The casual luxury clothes retailer Abercrombie & Finch brand name displays a moose, not known if of North-American, Scandinavian or Russian origin, but as a big fan of Norwegian Moose we will of course draw our own conclusions.
Founded in 1892, the company was for many decades mainly an elite excursion goods retailer. After many years of success, the company struggled financially from the late 1960s until it was purchased by The Limited in 1988 and repositioned as a lifestyle brand.
The company's clothing has also been the subject of criticism. In 2002, controversy erupted over shirts featuring caricatures of Asians and other ethnic groups. One shirt featured the slogan "Wong Brothers Laundry Service—Two Wongs Can Make It White" with smiling figures in conical hats, a 1900s popular-culture depiction of Chinese immigrants. The company discontinued the designs and apologized after a boycott by Asian-American student groups, such as Stanford.[13] That same year, the children's clothing division removed a line of thong underwear sold for girls in pre-teen children's sizes after parents mounted nationwide storefront protests. The underwear included
More T-shirt controversy occurred twice in 2004. The first incident involved a shirt featuring the phrase, "It's All Relative in West Virginia," an apparent jab at incest relations in rural America. West Virginia governor Bob Wise spoke out against the company for depicting "an unfounded, negative stereotype of West Virginia," but the shirts were not removed.The second incident involved another t-shirt with the phrase "L is for Loser" written next to a picture of a male gymnast on the rings (the same shirt was worn by Tyson Ritter of The All-American Rejects in the music video for "Move Along."). The company stopped selling the shirt in October of 2004 after USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi announced a boycott of Abercrombie & Fitch for mocking the sport.
In November 2005, the Women & Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania launched a "girl-cott" of the store for selling T-shirts bearing phrases like "Who needs brains when you have these?" in reference to large breasts and dumb blondes. The campaign went national on NBC's The Today Show, and the company pulled the shirts from stores on November 5, 2005.
Bob Jones University and its affiliated precollegiate schools — Bob Jones Academy, Bob Jones Junior High School, and Bob Jones Elementary School — forbade Abercrombie & Fitch clothing from being "worn, carried, or displayed" on its campuses because of "an unusual degree of antagonism to the name of Christ and an unusual display of wickedness" in the company's advertising.
We in NorwegianMoose.Com suggest to focus more on the Moose-brand as this obviously is the best way by far to give a positive perception of a brand :-)
Ahh, and they actually have pretty nice clothes. Here is their site:
http://www.abercrombie.com/
