Undercover tells all: What's it really like to work at the new Abercrombie & Fitch store ?
By TOM MITCHELSON
Two young, shirtless men in low-slung jeans greet you at the door. Disco music pounds out, the air is full of a sickly sweet scent and it is so dark, customers get lost and panic. This is shopping Abercrombie & Fitch style. Savile Row will never be the same.
I've been working undercover there after I took a job as an in-store model at the multi-billion dollar U.S. clothing company's new London store - their first venture into Europe.
My aim was to report from the inside. It happened by chance. You don't see many Canadian woman in turquoise wellies on public transport in London, so I had already noticed the store's talent scout when she noticed me, at a London Tube station. I was curious. So was she.
"You've got just the right look to come and work for Abercrombie & Fitch" she told me. I was taken aback, flattered, but had no idea what she meant.
:: Hello how are you?: Three of the A&F in-store models ::
"Fantastic" I replied. Abercrombie & Fitch? The name rang a bell. Shortbread? Why would a biscuit firm want to employ me?
She explained that Abercrombie & Fitch was a clothing store and that they were hiring "models" to "just hang out" around the shop, wearing the company's clothing.
The penny dropped. I'd seen those risque; posters of a muscular man with a builder's bottom adorning London buses. I knew this homoerotic campaign has caused a stir.
This, I realised, was the American chain whose use of blatant sex to market their U.S. preppy style has attracted critics as well as custom. They promise a store full of "gorgeous kids".
:: Tom Mitchelson worked undercover at the West End store ::
And this woman was asking me to be one of them. Was this her job, then - hanging around Tube stations offering jobs to anyone she fancied the look of? I wondered if I looked particularly unemployed. She asked what I did. I told her I was a freelance writer but had some time to spare. She gave me a number and told me to call.
The interview room at the Abercrombie & Fitch headquarters was packed. The woman interrogator asked which three words I'd use to describe myself.
I repeated what the girl before me had said "I'm approachable and friendly". My interviewer smiled and wrote this down.
She informed us that the company had a "tagline" which we would have to use when greeting customers. She explained, very seriously, that it was, "Hello, how are you?"
"How did you come up with that?" I asked. She said a company of marketing consultants had worked intensively at developing it.
They wanted to audition me to see if I could deliver the line - this was make or break. "Hello, how are you?!" I said clearly. "Very good" she reassured me.
I had cleared my first hurdle and said four words in the right order, a test that floored some of my fellow-would-be-models - honestly.
The interviewer then asked the assembled clutch of giggly, naive, underfed boys and girls - the bony and the beautiful - what they knew about Abercrombie & Fitch.
Nobody mentioned the story that A&F supposedly sold Ernest Hemmingway the gun he used to shoot himself.
And no one mentioned the homoerotic nature of the ad campaign or the $40million outofcourt settlement in a racial and ethnic discrimination case bought by 10,000 litigants in the U.S.
One girl said she thought the store was a bit like GAP. That was the end of her. A week later the phone rang. I'd got the job. Would I come to an orientation day?
This turned out to be a crash-course in the way to hang about. We should be friendly, outgoing and portray a sexy image, they said.
Next came a lecture from a member on how to prevent clothes being stolen. "Be vigilant" suggested one of my colleagues. "No. You must never touch the customers," he said, alarmed. I think he thought vigilant was like vigilante.
We were instructed how to spot a shoplifter. Rather than confront him we should try to persuade him to buy the item as opposed to stealing it.
"I couldn't help noticing you've put a pair of jeans down your jacket, they would go very well with our new range of shirts, would you like a look?"
While I was lining up to collect the jeans - so tight I couldn't use the pockets - polo shirt and flipflops that all A&F workers wear on duty, I saw the Canadian woman who had recruited me.
"Glad you came. I thought you might write about this".
"No", I lied. A date was fixed for training. But then I got a call to work next day.
I arrive at 9am, untrained but undaunted, entering the store for the first time. It is a Grade II listed building, just off London's Savile Row.
The doors are not yet open for business and I face a sea of precisely placed and neatly-folded merchandise. Outside the sun shines, but in here it is so dark I keep tripping over my flip-flops.
The shop presents itself as if it were the coolest clothes shop on the planet. Aimed at 20-year-olds, the store offers polo shirts, hoodies and tight jeans. David Cameron would shop here if he thought he could get away with it.
My eyes accustom to the gloom. I confront tacky paintings of teenage boys stripped to the waist in frames that aspire to the look of a grand country house.
The theme of male near-nudity is pursued throughout. It has caused trouble. One edition of the company's catalogue had to be recalled after a storm over the explicitly naked photographs of young models.
And now I was joining the team. The in-store dance music reached a crescendo as the manager came over to talk to me.
"What?" I shouted desperately trying to lip-read. "You're working on the cash register," she shouted back.
"But I don't know how." "Haven't you been trained?" "No. Not at tills. I'm a model." "All models may be required to work the tills."
It was becoming clear what "model" actually amounted to - meant "shop assistant with come-hither looks".
My first customer, a mother with two teenage kids, purchased more than £500 of T-shirts. But by the time I had scanned and de-tagged all the items, removed the coat hangers, totalled the cost and figured out how to charge the credit card, 25 minutes had elapsed.
It was not long before I was relieved of my post at the till. Now I could "model" full time.
This meant greeting people and refolding the clothes disturbed by customers.
I tried out the tagline. "Hello, how are you," I said to a stressed looking middle-aged man. He looked at me suspiciously. More customers came into view and I repeated the line. Then a manager told me to keep "interacting".
"I am, I've spoken to everyone here".
"Yeah, but if you've said it once to someone, follow it up when you see them again. Say 'Hi, are you still all right?'"
This was mad. I didn't want to pester people. I also had no idea where things were, what we actually sold, what to do if we ran out of stock - or anything else of any use to the customer.
A woman asked if there were sizes available other than those on the shelves. "Probably" was the best I could come up with.
Next I really did get the promised training. I learned that David Beckham had come into the store. If I recognised a celebrity I was not to follow them around or ask for an autograph.
"What if I see Keith Chegwin?" I asked. The manager looked at me blankly. They clearly don't do jokes at Abercrombie & Fitch.
I threw myself even more furiously into my only practical function: pursuing customers zealously and refolding the moment they ruffled anything. Soon I couldn't stop. I was heading for an obsessive compulsive disorder.
One model told me he'd been instructed to smile till his jaw ached. The room was empty at the time: "What do they want me to smile at: the clothes?" he muttered.
The company told us it was an equal opportunity employer. Funny, because all its visible staff are young and beautiful.
The unattractive, the overweight and the disabled just don't seem to make it on to the shop floor. In fact, there is no lift and therefore no way for wheelchair users to work or shop upstairs.
As far as age goes, at 29 I was probably the oldest there. I thought that if the law permitted it, managers would have exercised quality-control over the customers, too, and I might be assigned to blow a whistle if anyone old or fat ventured in.
But employees who are not on public view are allowed to be slightly less attractive. The "impact team" is a group of workers who replenish the dwindling stock.
They are often on the shop floor but don't have to interact with customers in the same way. A manager told me: "The impact team don't need to show the visual image of the store."
She meant they could be a bit uglier. There were also the "overnighters" - nocturnal shelfstackers. Presumably it doesn't matter what they look like.
I don't get out of bed for less than £6.50. Fortunately this was A&F's hourly rate. They trade on the inexhaustable supply of beautiful dimwits for whom the excitement of being hired as "model" matters more than the pay scale. I got the impression that, ideally, they'd like us to pay them, rather than the other way round.
The men who stood semi-clothed at the entrance earned an extra £1 an hour. But they had the required A&F six-pack. The new way of selling clothes seems to be not wearing them.
Then there was the little clutch of dancers who have to jig around endlessly on a sort-of platform. Some of the customers thought this was cruel.
More importantly, customers quickly became frustrated when encountering a 45-minute queue for the changing rooms, and one shopper said the last thing she wanted when searching for her size was to have to ask a size zero model if she could try on a Large.
A & F is unlike other foreign stores that arrive in the UK and try to fit in. It is brash and all-American. But they do want to be posh. Association with the quality tailoring of Savile Row, the listed building and the statues and art work, rub uneasily against the overt use of sex to sell clothes.
There's nothing tasteful in halfnaked boys hanging around the store door. Or are we just too oldfashioned for this fusion of softcore porn and high-class pose?
As for me, I'm finished as an A&F store-boy, now I've gone to print. I can't say I mind.
You try placing a pair of blue jeans back on the right shelf among 20 other only slightly different jeans. Then try doing it in the dark, while looking sexy with an ever-ready "Hello, how are you?"
Since February 4, 2006