A&F CEO plane cabin rules

[sebbie]

There are all sorts of what I would term "gayboy elements" in an A&F store. For starters the customer on entry to the store normally encounters a huge b&w photo of a bare-chested (teen or early 20s) male model. But as I indicated above, there are elements that are also at least borderline fetish--the fascination with flip flops and bare feet, for example, really tight button-fly jeans, sweatpants, the fascination with colorful boxerbriefs etc, The issue here is that these same or very similar designs over and over tends to slip this all into male fetish mode.

There are mens' clothing retailers that cater all but exclusively to gays. The problem for a retailer is that this limits how large the store market can be, A&F to be successful on the scale that they are, has to have a much larger market, including a lot of (mostly, at least) straight males. What is interesting to me is that A&F has been able to successfuly sell this clothing to the broader group of customers, or at least a significant share of them.

Which leads me back to my theory that for the vast majority of straight guys, there is still very much curiousity about being gay and this pops out with clothing selections that are consistent with that.

Then there are the teen girls, who also buy at A&F and the bare male torso becomes the "calling card" at the front of the store. THis part is really tough to figure out, except to say that teen females often are fascinated by androgenous young males. Were that not the case, boy bands would not be successful. I suspect that the teen female fascination with A&F is not unlelated to the boy band fetish.