🟧 Abercrombie & Fitch is back. Don't hold your nose.
Embrace trendiness in menswear retail.
Nate Gallant: Though you may have lost track of it since high school, Abercrombie and Fitch's revival is more than complete. It has, as some have noticed, come back from several kinds of cultural death and irrelevance. After a visit through the very overwhelming Tyson's Galleria mall location the other day in Northern Virginia, I would argue A+F is now approaching a place in the menswear market that has been missing for some time, ever since preppy died one of its own intermittent deaths in the late 2000s. A+F is now something like Aritzia for masc fashion.
Aritzia, for those unfamiliar, is a Canadian women’s fashion brand. Walking into one of its stores is like opening a femme fashion-oriented Instagram Discover page. Every trend is on display at once, no garment goes untouched. There are frills upon frills and matching sets abound. This kind of hyperaware trendiness has been absent from menswear and masc fashion retail more generally in the US.
A basics brand like Uniqlo or even the slightly more upmarket Everlane often displays an enormous discrepancy in the trendiness of the masc versus femme styles. You will find Issey Miyake pleat dupes and a variety of pant cuts marketed for women, while the men’s side of the store has one style of sweater, one t-shirt, and a bunch of technical outerwear. (There’s such a thing as too many basics.) At the same time, J. Crew and the like have become a hair too preppy to really sit at the Instagram-driven center of progressive fashion. The brand is neither particularly up- nor down-market. Theory, at the higher end, is more of-the-moment, but so is Forever 21 or Shein at the low end.
That’s where A+F comes in. The store stocks the obligatory camp-collar button-up, the newish fuck-the-skinny-jeans look of the everyday cargo pant, the button-up sweater-polo, the nearly grandma's couch-patterned embroidered dress shirt, and perfectly oversized vintage NBA tees. These pieces are relatively accessible and quite well-fitting in a panoply of sizing options, perfect for those who want to match their real-world appearance to a social-media aesthetic. These are clothes that, even to a non-social media user, seem perfect as a TikTok uniform. I think it is both interesting in its cultural moment and desirable in its median level of trendiness (though this inevitably requires a little guesswork in algorithmic culture).
These styles are not wholly cutting-edge; they were arguably trendiest perhaps four or five years ago, or whenever Justin Bieber first appeared before us as a ‘70s fuckboy. One could have always looked around the runway shows and T Magazine ads and then hit Etsy or medium to big-city vintage stores to find clothing from whatever decade designers decided it was time to revive. Those with thousands of dollars a year of disposable income to burn on clothing could always afford to let fashion aggregators curate these trends for them. But this generous presentation of menswear aesthetics feels relatively new at the A+F price point.
We’re in an acknowledged moment of millennial nostalgia in fashion; the scene is veritably sweaty with it. Thus it seems not coincidental that a brand so associated with the 2000s high-school experience would be reinvented. The name recognition is there, and enough time has passed that we’ve forgotten the dysmorphia-inducing photos and Dennis Feinstein-level aggressive cologne. It’s uncool enough to become cool.