Going for the Look

Essay written for this article on job discrimination

Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination

As a consumer society, retail advertisement rules our lives. Commercials and ads tell us what to do, what to eat and how to dress. Companies hire people that they think will represent their brand in the best way. But do companies sometimes discriminate in the way they go about it?

For the record, it should be impossible for job hiring discrimination to happen because there are laws against discriminating against someone on the basis of age, sex or ethnicicity.

The retail clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch supposedly does not discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. Tom Lennox, an Abercrombie communications director has denied allegations of job bias, but he did admit that his company liked to hire “brand representatives” that projected their image; people who they thought looked great. The problem is however, that what someone believes to look good may have implications on someone else’s ethnicity.

So then, what does Abercrombie believe to look “good”? Well, if you’ve ever gone into an Abercrombie and Fitch store, you’ve probably seen those massive photograph posters of A&F models. Most of them tend to be young, fit, attractive, and white. Now, it could totally be a coincidence that all of their models are white; but the company has taken heat for the image they project.

Some Asian, black and Hispanic job applicants have sued Abercrombie on the basis of racial discrimination; citing being directed to working in the back instead of the front of the store.

Abercrombie has also been slammed elsewhere for their seemingly biased hiring policies. On Seth MacFarlane’s hit TV Series Family Guy, we are shown a sequence in which two of the main characters are looking through an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. The two characters look for diversity in the catalogue as if they were trying to find Waldo.

As strong as the case is that I have made against Abercrombie and Fitch, I must offer one last twist as my opinion on the subject. Retail companies are in the right to hire whoever they want, because the future of their company is at stake; they need to project an image that appeals to the targeted range of their customers. But doing so in a discriminatory way is wrong. But then again, maybe, just maybe, in the case of Abercrombie and Fitch, it’s only a happy coincidence.