Telling Brand Tales—Revealing All and Covering Up: The A&F Brand/Story

Against the backdrop of complex transcultural flows of goods and the varied reception of their embedded meanings, North American based Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) is one important fashion brand that has globalized its efforts, opening stores around the world, especially across emerging markets in Asia and the Middle East. The context of this effort is the company's seeming saturation of its home market, the global recession resulting in reduced global consumption patterns overall, and the emergence of new directions in consumer preferences. This article will firstly examine the A&F brand in terms of its rise and fall across current cultural branding activities (Holt, Brands Become Icons 20–21, O'Reilly 573) to map and understand A&F's brand strategies and tactics that are geared toward engaging with its consumer base, both at home and away, as a means of understanding the challenges that fashion brands face in their twenty‐first century marketplace survival. The theoretical analysis, using consumer culture theory, and the importance of brand storytelling in this process will be supplemented with ethnographic, interpretative research using data elicited from youth‐based focus groups. In this way, the article will analyze the A&F brand's communication strategy and positioning as set against the consumer's interpretative responses. This producer–consumer relationship provides a way of understanding how contemporary postmodern fashion brands work to survive and prosper in a highly competitive global fashion marketplace.