Abercrombie & Fitch stupidly deletes an ad featuring a fat woman in size-appropriate clothing

"Twitter doesn't reflect real-life people or ideas" is wishful thinking from 2017 or before

Abercrombie & Fitch is a U.S.-based company specializing in “casual wear.” The United States boasts a lot of fat citizens as well as millions of people of all sizes who like to spend their lives in jeans and T-shirts unless forced to do otherwise. Any company that makes casual wear is well advised to include a range of larger size options.

The New York Post, which hates tawdriness, is reporting that over the weekend, Fitch pulled a photo from its Instagram account after Twitter users jumped on its ass for “promoting” and “normalizing” obesity. (Everyone else predictably uses “Abercrombie” for the shortened version of the name; someone needs to balance this off, starting right now.)

If these idiots disengaged their slack faces from their phones and glanced around, some of them might notice that being fat is normal. It may not be what everyone wants, but being overweight is as American as it gets. Our food-makers ensure a startling prevalence of obesity by making energy-rich foods that some folx find literally addicting, while our fashion merchants remind us that not having a ripped stomach until at least age 75 is a sin. Buy, buy, buy, you consumerist shits.

Based on the thousands of words I’ve expended on certain obese people gaining undeserved marketing traction as well as condemning the companies doling out the goodies to these slobs, this may seem like a contradiction or a token instance of not taking a fat person with sponsorships to task. But as an optimist, I’m confident most people can appreciate the obvious difference between an ad showing a fat person wearing everyday clothes and an ad advertising nonexistent accomplishments by a sociopathic fraud who happens to be fat. In fact, this episode offers a perfect opportunity to emphasize what does and doesn’t upset me about the promotion of physically imperfect people.

During my last cross-country road trip, I spent one night in Terra Haute, Indiana. I didn’t have to—there were plenty of shitty motels not far up the pike in that state and it was only late afternoon—but I wanted to spend a day in the city where Larry Bird went to college. If that’s not as good a reason as any to bunk up somewhere one time, they should just demolish the hospitality industry, because the terrorists have clearly won.

I am not exaggerating much when I say that the woman in the deleted Fitch ad looks like a typical 30-year-old female resident of Terre Haute. A Terre Haute Starbucks patron, at that. (I had to go somewhere besides the Motel 6 for coffee.) The whole town is fat—kids, men, women, dogs, skunks—and no one is very worked up about it. They probably should care a little more than they do, since they have kids and grandkids. But when you live in Boulder, observing a total absence of body shame is like being an L.A. native in Alabama and wondering why no one uses crystals for healing.

You can argue all day that being as fat as this woman is makes for a lot of future health mayhem. That may be the case, but in the meantime, isn’t it okay for people to wear clothes they like? Fat people aren’t going away. And if you don’t like the sight of some flab spilling out of Daisy Duke shorts, avert your eyes. Thin women also manage to find too-tight clothing, with the result being hundreds of 5’ 5”, 105-pound C.U. students I never see passing the house showing just as much bare ass, proportionally speaking, as any fat woman does.

If Fitch had been promoting this woman as a professional athlete, people would have been right to bitch about it—especially if the subject of the ad was herself obnoxious beyond all conventional measures, as Latoya Snell is. This is an easy difference to spot and absolutely essential to understanding why the noisily anti-Wokish behave as we do.

I feel bad for the woman in the removed ad. Unlike the Layota Snells of the world, she didn’t do anything to invite this shit. She also looks a lot like my last therapist, who was not only kind but eager to take on lost causes and manage them with grace.

The other aspect of this tale is that companies need to learn to tell people on Twitter to go fuck themselves when they start unleashing nonsense. Fitch isn’t promoting obesity by showing a fat person any more than ad showing a thin person is promoting anorexia. If she’s been standing there with an ice cream cone in each hand, fine, they’re “promoting obesity.” But I suggest such people redirect their outrage toward shithole companies like HOKA and shithole organizations like the New York Road Runners, both of which consciously promote and endorse a gibbering, race-baiting liar. There is nothing dishonest or hostile or immoral about being fat, but there’s inherently a big problem with an “inspiring to the obese” runner who advertises brazenly false running credentials and has the support of various business entities in so doing.

HOKA’s corporate wokewashing is too bad, because the company does make some nice shoes, even if it can no longer manufacture working laces to match. Regarding the NYRR, it’s irredeemable. No one outside the five boroughs gives a shit about running clubs or anything else in New York City, because everyone who doesn’t live there is wise enough to hate it, mock it, and root for its rapid and unconditional dissolution into a giant, even less-habitable sewer of supposedly eradicated diseases, empty-headed social climbers with BMIs in the mid-teens, propaganda-driven media companies, hell-bound financial crooks, and brain-damage-driven corruption.