Twitter is losing it over this explanation of a mall in the new Abercrombie & Fitch doc

Netflix just dropped a documentary about popular-kid brand of the 1990s and early 2000s Abercrombie & Fitch, and while the revelations about the company give us plenty to talk about – racism, weight discrimination, homophobia, sexual harassment – it's one man's description of a shopping mall that has people really fired up. Because…do teens not know what malls are? Or do adults just assume teens don't know what malls are? And are malls really that hard to understand?

Obviously, the advent of online shopping caused many suburban shopping malls, once palatial monuments to American capitalism, to shutter, and the pandemic has all but written their eulogy. Malls these days serve mostly as sets for Stranger Things. But we still all know what they were, right? It's a big building with stores and a food court, sometimes an arcade or a movie theatre. It's a place where teens could hang freely without actually wandering the streets, a midway between public and private property. It's where Halsey sang Blink 182 in front of The Limited.

Or, as the dude in Abercrombie doc White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch puts it, a mall was “like a search engine you can walk through.” Which is actually not a very accurate description! You can't, for instance, find a list of all the presidents of Yugoslavia at the mall; you can in a search engine. You cannot get your ears pierced in a search engine; you can at the mall. 

Now, an “online catalogue that's an actual place” – closer! That's actually a store. A search engine you can walk through is maybe a library. And a mall, as I have explained, is a bunch of stores plus an Auntie Anne's Pretzels and some bathrooms.

Okay, let's try this: A mall is an airport terminal without any of the gates.

So are we all caught up now? Do we know what a mall is? Great. Back to Abercrombie & Fitch.

The store built its brand on sexy-ish black-and-white images of teen models (including a young J.Law), and it was an open secret that you couldn't get hired at the store (which is like a walk-through catalogue!) if you didn't have an “athletic” body type, i.e., it totally fat-shamed and it didn't even make clothes above a women's size 10.

On Twitter, viewers also called out other brands and industries that are due for a reckoning. One user pointed to more current mall staple Aritizia, while another pointed to similarities between the fashion and gaming industries.

Definitely a conversation worth having. Perhaps over some Panda Express at the mall? I need new Skechers….

This article first appeared on Glamour.com.

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