Boys Ruehl!!!
This evening we had an exciting night out... to the mall and then the supermarket!!! Well, that's about our speed. And actually, even the mall was a bit too fast for us! Walking away from the food court ($8 Chinese food - what a rip!) we passed a new store whose staging looked straight out of Disney's MGM... A replica facade of a New York City apartment building, complete with wrought-iron railing and three separate address plates! Red brick and everything. Right there on the second floor of the Burlington mall!!!
Turns out the new store is called Ruehl, from the fine Abercrombie & Fitch company which also brought us Hollister. You may remember that Hollister is the fine establishment which surprised our mall experience last year by turning a corner of the bottom floor into a Jamaican Cabana. Not unlike Abercrombie, they make slutty tank-tops for girls with a-cups. And short skirts in plaid and khaki. And boy button-downs wrinkled just enough to give off that special i-just-f——-your-sister look.
After running through the rows of t-shirts in this fake New York loft, beneath the BLARING techno music, I asked the bellboy... er ... greeter... if this Ruehl was owned by the Abercrombie company. Yes, he informed me, the brand portfolio goes in this order: Hollister for pre-teens, Abercrombie for teens through 25, and Ruehl for 25-35 assholes who like ripped khakis and layered t-shirts (actually, that last descriptor I threw in myself; the sales guy was very nice and helpful, except that we really had to stand out in the hallway to have a conversation over the music.) Well fair enough Abercrombie brand managers, although on our way out of the mall we saw three late-twenty-somethings sporting t-shirts with the Hollister logo... guess they didn't get the message that they were supposed to move up the brand hierarchy.
After browsing Ruehl's web property, i discerned no noticeable difference between the actual garment products sold in either of the three stores (Hollister -> Abercrombie -> Ruehl), other than relative the age of the models engaged in various stages of sexual foreplay. (Um, Ruehl, your new target demographic is adults... we've already HAD sex enough times to be not impressed.) As for the produc, all i have to say is Abercrombie corp, if your offerings of mens pants consist only of pre-ripped jeans and plaid shorts, you are NOT targeting clothes to grown-ups. Unless your graduated frat-boys now work in the New York porn industry. In which case, way to go!!!