Our friends at Improv Everywhere recently completed their latest mission “No Shirts”, where they organized 111 shirtless men of all shapes and sizes to go shopping at the Abercrombie and Fitch store on 5th Avenue in New York. As it turns out, in a store that celebrates the shirtless male, shirtless men are not allowed to buy shirts.
Agent Nguyen came up with the idea for this mission when he noticed the 5th Avenue Abercrombie and Fitch store had a shirtless male model greeting all customers as they enter. Upon further examination, we discovered the model is only one aspect of the store’s celebration of the shirtless male. There are photographs all over the store of bare-chested men, both on the wall and on the products themselves.
Improv Everywhere has a full report on the mission, including video and photos.
Here’s our previous coverage of Improv Everywhere missions:
Redheads Protest Wendy’s, Saying Logo Is Inaccurate
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How funny!
Classic! Great post
Too funny.. everything IE does is great.
Next time…use girls…its still legal (in nyc)…
that Abercrombie & Fitch store always has tourist moms and daughters giggling at the shirtless male models at the entrance…they probably were giggling a bit less with these guys!
http://scophy.com/2007/10/23/art-tuesdays-shirtless-flash-mob/
First off, I work at the A&F on 5th Ave and just happened to be working that day, and I must say, It was really funny seeing all those shirtless men walking around, but then again it did disrupt our store or a few minutes, as we were trying to escort them out.
When another associate asked me “how many men were in the store”, I said about 30 or so, but I had no idea, that there were actually 111,
what a day.
I love it… You guys make a very good point.
The store manager lost a free marketing opportunity and made the store look hypocritical. What a better way to advertise A&F by having the shirtless men all leave the store wearing their product? Duh!
I think that this should have been embraced and made into an annual event. In fact, I would go one step further and offer a 10-15% discount to all shirtless men who actually wore the shirt out of the store. That was such a no brainer.
i work for hollister… i would have recruited the ones looking like my current models, and then asked everyone to buy a shirt or leave….
sales boost baby….
it’s a fine line between brand damaging for the company, as they do not like any outside advertising, and that would have drawn media attention which is an unspoken no no.
hey jen, that sounds a bit chauvinistic, at least thats just my opinion anyway. what constitutes being a model anyway? they where there to not only make a point but to buy also. what if a friend or relative came into your store and didnt fit the image, would you be mad if they were kicked out? you are wrong!!!!!!!!
I personally think it was really hypocritical, I mean they use shirtless men for ads, but as soon as anyone in the store is shirtless their kicked out? I think it’s quite a two-faced company.
funny guys.. You should have asked why the model in the hall did’nt have to leave. To be fair, he to was shirtless :P
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