Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Resurrected A&F Quarterly

Personally, I always enjoyed the A&F Quarterly and viewed Abercrombie & Fitch's discontinuance of the publication as a surrender to the busy bodies of the Christian Right who always view the human body as something dirty and shameful. If you don't like the A&F Quarterly, simply don't buy it. And if you're worried about your little darlings seeing it, then know where your children are. The irony is that the little kiddies can see far, far worse nowadays on the Internet and elsewhere. I'm glad that the self-anointed moral police have lost another battle. As readers may have noticed, A&F style photos are what I like to use on this blog. Both Fashionista and New York Magazine have coverage on the resurrected publication. Here are highlights from New York Magazine:
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On Saturday, the A&F Quarterly — a catalogue you can buy! — returned after a seven-year hiatus. To buy yours, you would have had to reserve a copy online and then pick it up in the store between the hours of 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. — the time restrictions perhaps being Abercrombie's attempt to ensure you'd enjoy the pleasure of buying their marketing materials in broad daylight, perhaps also forcing you to bring them to brunch or happy hour where other people would see them. Once you were in possession of the catalogue, a red warning label assaulted your eyes with a reminder that the pages within the plastic wrapping contained adult content and nudity only appropriate for people 18 years old or older.
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[T]he new A&F Quarterly is pretty much exactly like the old one featuring Bruce Weber's photos of gorgeous young men and a few token chicks in various states of playful undress. If you didn't know it was from 2010, it could easily have been from 2003, or 1998 or whenever, which, depending on your point of view is either comforting or disappointing. Conceptually, however, it represents the roots of Abercrombie's current business woes as the store remains mired in outdated aesthetic concepts that it refused to abandon.
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But on to the pictures! After all, there are hardly any clothes in the book anyway, and with the whole afternoon at our disposal, we decided to do the Concerned Parents of America a favor and count the instances of nudity that necessitated that bossy warning sticker.
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It's hardly hard-core porn, but at $10 a copy it's certainly priced like it, and while there is no actual full frontal nudity, there is plenty that without a strategically placed hand, leg or even a big black dot, would easily qualify.
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A few more photos can be found here.

1 comment:

Tempest Nightingale LeTrope said...

My son is twenty now, but if he had seen that publication when he was but a wee tyke I hardly think it would have scarred his sanity. This society is so messed up. They worry about the kiddies seeing a picture of a naked person--not even in a sexual context. But on groups like Facebook, violent and horrific images are often displayed, and one must fight to get them removed. Images of actual suicides, gory war deaths, and animal mutilations. Now these I wouldn't want my child to see. I wouldn't even want my adult child to be exposed to them! But Facebook instead banishes photos of women breast feeding as obscene. How ass backwards is that?