Abercrombie & Fitch's Marketing strategy is shaming fat people

Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries doesn't like ugly people... ???

In other baffling news this week, Abercrombie & Fitch explains why they don't carry women's clothing in sizes larger than 10: they dont want fat people wearing their clothes. CEO Mike Jeffries is quoted as saying (among other things), "Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely." An article from the Elite Daily website has this quote, "Robin Lewis, author of The New Rules of Retail, spoke to Business Insider about the kind of people Jeffries wants advertising his brand. 'He doesn’t want larger people shopping in his store, he wants thin and beautiful people,' Lewis said. 'He doesn’t want his core customers to see people who aren’t as hot as them wearing his clothing.'" There are a lot of implications here, for example that fat people; a) cannot be attractive, b) cannot be cool, c) have less friends, and d) are an undesirable group to be associated with, as a company. It's also worth noting that while sizes over 10 are not carried in the women's department, the men's section carries XL and XXL sizes, supposedly to cater to larger, athletic men. There's been a lot of backlash on social media sites (here, here, and here, although this gifset was probably my favorite), and an open letter was published on the Huffington Post website. 

I think that this is a despicable message going out to A&F's main target area: Young Adults. Young people (especially young women) today are bombarded by messages and images telling them that they are not good enough the way they are, that they should wear make-up, lose weight, even get plastic surgery because your outward appearance is the most important thing in the world, more so than how kind you are or what's inside your mind and heart.