White Hot tells the story of the rise of Abercrombie & Fitch from just a hundred year old clothing store to the most elite and prestigious and nakedest clothing store in your local mall. How it sold an image more than it sold clothes… and how they got themselves in a lot of societal and legal hot water over their hiring (and firing) practices.

You know, I worked at the local mall through much of the 1990s… at Babbage’s, the software store (RIP). To put it mildly, I operated in a different universe than Abercrombie & Fitch. And, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if there was an A&F store at that mall…

My point being, I watched this documentary more as a visitor from an alien world than as anything remotely resembling a customer. Not that I wasn’t aware that A&F was a “thing”… I saw the clothes with the meaningless label that people would wear like walking billboards. And I saw the eye-popping ads selling nothing but half-naked dudes (and knew I wasn’t whatever their target market was… and that’s an understatement).

So this was more anthropology for me than anything else. And it was eye-opening and quite fascinating… even if occasionally it made me pause and remember that episode of Futurama where Bender gets bitten by a werecar. “I was working on Project Satan: a savage intelligent military vehicle built from the most evil parts from the most evil cars in the world. The steering wheel from Hitler’s staff car, the left turn signal from Charles Manson’s VW, the windshield wipers from that car that played Knight Rider (Knight Rider wasn’t evil, his windshield wipers were… it didn’t come up much on the show though). Only after bringing Project Satan to life did they discover they’d made a horrible mistake. You see, it was PURE EVIL.”

Ummm… my point is, every A&F model (and apparently store clerk) was the handsomest, white-est, abbs-iest dude who ever kicked sand in the face of a pimply nerd at the beach. And you didn’t think this was exclusionary and kinda racist? I mean… it was right there, staring us in the face (if you were paying attention…. ummm… which I wasn’t).

Anyhow, I was pretty fascinated by this doc even with that hovering sense of “no duh” in my mind. Still a worthy watch, especially if you – like me – are only tangentially aware of the store and the controversy. The history, the branding, the image, the money… and how it all went south.

And, hey, maybe like me, you realized twenty minutes in that you don’t even know if the stores exist anymore.

(spoiler alert: they do).

Score: 85