White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch

Pulsating music, louvered blinds over the windows, and cutouts of topless male models flanking the door. Any mallrat in the early 1990s recognizes this venue immediately—not a nightclub but the overpriced clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch. A retail behemoth in its heyday, the brand sold not just jeans and T-shirts but an all-American preppy aesthetic, captured in black-and-white photos featuring lots of nubile twentysomethings and closeups of chiseled abs.