Fitch(slapping) the Homeless

If you haven't heard already, Abercrombie's CEO Mike Jeffries (in 2006) in an interview with Salon.com noted that Abercrombie targets specifically the in-shape, "cool kids."  Unapologetic about this, he went on: "a lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong.  Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."  To add insult to injury, it was further revealed that Abercrombie is actually required to burn damaged items instead of selling them at a discount or donating them to the homeless.  Rightfully outraged by this, Greg Karber started the Fitch the Homeless campaign, in which he ransacked Goodwills to purchase every second-hand Abercrombie item he could, with the intention to re-distribute them to the homeless in order to produce a public image exactly countervalent to the one Jeffries described.

Yes you read that right.  In what is possibly the most viral and you-tubed back-handed act of charity in recent memory, Greg Karber's good intentions resulted in Fitch-slapping the homeless.  Which one can imagine is akin to saying "yeah, you're gross, but cheer up buttercup at least now its useful to undermine Abercrombie's brand image!  So go on and get your stink all up in this t-shirt, you social deviant, you!" Understandable as the outrage is, this solution seems...less than well thought out.  I mean, it takes what I can only assume is a lot of concerted effort to tarnish the act of giving a homeless person clothing.

Yet, unfortunately, good intentions aside, I predict that will be the extent of this anti-campaign's achievements.  It merely perpetuates the dehumanization of the homeless by casting their social undesirability under a very bright (and very trendy) spotlight.  Ironically it ends up doing the very thing that Abercrombie's marketing strategy does: it accepts the spectrum of social desirability described by CEO Mike Jeffries but simply wanders off to the ugly dark corner instead of the one illuminated by the pearly-whites of the Football captain and his supermodel girlfriend.  Not to brighten up the dark corner, mind you, but only to comment on how really--really--not bright it is in there.  In so doing it actually reinforces the alienation of the homeless, and does nothing to rehumanize their image.  In this respect we have to say (with tongue firmly in cheek, of course) that Karber would have been better off going with the far more subversive Derelict campaign from the movie Zoolander, in which homelessness is elevated to the au courant of the fashionista elite.

But the larger picture of this off-the-cuff critique of mine (by no means original to me) is precisely how modes of thought and patterns of activity which horrify us replicate themselves in the solutions we propose.  Karber was quite rightly put-off by Jeffries' comments and the general campaign strategy of Abercrombie marketing.  Yet precisely here in his solution he merely perpetuates the problem by attacking only a symptom and not the disease.  In the gesture of this "subversion" he reinforced an entire series of social classifications which provide the fuel for the analytics generating Abercrombie's strategies of demographic targeting.  Here, I think, we need to take Zizek's advice to "Dont Act, Just Think"; of course Zizek is not speaking of just sitting in one's study like Descartes and explore the inner rooms of your mind, instead of helping.  Rather we have to use this as an opportunity to step back and start thinking.  For example, lets be honest here, as tactless as Jeffries was for saying out loud and unapologetically what he did, there is no getting around the fact that this is the operating strategy for nearly every company, with clothing or otherwise.  So why this specific outrage? The most disturbing thing about this Fitch the Homeless campaign is the specificity of our rage.  And I include myself here.  We are constantly saturated by a marketing culture and apparatus that generates an entire series of ethical and social demarcations, and we know this.  Yet it seems we have arrived at a point where we can only get upset about it when someone explicitly acknowledges this is what they are doing. The Fitch the Homeless campaign then, will act more as a scapegoat sacrifice to appease the general (un)conscience (excuse the pun) of society back into ease with the generally-known-but-never-spoken manipulation of desire that has become our daily existence. Thus, in another ironic twist, the worst thing that this campaign could do is be successful in the terms it has set forth.  Because our all-too-easy conscience could then ease back on its laurels, having been momentarily appeased that it has acted (even if only by proxy through a youtube stunt) and can go back to business as usual.  We cannot let this sort of charity become an oblation upon an altar of consumption.

We have to truly begin to think of Christ's upside-down Lordship, and the principle the first shall be last.  For its only by undoing the very structures and rules that generate the conditions which cause things like Jeffries comments and Fitch the Homeless that we can overcome the empty dialectic between the two.  And this is precisely by analyzing so as to overcome their secret dependence upon one another and the structuring context of an image-based consumer culture, so we can create something truly free.