Making Kids Sexy: Sexualized Youth, Adult Anxieties, and Abercrombie & Fitch

Even the least critical consumers of media images must admit that there is something different to how Abercrombie & Fitch does business. While many companies over the last century have used sex and innuendo to enhance the desirability of their products and increase sales, Abercrombie & Fitch at times appears to be selling the sexualization of youth itself, with its clothing lines as the simple run-off or side effect of consuming the lifestyle associated with their products. Whether it is in their magalouges, at their clothing stores, or on their company website, the connection between Abercrombie & Fitch and sexualized youth is difficult to ignore. Abercrombie and Fitch is not a small company, producing images and representations of youth and sexuality in isolation. The company itself is over 115 years old, and in the 2007 fiscal year, Abercrombie & Fitch posted $3.8 billion in net sales. Therefore it falls under the same economic principles and factors that affect other major corporations in the marketplace. Its actions and goals are always influenced by its priority, which is to make money. However, because of its sheer size and its saturation in the marketplace, their advertisements also maintain a social role (and not necessarily by choice). Because Abercrombie and Fitch is a business, it is under no obligation to respect the social role that it plays and therefore create unbiased advertisements. And since ads don‟t happen by accident, consumers cannot lose sight of the fact that advertisements are ideological texts. Ideological texts always come with a bias and an unequal power dynamic. Remembering that ideology works on both explicit and implicit levels, images and representations of youth at Abercrombie and Fitch have tended to focus at the explicit level on a romanticized, sexualized, and innocent youthfulness. This nostalgic representation of youth presents youth not as a biological stage in life, but as a lifestyle and a feeling, no different than happiness or wealth, and something to which everyone should aspire. However, implicitly, representations of youth in advertisements have tended to draw on the deeper psychological motivations of adolescence that, it was suggested by discourses in adolescent psychology in the early 20 th century are to be experienced by everyone, namely the competing sexual identities and desire for approval from the peer group. 1