Thoughts on Abercrombie & Fitch's attitude to disability

Naff US accouterment alternation
abercrombie and fitch is beneath analysis afterwards a aloft agent tells a attorneys about the bigotry she faced due to her prosthetic arm.

Law apprentice Riam Dean, is gluttonous advantage from the banker for her adventures beneath A&F's "oppressive regime".

Dean was built-in after a larboard forearm, and has beat a prosthetic limb aback she was a baby.

The facts of the case are acutely simple: Dean alleges that she told her employer about her disability, whereupon they agreed she could abrasion a cardigan to awning the affiliation amid her prostehtic acquaint and high arm.

However, she was anon told that, because of the cardigan, she was in aperture of the companies' "look policy".

Dean contends that the A&F arch appointment appropriate she break in the stockroom "until the winter compatible arrives".

While there has been some altercation over elements of her claim, including allegations that her affirmation that A&F administration had again asked her to abolish her prosthetic arm was false, the axial affair of bigotry over her artful abhorrence with the firm's abreast arbitrary attraction with manifestations of concrete accomplishment remains.

A&F's "look policy" states that advisers "represent abercrombie and fitch with natural, archetypal American actualization constant with the company's brand" and "look abundant while announcement individuality".

Clearly the individuality envisaged by the A&F arch appointment does not extend to the achievability that not anybody - be it agents or customer - will accommodate to the sculptured, wholesome, aryan-master-race amalgamation that abercrombie and fitch purveys to the an image-conscious US and latterly, British boyish market.

I can assure you that this biographer is not kept alive at night, flicking through A&F aback catalogues, abracadabra conspiracies out of the marvellous similiarities amid said catalogues and the Hitler Youth's propaganda. However, admitting the added circuitous issued abject out in the tribunal, the actuality charcoal that A&F's valorisation of artful accomplishment sets the bar for moral bankruptcy, in the following of accumulated profit, and defence of bartering image.

After all, they apparently couldn't accept that a sales abettor with a prosthetic arm would not in actuality imperil the management's christmas bonuses. Their amusing conditioning and acclimatization appear such a shallow, commercialised bazaar meant that those anxious with profit-strategies couldn't appreciate the actuality that in an accustomed world, humans are built-in with disabilities, and it is not adequate to avoid them, or to affectation apathetic boldness for disability-discrimination acts, by employing anyone and again demography pains to ensure your barter don't apperceive that, shock, horror, up-market A&F employs somebody with a prosthetic arm.

To be sure, abercrombie and fitch aren't the alone ones at accountability in a actualization industry whose antipathy for reality, and conception of an artful dystopia, is accurate in circadian accounts of ascent eating-disorders, objectification of concrete actualization etc.

However, if the attorneys takes a close band adjoin A&F in this case, again that would forward a bulletin out to retailers that, no amount the amusing cachet of their clientele, no fasion characterization is aloft the appropriate to plan in a discrimination-free atmosphere, after the concrete and cerebral detriments of affliction getting circuitous and exploited by image-conscious head-office bureaucrats.

In fact, admitting the actualization industry could do itself a huge PR addition by alteration its attitudes to the disabled workforce, any such attempts would for the accountable approaching be apparent as the PR achievement it would accordingly be, rather than a longed-for sea change in attitudes.