News Now! | Hillary Clinton's Abercrombie Marketing Disapproval...

With Abercrombie's iconic sexuality-play-on-display gone,
maybe a truce with the possible future President of the U.S. is in sight...
Image, Associated Press, (image source)

         THE FINAL BOMB-drop to dismantle what remains of Mike Jeffries' Abercrombie & Fitch, the April 24 release, by Abercrombie & Fitch Co. new senior management, left a reeling, polarized landscape after heralding the slackening of associates standards and store protocol and the definitive discontinuation of sexuality in branding and marketing. The latter aspect, in particular, came in utmost coincidence after the April 12 official announcement of Hillary Rodham Clinton's intent for the White House as Democrat candidate for the 2016 United States presidential election: as it's turned out, Abercrombie & Fitch was not in good standing with her when it came to the matter of explicit nature in marketing for youths. Now, sexuality in A&F Marketing is caught up as part of a greater national political discussion over the contrasting ideology of the powerful presidential candidate...

It was during her third-to-last Christmas season at the White House as First Lady (with her husband, former President of the United States Bill Clinton), when a copy of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog for the A&F Christmas 1998 fashion season was brought to her attention. (Each seasonal Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, from Back-to-School/Fall 1997 to Christmas 2003, came together in one package behind the A&F Quarterly edition of the season, so who knows if it was brought to her attention with the A&F Quarterly, too, or not). Whatever her exact reaction at the moment was when she first saw it, we know not except for that it greatly angered her: a Post-it note, written out by then-Clinton aid Ruby Shamir, which was slapped on the cover, reads, "HRC thought this was outrageous re: teens + sex + selling sex to sell clothes".

"It’s unclear exactly how the catalog came to Clinton's attention, although the White House records also include an outraged letter from a concerned citizen that President Bill Clinton circulated among top advisers. He jotted in the margins: 'Make sure HRC sees this too.'"

Found in the mass private archives of the Clinton Library of material dating from the time of the Clinton administration, the A&F Christmas 1998 catalog "almost leaps out of the box" as the Politico commented (and as you can only imagine).

Not the Clinton copy, but a general one found of the A&F Christmas 1998 catalog.
Cover photography, Bruce Weber for Abercrombie & Fitch

Hillary's public efforts for the continuation and strengthening of wholesome ideals for youths stem as far back as 1977 when she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families (AACF) non-profit advocacy organization. This only furthered by, and beyond, her years as First Lady (during which time she even had the book published, It Takes a Village). By November 25, 2005, as U.S. Senator in seat for the state of New York, she introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act bill (which was to regulate the sale of video games featuring explicit content and further stand against it reaching youths) with the pursuit to make it national law; it never happened and expired at the end of the 109th U.S. Congress session, January 3, 2007. By December 2007, she "she urged Federal Trade Commission audits of game retailers and investigations into games with hidden content", and throughout her 2008 presidential campaign, "kept pushing the federal bill to criminalize the sale of some video games to minors through her 2008 presidential bid." As the Politico states, "Throughout her political career, Clinton has embraced mostly liberal causes, which is why her views on violent and sexually explicit media stand out in a review of thousands of pages of documents from the presidential archives."

And that is precisely why the Abercrombie & Fitch name has been brought up - by record of her reaction to its A&F Christmas 1998 catalog as example among many - among this rising national discussion over her contrasting liberal-conservative ideology: "'She was always what you would call a communitarian. She took these socially conservative ideas and gave them a more egalitarian spin. [...] Clearly, Hillary isn't running in the Republican primary, so she only has something to lose from raising these softer conservative issues. I’m sure she’ll come back to this one of these days, but at the moment the focus is getting us out of this stagnant economy," said Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University. Furthermore, "Clinton 'was one of these Democrats who embraced a certain kind of social and cultural centrism,' said Julian Zelizer, a political science professor at Princeton. [...] Zelizer said Clinton is fairly 'insulated' from criticism on the issue because she faces little in the way of Democratic opposition and calling attention to the subject would undermine Republican narratives against Clinton. 'Conservatives aren't going to do much on this because they don’t want to say she’s not that liberal. They’re arguing that she's campaigning from the far left.'"

Well, Hillary, you've nothing to worry about on the war front when it comes to A&F Co. anymore...

Read the Politico article (here)!

Stay FIERCE!