Abercrombie & Fitch — You’re Joking, Right?

By the mid-1990s, Abercrombie & Fitch had, under various owners, been selling high quality sporting and excursion gear for more 100 years.   Calling itself “The Greatest Sporting Goods Store in the World,” A&F outfitted Teddy Roosevelt’s African safaris and Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic.  Its patrons had included Clark Gable and Amelia Earhart, John F. Kennedy and Greta Garbo.  But after a bankruptcy and an only partially successful reboot, the company was ready for a serious rebranding.

So gone were the canoes and the elephant guns.  In their place:  A new and expensive clothing line designed for trendy, upscale young adults.  The new A&F was blatantly, proudly elitist.  “We go after the cool kids.  We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends,” said A&F’s CEO, Mike Jeffries.  “A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong.  Are we exclusionary?  Absolutely.”

For a decade, it worked beautifully.  Abercrombie was the hottest clothing brand in the country, thanks in no small part to its highly sexualized marketing, the buff, shirtless models at the door, and the Abercrombie Quarterly’s famously homoerotic photography by Bruce Weber.

But styles change, and A&F was hit hard by the Great Recession.  After almost three years of negative company comparable-store sales, Jeffries stepped down in December 2014.  It was time for another rebranding, which brings us to today.

The shirtless models are gone.  The stores are de-sexed.  The clothes and the image are more “egalitarian.”  And it looks like this:

WTF?  

Really?

Look at those clothes!  That’s Ty Ogunkoya, fronting for Abercrombie & Fitch’s big Fall 2016 Denim Campaign, and probably having second thoughts about his career and the glamourous life of a successful model.

Does A&F really believe that its customers will go for the homeless derelict look?

Is A&F simply recycling cast-offs from the dumpster in back of Goodwill Industries and slapping a high price tag on them?

Is “panhandler chic” a thing?

Granted, I’m not in A&F’s target demo—people over 25 who wore Abercrombie always seemed a little desperate—but I can’t see this as anything but a retail disaster.

Sansa Stark Meets the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

I used to post a regular item I called Sunday Morning — Victoriana of the Week.  Haven’t done that for a while, but here it is Sunday morning, and I’m reviving it for one day only.  Something showed up on my Tumblr feed that combines two of my favourite things, right up there with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens:  Pre-Raphaelite art and Game of Thrones.

A Swedish site called TimjanDesign has juxtaposed details of famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings with pictures of Sophie Turner, who’s otherwise known as Sansa Stark on GoT.  Here are a few of them.  Find more at the link.

If anyone ever makes a movie about the sad, tormented life of Lizzie Siddal, I’ve got a suggestion about who should play the lead.

2016 Cookery Project — Skillet Chicken with Creamy Sun Dried Tomato Sauce

Skillet Chicken with Creamy Sun Dried Tomato Sauce

This tasted Italian.  It would have surprised me if it hadn’t, since the sauce included sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, parmesan cheese, and fresh basil.

I’ve got three shelves full of cookbooks, not even counting don’t-try-this-at-home coffee table volumes like the cookbooks from Alinea, The French Laundry, The Fat Duck, and Eleven Madison Park, yet here I am again, getting a recipe from the web site Cooking Classy.  The internet makes it so easy!

A Corpse Flower Grows in Washington

A corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanum), also known as the most disgusting, foul-smelling plant in the world, is about to bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington.  The last time that happened, in 2013, more than 130,000 people came to see (and smell) the plant in person.

The Botanic Garden is running a live webstream of the corpse flower, which is expected to start producing its noxious, gag-inducing scent this weekend.  While the webstream isn’t as charming as the National Zoo’s Panda Cam, it’s guaranteed odour-free.

Snow White Slept Here

Love this!

Richey and Karen Morgan began building this Storybook cottage in the late 1970s.  It took them 25 years to finish the house and grounds, and I can’t think of a more interesting way to spend the better part of a lifetime:  Creating something magical.   It’s located near Olalla, Washington, on the Kitsap Peninsula in the Puget Sound region, and it’s on the market.

According to the listing, “There’s not a square or a corner anywhere.  Each door was hand-built with extensive iron work.  Wood beams were hand carved, stained glass windows are everywhere, and the walls are more like a magical cave.”

I’m fascinated by Storybook Style, which first appeared in Southern California in the 1920s.  Even today, most Storybook houses are found on the West Coast, but they sometimes pop up in the most unexpected places.  The Morgans’ property is considered the “most spectacular modern-day evocation of the Storybook Style,” according to Gellner and Keister, who literally wrote the book on the topic.

The asking price is $825,000.  The realtor guarantees that the property can easily accommodate seven dwarfs.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them — Comic-Con Trailer

Comic-Con International was last weekend in San Diego, which means we have a whole bunch of new movie trailers.  Here’s the one for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

I posted an earlier trailer here, and a brief “Behind the Scenes” video here.

Eddie Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, the lead character in this first film of a new trilogy based on J. K. Rowling’s 2001 Harry Potter prequel.

This film will be released on 18 November 2016.

Unnecessary Warning

From today’s online version of The San Francisco Chronicle:

Janis Joplin’s Port Arthur House Is on the Market

Our ongoing series of interesting residences on the market has covered everything from Lauren Bacall’s co-op in The Dakota (bought for ~$60,000 in the 1960s, asking price $26,000,000) to Buffalo Bill’s scary funhouse in Silence of the Lambs (asking price $300,000, sold for $190,000, sans dungeon) to Julia Child’s shabby $1,100,000 fixer-upper in DC to Jesse Pinkman’s party house in Albuquerque (asking $1,600,000, meth lab not included).

Now on the market:  The house in Port Arthur, Texas, where Janis Joplin grew up.

The asking price for the 1,300 square foot, five-bedroom, three-bathroom house is $500,000, which is insane.  Other houses in the area go for ~$50,000, which is about the assessed value of this one.

The house’s interior has changed considerably since Janis left in 1962, and…well, it needs a lot of work:

Factor in the Port Arthur, Texas, location, and I’d be surprised if this goes for more than $75,000.

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About five minutes into this famous 1970 interview with TV host Dick Cavett, Joplin talks about growing up in Port Arthur.  It’s a beautiful moment.

2016 Cookery Project — Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breasts

Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breasts

According to The Weather Channel, it’s “98° MOSTLY CLOUDY feels like 112°” in Washington right now, and, if it weren’t so hot, I’d light a candle in memory of Willis Carrier, the American engineer who invented the first modern air conditioner in 1902.

Willis Carrier. Our Hero.

But it is, so I won’t.  Instead, I lit the oven, and made Spinach Stuffed Chicken Breasts for lunch.  (Wasn’t that a neat segue?   Maybe a little bit too precious, but still….)

The recipe comes from a site called Basil and Bubbly, which operates under the slogan:  “Two parts food, one part booze, and a dash of snark.”  The stuffing was made with a package of frozen chopped spinach, cooked and squeezed dry,  feta cheese, cream cheese, and garlic.  I wound up with more than enough stuffing for the chicken, so I saved the extra bit to spread on Wheat Thins for my midnight snack tonight.

The watermelon salad consisted of random leftovers from the fridge:  watermelon, mint, and a little bleu cheese. I thought about giving it a dash of balsamic, but decided against it.

Stranger Things and the Less-Than-Perfect Insight of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here are the first eight minutes of Netflix’s hit series, Stranger Things.

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If you’ve not yet binged on Stranger Things, what are you waiting for?  It’s one of the most enjoyable rides of the summer of 2016.  This homage to the Stephen King/Steven Spielberg pop entertainments of the 1980s may be the best series Netflix has ever produced.

It’s like watching a classic mid-80s film for the first time, and actually being in the 80s when you do it!  It takes you right back, thanks in part to the terrific 80s soundtrack, but mainly because it perfectly duplicates the look and feel of 80s film, right down to the show’s title font.  Highest recommendation.

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And then there’s this.

My own favourite 80s movie is Heathers.  When I posted about it a while back, I wrote:

“It was also the absolute peak for many of the people involved.  Daniel Waters, who famously wrote the screenplay while working in a video store, followed it up with the scripts for the notorious bombs The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Hudson Hawk.  He doesn’t have many IMDB credits in the 20 years since then.  Winona Ryder and Christian Slater seemed on the edge of major stardom at the time, but their later careers have never lived up to those expectations.”

So here it is, 28 years later, and who’s starring in two of the buzziest and most acclaimed TV shows of summer?   Winona Ryder in Stranger Things and Christian Slater in Mr. Robot.

Fitzgerald was so wrong when he claimed, “There are no second acts in American lives.”