Abercrombie and Fitch Dislikes Disabled, Non-White, Non-Thin Women

Here's to hoping that Abercrombie and Fitch is on the verge of a quick spiral into oblivion. The brand has earned a lovely reputation as a discriminator against Hispanics, Asians, African Americans and people with disabilities, and has been forced to settle lawsuit after lawsuit for its discriminatory and unfair unemployment practices.

It's hard to think of a store that more faithfully celebrates white, blond, excessively thin WASP-iness as a superior aesthetic and, indeed, a superior racial category. It does so with a "look policy" that stipulates how long employees' nails should be, how they should wear their hair, and how they should best represent the all-American (read: white, non-disabled, thin, young, blond) image.

Such a policy has been called out in a 2003 lawsuit by employees whose minimum wage earnings didn't allow them to buy Abercrombie clothes (Abercrombie settled for 2.2 million), in a 2005 lawsuit on the part of racial minorities discriminated against by the chain's hiring practices (Abercrombie settled for 50 million) and in a 2009 lawsuit by an employee who was spirited away to the stockroom because her disability wasn't all-American enough. In the last case, Riam Dean, a British law student taken off the shop floor after her prosthetic arm was discovered, won a whopping 25,000 pound lawsuit.

Where women are concerned, Abercrombie is all about perpetuating the unhealthy pursuit of thinness. A Jezebel writer talks about being in the inpatient unit of a hospital in treatment for anorexia next to a woman who was 40 lbs underweight and so ill she needed to be tube-fed 24 hours a day. This woman confessed to the writer that she'd been recruited by Abercrombie and Fitch a week before being admitted to the hospital : she went to an Abercrombie store where the manager told her she had the ideal look the store was after. (Desperately ill and eating disordered? Ah, we love that look.)

Oh, Abercrombie. If you're not making racist t-shirts ("two wongs can make it white") you're busy perpetuating the same harmful myths that not only make any non-thin, non-white, and disabled women feel bad about themselves, but encourage a whole cultural viewpoint that celebrates "all-American" as "all-white, all-thin, all-perfectly abled, all the time." It's encouraging to see TIME call Abercrombie out as "the world's worst recession brand" but it'd be even greater to see women call it out as the world's most unfriendly, body and diversity-hating brand.

Photo: Sgd