Black Isn’t Always In: Abercrombie & Fitch is Banning Black Clothing

Besides ‘uncool kids’ and ‘unattractive people’, clothing brand Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) has now banned the color ‘black’ from its stores. They will no longer be selling the color in their stores or allowing their employees to wear it to work.

“Abercrombie & Fitch does not sell black clothing and discourages wearing it at our home office and in our stores, because we are a casual lifestyle brand and feel black clothing is formal. We have nothing against black clothing and feel it is perfectly appropriate for things like tuxedos,” the company recently confirmed to Business Insider.

CEO Michael Jeffries, assumed to be the force behind the ban is uncomfortable with all the witchcraft and dark magic associations. There’s also the connotation of the black hole, an inescapable place and all the existential emptiness that suggests. However, the psychological impact of black as a color may have no scientific backing but the average wearer is not guided by science.

Abercrombie & Fitch is alone in its boycott of black. Competitors such as J. Crew and American Eagle sell black, and some people wear the color much in the same way painters such as Henri Matisse used it. Coco Chanel was the pioneer of the little black dress in high fashion, famously introducing it via a drawing in Vogue magazine and declaring, “A woman needs just three things; a black dress, a black sweater, and, on her arm, a man she loves.”

“When I didn’t know what color to put down, I put down black,” Matisse said in 1945. “Black is a force: I used black as ballast to simplify the construction.” Abercrombie & Fitch is coming most popular for it’s unrealistic bans on clothing. Black has and always will be the go to color for any and every occasion. At this rate, with all of the current bans, A&F will have no products to sell on their shelves or no customer to sell their clothing to.