subject: 2010 Abercrombie and Fitch news show [print this page] 2010 Abercrombie and Fitch news show 2010 Abercrombie and Fitch news show
What exactly is the Abercrombie & Fitch look?
"It's dominated by Caucasian, football-looking, blonde-hair, blue-eyed males; skinny, tall," says Lu. "You don't see any African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and that's the image that they're portraying and that they're looking for."
Liu says she was fired after corporate officials visited the store, and, according to her, didn't like what they saw: "A corporate official had pointed to an Abercrombie and Fitch poster and told our management at our store, 'You need to have more staff that looks like this.' And it was a white Caucasian male on that poster."
Anthony Ocampo says blacks, Asians and Latinos were sometimes hired by Abercrombie, but weren't given the opportunity to work in sales. "The greeters and the people that worked in the in-season clothing, most of them white, if not all of them, were white," says Ocampo. "The people that worked in the stock room, where nobody sees them, were mostly Asian-American, Filipino, Mexican, Latino."
The lawsuit alleges that Abercrombie hires a disproportionately white sales force, favors white employees for the best positions, and discourages minorities from even applying for jobs. But lawyer and conservative talk show host Larry Elder says too often cases like these end up in court.
" Abercrombie clothing ought to have the right to set their own policies, for good or for ill. Look, there's a restaurant called Hooters. Hooters requires you to have certain kinds of physical accoutrements," says Elder. "Will that do? And I think people understand that. Should they have a right to hire waitresses because they want to attract a certain kind of clientele who want to ogle at the waitresses? I think so."
