Deconstructing Abercrombie!

Abercrombie and Fitch's new spring catalog makes you wonder if the clothier company famous for dressing college kids to look their prettiest isn't just a public relations firm hired by some national college frat consortium.

The theme of this season's catalog, "On Spring Break, Looking for Love" is a dead giveaway. Flip through the pages of publication and what do you see?

Exactly.

See Blond Boy play frisbee in between his legs. See Taller Blond Boy caress his lady-friend. See Pretty Boy hang in the tree like Curious George. Life is wonderful, care of Abercrombie and Fitch, and this a notion that you can buy into only if you buy into their line of clothing, replete with the standard flannels, worn-hats and sandals.

But with Abercrombie and Fitch, the marketing strategy to sell clothes does not rest solely with pictures of beautiful people cavorting in careless abandon. Rather, the company's is an attempt to sell the college lifestyle and attitude, both that, according to the catalog, revolve around Greek letters, Betty & Veronica comic books and morning-after remedies like Tylenol. Even though the catalog does sell women's clothing, essays entitled "10 Things to Help You Score" and "10 Things You'll Regret" make this magazine much like the restaurant Hooters: Women are welcome, but they'll just get made fun of. (There's even a cartoon page called "Scoping" in which a jeep full of bare-chested males drinking beers hoot at a blushing female.)

It's as if the clothing company has become the automatic arbiter of heterosexual activity, fashioning a personality to match the perfect wardrobe: Preppy meets perverted. We first buy their clothes, then we may become as obnoxious as the characters in their catalog. Here are these tough 'n rough meatheads on a spring break road trip performing as exemplars of straight males in their late teens, early twenties.

Abercrombie touches its magazine with a week's worth of fabricated diary entries by a male (of course) Cornell student that reads as if it belongs in some college frat weekly magazine entitled, say, Hook-Up. Here's my fave: "Somewhere between the late-night skinny dip and the early morning screwdriver, I am hurling off the side of our sun deck at the hotel and everyone is crying to Fiona Apple's "Never is a Promise." The long road to becoming a Promise Keeper, I think, begins here. Somehow, I make it to bed, alone of course."

Either the folks up at A&F's headquarters are all former writers for The Young and the Restless or they just don't think an Ivy Leaguer can get some in Florida come Spring Break. Either way, the catalog ends on a note that makes itself a cross between Seventeen and GQ. Who knows? Soon, we may end up with the chance to buy a pair of Abercrombie underwear with a complimentary box of the company's own brand of condoms. Talk about something to help you score.

But I'm not done yet. And neither is this magazine. (Yes, the company has the gall to charge interested customers $5 for their A&F Quarterly as if it bears semblance to a more famous men's fashion magazine.) After making a request for an interview with management, I was quickly put on hold to some rock musak of Counting Crows. I guess once I told them I was a reporter from Princeton they assumed hipness. Well, they were wrong; I'm not a big fan of "Sha La La Las" and I don't particularly enjoy listening to the Counting Crows, especially while on deadline.

But we digress. To the suspecting eye, the magazine emits more than just tones of heterosexuality. Young boys in their glory days may adorn the magazine's pictorial sections, but we must question if their presence is mere embellishment or modeling of clothing (or lack thereof in most cases).

The front cover that has been recently advertised in the news pages of the 'Prince has a bright-eyed young man donning some hybrid of a cowboy-straw hat. Open up to the two-page photo layout and you'll find something a little more titillating: musclebound frat-guys (it's a fair assumption) pulling, tugging, armpit-grabbing on a sandy beach while their friends, these voyeurs, watch in laughter and excitement.

Flip to page 76 and you can find "Biff" (it's a fair assumption) posing in an A&F windbreaker staring into the eyes of his viewer. Decked in a pink-flower Hawaiin lei – not around his neck but around the top of his head – Biff's right thumb is seducing us. It's pulling down the band of his underwear, flaunting his midriff and almost showing much more. Such a tease. (But, thank God he's blond.) It all reminds me of that beach volleyball scene in Top Gun where Kenny Loggins chimes in with "Playing with Them Boys." We're on a highway, that's for sure, a highway to the danger-zone of hypocrisy.

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So let's get it straight. Disrobing instinct's caution, the male models strap on their Abercrombie teeshirts and primarily are photographed holding each other in precarious, homoerotic positions: One guy, eyes-closed and on his knees in the sand, buttresses another male on each of his arms and shoulders. Four males are shot in a two page layout as if they are in a Hawaiin luau. Anyone actually interested in purchasing the boxers can barely see them hidden underneath none other than – you got it – grass skirts.

How do we explain this apparent contradiction between the implications the articles project and those of the photographs? "Maybe the editors are trying to suggest that there are other ways for men relating to men than what is represented in the articles," says Mimi Ferraro '98, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Peer Educator on campus.

But all of this is particularly hard to swallow considering the source. Notorious for dressing tomorrow's Varsity Lacrosse Captain, Ab-ercrombie and Fitch comprises the wardrobe of the All-American Male, the guy who lives up to the saying, "boys will be boys." But, with these suggestive pictures, perhaps A&F is taking strides in the right direction. Even though their articles practically condone a misogynistic Spring Break, the photos may be their way of injecting homosexuality into mainstream, blue-blood, homophobic culture.

Ironic?

Or, it could have been a release of some unconsious instincts, as Freud – and Ferraro – would have it: "Within the gay community, people acknowledge that often the most homophobic people are those who are most afraid of their sexuality," the peer educator told me earlier this week.

So if the spring has got you down, your fashion sense is offtrack these days and really, you've lost a sense of identity – who you really are, then look to the A&F Quarterly. And if you want to join in the fun, send in a picture of yourself cavorting with pals in various states of undress.

Hey, as the magazine says, "We've shown you our package, now show us yours."