Abercrombie and Fitch, a retail chain catering to teenagers and young adults, recently opened a store in Provo. Our teenage daughters were excited and happy to see them open. A welcome addition to Utah, we thought. We shopped, we bought and we subscribed to their catalogue, A&F Quarterly. A catalog geared to teen buyers, we assumed it would be a quality catalog to sell quality products.
The A&F Christmas issue, "Ring It In," brought more than holiday cheer into our teenagers' lives. A&F has taken the theme "sex sells" to the next level. We are still trying to figure out how a naked young woman riding an elephant sells clothes. One astute seventh-grader stated, "Wouldn't they sell more clothes if the models were dressed?"It is not enough for A&F to have naked models and partially clad teenagers modeling, they enrage parents with their New Year's resolutions by the A&F editorial staff, such as take naked pictures off the Web. They also included a list of party games for teenagers this holiday season. They included: Get naked with 200 of your closest friends, Strip Yahtzee, Porno Celebrity, Dirty Scrabble and Naked Twister.
It's all there in A&F's Christmas Quarterly. When we called to express our disappointment on their blatant uses of sex to sell clothes to kids, the message we got was "don't subscribe." Well, we'd like to let A&F know we won't subscribe, and we also won't shop and support a company that has such little regard for the well-being of the teenagers they sell to.
Brad and Heather Oakeson
Sandy