The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch

Jeffries' obsession with building brands began when he was 5. He grew up in Los Angeles, where his father owned a chain of party supply stores for which a young Jeffries liked to organize and design the windows and counters. "I would always say to my parents, 'We need another store. We need another!'" Jeffries recalls. "I always wanted to expand and get bigger, and I would get off on saying, 'Why do we do the fixtures like this? Why don't we do it another way?' That totally turned me on."

Jeffries says he had a "very classic American youth," although he was not good at sports. "I broke my dad's heart because I wasn't good at basketball," he says. In high school in the late 1950s, Jeffries always wore Levi's jeans. "Actually, don't write that," he tells me, laughing. "But Levi's was definitely the uniform back then, kind of like what A&F has become. If you didn't wear 501s you were considered weird."

No one cool wore Abercrombie & Fitch when Jeffries went off to Claremont McKenna College and then to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in business administration. In fact, the company's best years were long behind it. Founded in 1892, in its heyday it served Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower (they bought their fishing equipment there), Ernest Hemingway (guns), and Cole Porter (evening clothes). During prohibition A&F was where the in crowd went for its hip flasks. But by the 1970s it had become a fashion backwater, holding on for dear life.

Leslee O'Neill, A&F's executive vice president of planning and allocation, remembers what the company was like before Jeffries got there. "We had old clothes that no one liked," she says. "It was a mess, a total disaster. We had this old library at our headquarters with all these really old books. There were croquet sets lying around. It was very English."

The company, which since 1988 had been owned by the Limited, was losing $25 million a year when Jeffries arrived and announced that A&F could survive and prosper as a "young, hip, spirited company." "We're all there thinking, Oh yeah, right. Abercrombie & Fitch?" recalls O'Neill. "But in the end we were like, Well, why not? It can't get any worse." Jeffries, then in his late 40s, dressed in oxford shirts and corduroy pants. "He was a lot more normal back then," O'Neill says. "Today he's much more eccentric, obviously."

Maybe, although former co-workers at Paul Harris recall that Jeffries had an odd personal style even back then. "He wore the same outfit to work every day," recalls Thomas Yeo, a Paul Harris colleague. "Nearly worn-out suede loafers, a pair of gray flannel pants, and a double-breasted navy blazer. I don't think he ever changed his clothes. All that seemed to matter to him was the success of the brand."

Jan Woodruff, who also worked with Jeffries at Paul Harris, remembers him as a workaholic. "If he had a life outside work, it wasn't something people knew about," says Woodruff. But Woodruff and others say he has a superlative fashion mind. "It's so rare to find someone who is brilliant at both the creative and the business sides. But Jeffries is both. He's good at thinking in broad terms, but he's also obsessed with details. And I've never seen anyone as driven as Mike. I had no doubt he would be incredibly successful if he found the right venue. And he found it."

Soon after taking over A&F, Jeffries went looking early on for the right man to help him make A&F a sexy, aspirational brand. He settled on Bruce Weber, already a renowned photographer known for his male nudes. "But back then we couldn't afford him for an actual shoot," Jeffries told me, "so we bought one picture from him and hung it in a store window."

Fourteen years later, Jeffries' success is the envy of the fashion world. In a recent feature called "The Abercrombie Effect" in DNR, a newsmagazine about men's fashion and retail, the magazine noted that "not since Ralph Lauren's ascent in the 1980s has a single brand perfected a lifestyle-based look so often alluded to and imitated." Now Ralph Lauren's doing the imitating, opening a chain of collegiate, WASPy Polo knockoff stores called Rugby for young customers, featuring in-store grunge bands and beautiful salespeople.

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," says Margaret Doerrer, national sales manager for young men at Union Bay, another youth-oriented label. "In the young men's market, for the longest time no one was creating a 'lifestyle.' Particularly in the department stores, everyone was focused on hip-hop and urban brands, and no one was creating that average, American Joe look. Jeffries never lost sight of who his customer is, and he created a quality brand that caters to the cool clique and has a sense of exclusivity, yet it still has a mass appeal, because people want to be a part of it. It's genius."

Next page: An A&F T-shirt that read "Gentlemen Prefer Tig Ol' Bitties" didn't go over well with feminists