Interestingly, it also highlights how male beauty and fashion can be conflated with toxic gay culture.
GAY BLACK PORN STORY MOVIE
If you didn't know that Abercrombie & Fitch was created to exclude anyone outside specific white collegiate aesthetic, I encourage you to watch this movie and marvel at how ideas like wanting to depict the "all-American" look can be used to justify blatant racism when it is juxtaposed with rules that discourage POC or non-white cultural imagery. This segment produced my favorite line of the movie: "You know you've crossed the line when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks you've crossed the line of employment discrimination." In this case, the court sided with Samantha Elauf, who was refused a job because of the head scarf she wears for religious reasons. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, which paved the way for states to create labor and employment laws protecting historically oppressed people. Supreme Court case Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. (Unless they're in support of certain sports franchises, that is.) It also highlights a precedent set by the U.S. "Jokes" like the "Juan too Many" shirts with sombrero clad drunkards and "Two Wongs make a right" shirts with equally offensive buck toothed "Asians" that look more like Jerry Lewis, once proudly sold by A&F are no longer accepted in retail society. What it does do is show how far we have come as a society in recognizing passive racism. Alas, this documentary doesn't come close to inspiring those questions. Maybe after this documentary, we will look at Tesla, Apple and Humboldt theater and begin to see the lack of representation as affecting the quality of the product being fed to us so we can reconsider what we support.
Perhaps it is a meant to make us to think more deeply about what we consume and how we consume it, and demand more. Perhaps the movie was supposed to be investigative journalism diving into how society is blinded by fads whose coolness is in not caring about inclusion. Maybe the wash-board-abbed, "all-American" college boys engaged in homoerotic poses in black and white billboards outside shrouded stores oozing pheromone-laced cologne and throbbing music hypnotized people into seeing a POC where there was none. Why is White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch on Netflix a poignant documentary? Was it supposed to be a piece of expository journalism explaining the nature of the brand? I was waiting for a surprise, a twist, a revelation but the only blatant one was that some people didn't realize this brand built on exclusion and racism is, in fact, exclusionary and racist. WHITE HOT: THE RISE & FALL OF ABERCROMBIE & FITCH.