Netflix 2022 Doc ‘White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch’ Helped Propel Arrest of Retailer’s Former CEO Mike Jeffries

Two years after the release of the Netflix documentary expose “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” the retail company’s former CEO Mike Jeffries was arrested last week on international sex trafficking charges for crimes that occurred while he was running the clothing retailer from 1992 to 2014.

The 88-minute film, directed by Alison Klayman, served as a building block to bring the clothing store’s condemnable past back into the zeitgeist and ultimately led to the BBC docuseries “World of Secrets: The Abercrombie Guys,” which further opened the doors for people to come forward about Jeffries’ alleged sexual misconduct.

“Whenever you are making a documentary and report on something, it becomes a beacon,” says Klayman. “More people come out of the woodwork that were hard to find when making the film. The number of incoming messages about Jeffries that the film team and I received in the wake of “White Hot” was a representation of all people who initially felt like a needle in a haystack to find.”

“White Hot” premiered on Netflix on April 19, 2022, and overnight became one of the streamer’s top films to watch globally. The docu explores the rise in popularity of Abercrombie & Fitch during the late ’90s and examines how, under Jeffries’ leadership, the store became known for its sexualized advertising and its emphasis on an “all-American” look that tended to feature white models. The doc alleges that photographer Bruce Weber, who was instrumental in crafting Abercrombie’s marketing that often featured homoerotic shots of half-naked, young, beautiful men, was a predator who inappropriately touched his male models.

While a card at the conclusion of “White Hot” reads, “There are no reports of models alleging any sexual misconduct by Mike Jeffries,” Klayman says that during the production, she was made aware of Jeffries’ alleged inappropriate behavior.

“Being an independent filmmaker, even when you are making something for Netflix, is very different than being a (news) reporter on staff,” says Klayman. “You don’t have the same institutional protections on reporting, and you end up having to make sure that things are approved not just by your lawyers but also by insurance companies. I feel like with that card, we wanted to make clear what had been public, but we definitely talked to people who had stories but didn’t want to go on the record, which is why I always wanted to come back to this story and do more on it because sometimes you can’t do everything all in one go.”

It isn’t clear if any of the alleged victims named in the recent indictment against Jeffries were the same people who spoke to Klayman off the record, but the director says that “the allegations in indictment fit with stories that were told to us by multiple people during the production and release (of “White Hot”).”

Jeffries left Abercrombie & Fitch in 2014 following numerous scandals the company faced, including a 2004 class-action suit that accused the brand of discriminating toward Black, Latino, Asian and female employees. Fran Horowitz took over as Abercrombie’s chief executive in 2017 and effectively revamped the brand’s “inclusive” image. But Jeffries’ recent arrest, according to The New York Times, has caused Abercrombie’s stock to fall more than 11 percent.

Horowitz defended the retailer telling The Times on Oct. 25, “We are no longer the company that we used to be.”

But Klayman isn’t so sure.

“What we are trying to say with ‘White Hot’ was that Mike Jeffries was let go, and Abercrombie has since rebranded in a certain way, but the question of whether they deserve any credit for that or if it’s enough or what we even expect from brands, is a bigger question that would be nice to talk about,” she says. “(Abercrombie) has extricated themselves from Mike, but we did know some executives who were responsible for things from that era that we cover in the film who were kept on. There is no complete absolution, I guess. And I think that Abercrombie is very happy to just say, “That is the past,” but I think it requires journalism and people really exposing whether that’s true or not because a lot of it is PR and marketing.”

If Klayman were to make a follow-up to “White Hot,” she told Variety that the doc would explore “the impunity that comes with success and power when it comes to business in our society.”

“The amount of people who were like, “But (Jeffries) was genius.” And what was he a genius about? For the time when Abercrombie was profitable. How far was that able to carry in terms of either rumored or known bad behavior from the lowest to the highest levels at Abercrombie? I think that’s the takeaway,” Klayman says. “(The follow-up doc) would be more than just a film about Mike Jeffries and Abercrombie. It would be a story that is instructive about something bigger and more structural in our society and our system.”