or girls, not their peers.

Even with all this, there still are Asian Americans who buy, jock and support the controversial Abercrombie shirts. “I don’t know why anyone should be angry or upset. It’s a fun shirt,” says Lisa Tan, 20, in the Mercury News. “I think it’s a humorous T-shirt and you should have a sense of humor about these things,” says accountant Vi Ngo, quoted in the Chronicle. In the best-case scenario, they are confusing ignorance for having ‘thick skin.’ At the least, they ignore the plights of laundrymen of years ago: to be subjugated to countless abuses working in degrading positions because racism provided a glass ceiling so low they can barely limbo their way across town. One might wonder what our forefathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and pioneer immigrants who came before us would think of the shirts. “I’ve heard too many working-in-the-family-laundry stories from my mother and father and aunts and uncles to think that ‘Two Wongs Can Make it White’ can be funny,” writes L.A. Chung, columnist for the Mercury News.

But Abercrombie’s business is whiteness, and some of us are buying it. Some are willing to do anything to remove any trait of difference from their appearance. Racism has left many of us wishing we were not different, whether differences come from racial slurs or being barred from social circles. To some, being able to blend in with their surroundings like a chameleon would be the greatest gift. Yet, people will inevitably see us, with the difference in our physical appearance, as belonging to a different race.

This self-hate and shame of one’s race can cause one to lash out at any marker of our ethnicity. History and heritage cannot be lopped off like how plastic surgeons do flesh, but it can be attacked, demeaned, and ignored. “As a child I decided that the more assimilated I became the less abuse I would receive,” writes author Rajeev Balasubramanyam, on his experiences on growing up in England. “It helps to ridicule one’s own culture and people, to make racist jokes just as the whites do, to be self-hating, ashamed of one’s skin colour, determined to eradicate any trace of difference.” And what easier way to express one’s self-hate than with a T-shirt, priced at $24.95, and sold in a store where everything else is whitewashed?

Is this what Abercrombie sees when they see Asian Americans? Do they see a mass of consumers full of self-hate and self-loathing that they will latch onto any negative stereotype of themselves and parade it around town like a yellow minstrel? Or did they see us as a bunch of cattle, milking outrage from us and turning it into publicity gold? And do they see Asian workers as expendable labor unworthy of a smidgen of dignity? In each case, their PR agency assures us this is not so, but actions show they see Asians as pawns, not people.

In the meantime, the Abercrombie and Fitch brand got a needed boost in brand distinction and promotion. Besides just getting their name on the top of minds of consumers, they have strengthened the edgy, rules-skirting persona of the brand. They’re beyond the confines of multiculturalism and political correctness, and have joined the fashionable ranks of folks like Howard Stern, who has in the past called Asians “eggrolls” on air, Andrew Dice Clay, who shared ‘chink’ jokes on stage, and the Bloodhound Gang, who last year released a song in praise of the Asian Slut.

And while they will need to minimize the impact of protesters and other irate individuals, they can count on the support of their Asian constituents, who will lash out at anyone not following that publicly laudable virtue of total assimilation. Already, Carney has been forwarding his own evidence of Asian complacency, noting that the designer of the offensive shirts was a Korean American and that his Asian co-workers didn’t mind the shirts, without noting that none of them make up a representative sample of all Asians Americans. Complainers are being framed as bunch oversensitive, politically correct malcontents, maybe even as an insignificant but noisy minority of the Asian American population, and probably will lose in the court of public opinion.

Abercrombie and Fitch themselves are well on their way to getting away with this race-baiting publicity, just like they did with all the other publicity stunts they’ve pulled, scot-free.