“There is something undeniably ghastly about the Abercrombie & Fitch billboards that go up when A&F begins building a flagship store at one end of Savile Row—in the Mayfair area of London which, we’re told, “is the tribal home of the gentleman.” True, some of us associate modern Mayfair more with rich Arabs and expensive call girls. Yet as the jackhammers bang on, and the elegantly dressed tailors gaze mournfully upon the invader’s pictorial wall of gargantuan, bare-chested male models with nipples the size of dinner plates, we recoil with horror, too. The irony—that A&F is itself a brand which used to have a nice pedigree as an outfitter of the sporting man, and wound up dressing little girls for jail bait—is no comfort at this point.”
