Kirstie Alley Slams Abercrombie and Fitch for CEO's Anti-Fat Remarks
Kirstie Alley slammed Abercrombie and Fitch's CEO Mike Jeffries for his racy remarks that the company's clothing is for "cool kids."
The actress reportedly told Entertainment Tonight :
"Abercrombie clothes are for people who are cool and look a certain way and are beautiful and are thin' and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That would make me never buy anything from Abercrombie."
Alley, 62, said her two children, William True Stevenson, 20, and Lillie Price Stevenson, 18 will not be wearing clothes from the retail chain either.
"I've got two kids in that bracket, but they will never walk in those doors because of his view of people -- forget women, his view of just people."
Alley is the latest celebrity to blast the store, which does not carry sizes above a 10. Other celebrities have voiced her dismay. On May 13, Sophia Bush, actress of One Tree Hill, tweeted:
"Such a letdown to see that Abercrombie, a company geared toward teens, lets their CEO speak like this..."
Teenagers protested outside an Abercrombie store in Chicago the same day Bush sent the tweet.
Backlash against the company has grown since a 2006 interview of Jeffries with Salon recently resurfaced.
"In every school there are cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," he told Salon's Benoit Denizet-Lewis. "Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely."
A petition on Change.org was posted in an attempt to pressure the store to produce and stock larger sizes. Los Angeles writer Greg Karber started a campaign, "FitchTheHomeless," to rebrand the company's "exclusionary" tactics. He released a video on YouTube on Monday, which shows Karber searching for Abercrombie clothing in Good Will stores and then handing them to homeless people. The video went viral. in a 2006 Salon interview that recently resurfaced. In the interview, Jeffries said:
Abercrombie is reportedly required to burn damaged clothes instead of donating them to the homeless or selling them at discount.
Abercrombie has not yet commented.