The Situation
Soft-porn styled Abercrombie & Fitch looks even less classy than Jersey Shorewith PR stunt
It looks like everyone isn't a fan of Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and his Jersey Shore castmates. Abercrombie & Fitch has released a statement describing how Sorrentino's use of its clothes could cause "significant damage" to its image.
I can only imagine what the A&F marketing meeting sounded like. Between discussing how "soft" the soft-core porn catalogs should be and figuring out where to deploy their armies of topless models (Vatican?), someone making a joke about paying the cast of Jersey Shore to stop wearing the brand must have sounded pretty funny.
"The Situation thinks we should pay him money to wear our clothes? We should pay him to not wear our clothes!" [Hearty chuckle.]
But it turns out that issuing a press release begging reality stars to stop wearing your clothes is just not that funny. Sorry, Abercrombie, but it comes off as asinine and a bit pathetic.
This just makes Abercrombie sound like a dick. Who wants to shop at a company that would mock you for daring to wear its clothes?
First of all, is the Jersey Shore cast wearing your clothes really that damaging to your business model? I guess when you have a brand based around selling $50 T-shirts to the "right" kind of teenagers, anyone who doesn't embody the white, All-American prepsters look is an issue. (Just ask plastic-surgery-obsessed CEO Mike Jeffries.) Maybe that's why Abercrombie keeps getting sued for discrimination.
If Abercrombie really wanted the cast to switch to American Eagle or Aéropostale, I'm sure a quiet offer with the right kind of dollar amount behind it could make that happen. I mean, Pauly D appears in a Miracle Whip commercial in which he says he hates Miracle Whip. They will take the money and the disdain and they will laugh all the way to the bank, or perhaps to the bar if that's closer.
Abercrombie probably thought this would be like when a fledgling Southwest Airlines issued an open letter to Raquel Welch offering her a job as a stewardess because she was young and sexy and fun. That made people think Southwest was young and sexy and fun, too! This just makes Abercrombie sound like a dick. Who wants to shop at a company that would mock you for daring to wear its clothes?
Finally, if I had been asked yesterday what kinds of clothes the stars of Jersey Shore wore, I would have said Ed Hardy, Juicy Couture, garbage bags and whatever else makes really high-end stripper fashion.
Now I know they wear Abercrombie & Fitch.