Boo Will Take Care of the Details.

wtfplus:

i have already written extensively about this stupid abercrombie and fitch “controversy,” but the links, stupid gifs, and outrage keep rolling in (not just here, but on facebook, twitter, etc.) i addressed it in this post. later, in this post, i pointed out that almost every single retailer of men’s and women’s clothing carries vastly larger men’s clothing than women’s, because of the intersection of fatphobia and misogyny (not that fat people who wear men’s clothing have it that much better)- this thing you are upset about abercrombie and fitch allegedly doing? every store does it for a variation of the same reason. then i addressed it again in this post.

so, let me address this one last time, and hopefully people will stop linking me to it !

the original article, the one that every article you read about this was based on, came from business insider. here is how business insider works: someone writes a book about a business-y topic, and then pays business insider to fabricate a sensational story using the book as its only source, and then (theoretically) people are like ‘i MUST learn more !!!’ and buy the book.

in this case, the author of the book the entire article is based on did hard-hitting research like finding an already infamous salon.com profile of the CEO from almost 10 years ago and speculating that the CEO’s response to questions about his brand identity (which did not involve anything specific about size or sizing or fat people) meant ‘NO FAT CHIX’. so the story gets picked up as ‘A&F CEO SAYS NO FAT CHIX’ and then people who don’t even care about fat chix get all twisted up and throw clothes on homeless people.

now, of course marketing $70 t-shirts to ‘young hip all american people’ is barely-coded language for ‘thin rich white people’. of course. but none of these comments were made specifically about a refusal to sell to fat people. if you are a fat person, you are well aware that your body does not fit with basically any store’s “brand identity,” and that sucks, but… where has this anger from non-fat people been my entire fucking life when no stores’ “brand identity” catered to my body?  nay, where was this anger in 2006 when mike jeffries actually said that shit but no one disingenuously attached a ‘lol fat chix’ thing to it?

fat people, this article didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, and we don’t want to shop at abercrombie and fitch anyway. non-fat people, if you take part in this shit and are outraged, i hope you will also boycott the places you actually shop who exclude fat people. like urban outfitters, anthropologie, the gap, banana republic, j crew, uniqlo, ann taylor, american apparel, club monaco, etc. and while you’re at it, maybe you can boycott the places whose brand identity does include fat people, but only online or in ‘select’ stores, like old navy, h&m, forever21, etc

I should get out of bed.

Nailed it.