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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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Cool Like Me: Are Black People Cooler Than White People?

Longreads Pick

From the late, great Might Magazine, Donnell Alexander on the racial roots of cool:

I’m the kinda nigga who’s so cool that my neighbor bursts into hysterical tears whenever I ring her doorbell after dark. She is a new immigrant who has chosen to live with her two roommates in our majority-black Los Angeles neighborhood so that, I’m told, she can “learn about all American cultures.” But her real experience of us is limited to the space between her Honda and her front gate; thus, much of what she has to go on is the vibe of the surroundings and the images emanating from the television set that gives her living room a minty cathode glow. As such, I’m a cop-show menace and a shoe commercial demi-god—one of the rough boys from our ‘hood and the living, breathing embodiment of hip hop flava. And if I can’t fulfill the prevailing stereotype, the kids en route to the nearby high school can. The woman is scared in a cool world. She smiles as I pass her way in the light of day, unloading my groceries or shlepping my infant son up the stairs. But at night, when my face is visible through the window of her door lit only by the bulb that brightens the vestibule, I, at once familiar and threatening, am just too much.

Source: Might magazine
Published: Nov 1, 1997
Length: 10 minutes (2,582 words)

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.

Read the story

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Photo: emdot, Flickr

What Happens When Public Complaining Becomes a Career Aspiration

The Op-Ed Economy meanwhile means that whatever the event, we’re treated to what is essentially “commentariat tryouts.” Twitter was already the free-floating comment section ready to wrap itself around whatever the topic is. But once CNN began reading tweets aloud on-air sometime around the first election of President Obama, and op-ed columns spread across every site, the auditions began in earnest. Now Twitter is filled with people hoping their complaints are favorited, commented on, favstarred, and viral. Complaint as aspiration—everyone competing to be the star complainer. And increasingly, to that end, the key players in each scandal are suddenly accountable for something they tweeted in 2009, 2011, their Facebook from high school. Every blog they ever abandoned is combed for something to take them down and prove they are not good enough, pure enough, to keep their status. All of it is conducted in the manner of possible oppo research, as if it were all a campaign for president. It’s no longer enough to expose politicians and celebrities and reality stars—social media is increasingly everyone trying to be a reality star, because reality entertainment has become one of the few remaining ways you can transcend your economic class.

Writer Alexander Chee, on Twitter outrage. Read more from Chee in the Longreads Archive.

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Image via BlurMarTen, Twitter

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The Bohemians: The San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature

Ben Tarnoff | The Bohemians, Penguin Press | March 2014 | 46 minutes (11,380 words)

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

 

For our Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, the book by Ben Tarnoff, published by The Penguin Press. Read more…

What Happens When Ronan Farrow Interviews Miley Cyrus

Beyond music, Cyrus is expanding her interests. After her breakup, she tells me, she asked Diane Martel, the director responsible for Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” videos, to “just completely, like, drown me in new movies and books and art. I lived in Nashville, where that shit isn’t accessible.” We flip through a book of photographs by Cindy Sherman. “Check it,” she says as we arrive at Sherman’s Untitled #276, in which the artist poses as a kind of grungy Cinderella. “Lady Gaga completely ripped that off.” Cyrus is finding her taste in movies, too. She tells me she just watched the Tom Cruise 1990 drama Days of Thunder three nights in a row. She’s also newly enamored with the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I’m Blanche to a T, complete psycho,” she burbles cheerfully. I stare at her. I literally cannot imagine anyone less like Tennessee Williams’s fragile, lost Blanche DuBois. “Every time I watched her,” she goes on, “I was always like, ‘That’s me!’ ” If Cyrus is a Vivien Leigh performance, it’s Scarlett O’Hara in the early scenes of Gone With the Wind. She’s impetuous, beautiful, smarter than many give her credit for, slow to listen, quick to talk, adept at using her sexuality to her own ends. As for the world beyond the arts, Cyrus is leery.

—Ronan Farrow, on Miley Cyrus in W Magazine.  Read more profiles in the Longreads archive.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014

Longreads Pick

Here is Lynn Hirschberg’s 2008 New York Times Magazine profile of the actor, who was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan:

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Published: Feb 2, 2014
Length: 29 minutes (7,250 words)

Philip Seymour Hoffman: 1967-2014

“In my mid–20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, to Lynn Hirschberg, in a 2008 New York Times Magazine profile. Hoffman was found dead Feb. 2 in Manhattan.

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Photo: justinhoch, Flickr

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‘So What Do You Do?’: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Politico, Vela Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Mother Jones.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 2, 2014