Salon.com > Benoit Denizet-Lewis

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 11:16:00 +0000

Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says "dude" a lot. He'll say, "What a cool idea, dude," or, when the jeans on a store's mannequin are too thin in the calves, "Let's make this dude look more like a dude," or, when I ask him why he dyes his hair blond, "Dude, I'm not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders."

This fall, on my second day at Abercrombie & Fitch's 300-acre headquarters in the Ohio woods, Jeffries -- sporting torn Abercrombie jeans, a blue Abercrombie muscle polo, and Abercrombie flip-flops -- stood behind me in the cafeteria line and said, "You're looking really A&F today, dude." (An enormous steel-clad barn with laminated wood accents, the cafeteria feels like an Olympic Village dining hall in the Swiss Alps.) I didn't have the heart to tell Jeffries that I was actually wearing American Eagle jeans. To Jeffries, the "A&F guy" is the best of what America has to offer: He's cool, he's beautiful, he's funny, he's masculine, he's optimistic, and he's certainly not "cynical" or "moody," two traits he finds wholly unattractive.

Voice of the Net

Wed, 06 Sep 2000 18:57:00 +0000

What, exactly, is the dot-com voice?

Maybe you remember radio ads from the aerobics-fueled 1980s, when voice-over work was characterized by polite yuppie chatter. (Remember the Jack and Casey Shedd's Spread commercials?) Or the slacker 1990s, when a detached, almost juvenile, cynicism crept into ads for everything from domestic beer to wide-leg jeans. Well, we're zooming through the first year of what looks like the dot-com decade of the 21st century, and advertisers are desperate to answer this question: What should the voice of the Internet sound like?

"Back in the Gen-X phase, I used to tell my students to find their slacker voice, which means I used to tell my students to sound stoned," says Taylor Korobow, founder and director of the Voice Factory, a San Francisco voice-over agency. "Dot-com voices don't sound stoned. They're edgy and cool, but they're also very dispassionate. A lot of them have an elitist quality to them, but instead of feeling offended that he is talking down to you, it makes people feel connected, and people love to feel connected."