The Longreads Blog

A Brief History of PR Disasters By Abercrombie & Fitch

In many ways, Jeffries’s most impressive accomplishment was not the signature Abercrombie style but the signature Abercrombie attitude, with its bluntly brash appeal. As one former employee put it, “The only bad news was no news. Controversy was what you wanted.” Consequently, the list of PR disasters past and present is too lengthy to fully detail, but the more notable flare-ups include the following: the quickly recalled line of Asian-themed T-shirts, which featured men in rice-paddy hats and cartoonishly slanted eyes; a line of thongs, marketed to girls as young as 10, with the words wink-wink on the crotch; an issue of A&F Quarterly that included a user’s guide to having oral sex in a movie theater; and the disingenuous joke-apology to critics that appeared in the same periodical in 2003: “If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian-American Association, N.O.W.”

In 2010, Michael Stephen Bustin, a former pilot of the Abercrombie corporate jet, filed a lawsuit against Abercrombie in a Philadelphia federal court, claiming he’d been unfairly dismissed because of his age. (He is in his mid-fifties.) Abercrombie & Fitch settled with Bustin, but not quickly enough to prevent the disclosure, by Bustin’s lawyers, of a 40-plus page Abercrombie “aircraft standards” manual, a copy of which leaked online.

Included in the manual are rules on crew apparel (the male staff, hand-selected by a New York modeling agency, were to wear a “spritz” of Abercrombie 41 cologne and boxer briefs under their jeans), the specific song to be played on return flights (“Take Me Home,” by Phil Collins), and the way the toilet paper in the aft lavatory should be rolled (never exposed; end square neatly folded). If Jeffries makes a request, the crew is always to respond with “No problem” instead of “Yes” or “Sure.”

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and in New York magazine, Matthew Shaer looks at the rise and fall of retailer Abercrombie & Fitch, which is attempting to reposition itself in a the current market, where stores like H&M have found success. A+F CEO Mike Jeffries helped rebrand the company in the ’90s to much success, but has unable to keep the company up with a changing consumer market. Read more business stories at Longreads.

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Photo: Daniel Spills

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Sponsored Longreads: Read an Excerpt from 'The Children,' by David Halberstam

The following is a free excerpt from Open Road Media’s The Children, the acclaimed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Halberstam on the early days of the civil rights movement. The below excerpt focuses on Diane Nash and the Nashville sit-ins, which started on this day, February 13, in 1960. Buy the book now.

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"She's been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period." Great Dialogue from Great Writers

Nancy spoke to me as if she were my mother. “Margaret dear—you can’t possibly miss Laura Danker. The big blonde with the big you know whats!”

“Oh, I noticed her right off,” I said. “She’s very pretty.”

“Pretty!” Nancy snorted. “You be smart and stay away from her. She’s got a bad reputation.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My brother said she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose.”

“And,” Janie added, “she’s been wearing a bra since fourth grade and I bet she gets her period.”

—Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, as quoted in Ten Authors Who Write Great Dialogue ( Meredith Borders, Lit Reactor). Borders’ column also features passages from Jeffrey Eugenides, Barbara Kingsolver and Elmore Leonard, among others.

Photo: New York Public Library, Flickr

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Happy Darwin Day: Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben Talk Mass Extinction

KOLBERT

Wherever you have sunlight and nutrients, something will be able to survive. There’s a lot of versatility, but it won’t be what was there before, and that will have an effect of its own. Some things will do really well and some things may surprise us. We’re in uncharted territory, but we seem hell-bent on finding out what a simplified world will look like. And that’s a question I’ve got for you—what does motivate us to take action, to reverse this process as best we can? What gets people to make that step?

In Prospect, Bill KcKibben interviews Elizabeth Kolbert on her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Kolbert argues humans are driving what may be the most cataclysmic extinction ever, and imagines a future, vanished world. (Hint: we won’t be there.) Read more on science in the Longreads archive.

Image: Keene Public Library, Flickr

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"Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank." —Shirley Temple Black, Child Star and Diplomat

”It wasn’t until the next day that my guide came back and told me: ‘You will not see Mr. Dubcek, and you will not leave from the airport today. We have been invaded.’ There were tears in her eyes.”

”I was hungry, and on the way up to the roof of the hotel to try to see what was happening, I took some of the leftover hard rolls from the breakfast trays people had put outside their rooms,” she said. ”I looked down and saw tanks all around the hotel, and their guns were pointing up.

”That night, after curfew, in the lobby looking out at the street, I saw a Czech middle-aged woman shaking her fist at the soldiers. She was shot in the stomach and went down. That was a bad sight.”

”Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank,” she observed. She was here for the subdued anniversary observances, marked by quiet demonstrations by a few thousand people and the police arrests of 350 of them.

—Craig R. Whitney interviewing Shirley Temple Black, the then newly minted US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, about her experience in Prague in the late 1960’s (“Prague Journal; Shirley Temple Black Unpacks a Bag of Memories,” Sept. 11, 1989).

Photo: Boston Public Library, Flickr.

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How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson

I met Nicholas Shaxson last summer at a gay barbecue in Berlin. Shaxson isn’t gay, but he’s the kind of dude who will rock up at a gay barbecue, wife and child in tow, and unself-consciously eat sausage and ribs with the inverts. We discovered, lounging on a blanket, that we both work for small NGOs, live in Berlin, and dabble in journalism. And we both work on issues (me: corporate human rights violations; him: tax havens) that the rest of the world manages to ignore for most of their day.

Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.

Here’s how it works: If you’re a Russian oil billionaire or a Nigerian bureaucro-baron and you want to hide some of your money from national taxes and local scrutiny, London real estate is a great place to stash it. All you need to do is establish a holding company, park it offshore and get a-buying. Here’s Shaxson:

These buyers use offshore companies for three big and related reasons: tax, secrecy, and “asset protection.” A property owned outright becomes subject to various British taxes, particularly capital-gains and taxes on transfers of ownership. But properties held through offshore companies can often avoid these taxes. According to London lawyers, the big reason for using these structures has been to avoid inheritance taxes. […]

But secrecy, for many, is at least as important: once a foreign investor has avoided British taxes, then offshore secrecy gives him the opportunity to avoid scrutiny from his own country’s tax—or criminal—authorities too. Others use offshore structures for “asset protection”—frequently, to avoid angry creditors. That seems to be the case with a company called Postlake Ltd.—registered on the Isle of Man—which owns a $5.6 million apartment on the fourth floor [of One Hyde Park].

Shaxson argues that this phenomenon has taken over the U.K. real estate market—extortionate penthouses for the ultrarich sitting empty while the rest of us outbid each other for the froth below.

Shaxson’s piece was one of the best long-form pieces I read last year (I did in fact believe this before I met him, but you can take that with a grain of salt if you’d like), and last week I asked Shaxson to sit down with me for a proper conversation about how the story came about and whether it achieved what he wanted.

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How In-N-Out Withstood Competition By Not Changing Anything and Taking Care of Employees

Under her three-year tenure, In‑N‑Out has expanded—cautiously—into Texas, a move she says has been in the works for a decade. That foray brought one rare, considerably less-than-daring change to the company’s formula: It added iced sweet tea to the menu. “We knew that everybody loves sweet tea there,” Snyder explains. “It’s not that hard. We just need to bring sugar in.” But don’t expect to see it on the menu in Orange County anytime soon, because, she says, “Texas is so separated from here.”

Instead, Snyder concentrates on subtle improvements. While she’s an iced-coffee lover, she has never considered adding that or any other fancy coffee drinks to the menu as McDonald’s has. Instead, she set out to improve In‑N‑Out’s basic brew. “I went to the [supplier’s] plant, and did the taste test, and learned about the beans, all the things related to coffee,” she says. “So now I feel like an educated coffee-ist.”

Similarly, she often takes a hand in what would seem like branding details too minor for the involvement of a CEO, such as supervising radio ads and overseeing the design of the classic car T-shirts the company sells in its gift store, in restaurants, and online. She runs teamwork-building workshops and conferences that, at another company, would be the province of a human resources subordinate.

Instead of focusing on the size of her restaurant chain, “I put more thought into how we’re going to maintain the family atmosphere and the closeness,” she says. “We do a lot more that we weren’t doing, getting everyone together more.” Indeed, In‑N‑Out Burger has a reputation for taking unusually good care of its workforce. According to the Web publication Business Insider, In‑N‑Out ranked highest among 13 fast-food chains in pay, with workers starting at $10.50 an hour—nearly $2 more than its next-closest competitor.

In Orange Coast magazine, Patrick Kiger profiles Lynsi Snyder, the 31-year-old president of In-N-Out Burger who is maintaining the legacy of the company her grandparents founded in the 1940s. Read more profiles at Longreads.

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Photo: Jeremy Hall

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‘The Millionaire Couple Who Will End Divorce’ Says Three Things Will Keep Your Marriage Intact

Harville and Helen take turns talking and clicking through a PowerPoint that includes slides in both English and Spanish. Helen explains that half the people here tonight are the “draggers,” the other half are the “draggees,” and that it will actually be that second group that’s more excited by the end of the workshop. “See,” she says. “Your partner already decided that you’re the problem.”

Harville goes over what couples generally want from a relationship, which he boils down to: safety, a connected feeling, and joy. Helen explains that even if we forget everything else, they hope we remember three things. One idea: that childhood influences marriages. One skill: the ability to have safe conversations. One decision: a commitment to zero negativity.

We both bristle a bit at that last one.

-From 2014, writer Michael Mooney and his fiancée participate in couples counseling with Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt, for D Magazine.

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Photo: emdot, Flickr

There Are Three Types of People Who Can Afford to Write Books

Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter. These are the kinds of book that particularly benefit from the attention of editors and marketers, and that attract gifted people to publishing, despite the pitiful salaries. Without sufficient advances, many writers will not be able to undertake long, difficult, risky projects. Those who do so anyway will have to expend a lot of effort mastering the art of blowing their own horn. “Writing is being outsourced, because the only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere—academics, rich people, celebrities,” Colin Robinson, a veteran publisher, said. “The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.

George Packer, in The New Yorker, on Amazon and the book business. Read more from Packer.

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Photo: chasblackman, Flickr

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College Football Star Michael Sam on How He Was Treated After Coming Out to His Teammates

Mr. Sam played down any repercussions, saying he had the full support of teammates, coaches and administrators. One teammate, he said, accompanied him to a gay pride event in St. Louis last summer, and others went with him to gay bars.

“Some people actually just couldn’t believe I was actually gay,” Mr. Sam said. “But I never had a problem with my teammates. Some of my coaches were worried, but there was never an issue.”

One lingering issue, Mr. Washington said, was trying to get players to change their casual language in the locker room. Loosely lobbed homophobic remarks suddenly had a specific sting.

Mr. Sam played down that, too. For him, coming out to his football team was a positive step, on a path that seems as if it will lead to the N.F.L.

In The New York Times, John Branch reports about college football star Michael Sam, who came out as gay to his teammates at Mizzou. Sam is on track to become the first publicly gay player in the NFL. See also: “Chris Kluwe Takes a Stand.”

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Photo: Komunews

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