I don’t know if the superficial fashion company Ambercrombie & Fitch deserves a better expose but a superficial documentary now on Netflix feels like a nostalgia trip that trades in too many glancing, annoying generalities. White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Ambercrombie & Fitch feels like an extended segment from one of those old I Love the 90s specials that used to dominate VH1 where a group of talking heads chatted nostalgically about whatever pop culture bon mot of the past that deserved reverence or being forgotten. I think there could be a story here too. Ambercrombie’s success was built upon two men, both of them gay, creating a brand image basically around the kind of man they found most alluring and attractive: WASPy, muscular, young, and their idea of what it meant to be American (a.k.a. white frat boys). One of those men was closeted and mercurial, and the other was a prominent photographer who was also a predator, but both of these men were responsible for a largely heterosexual cultural landscape accepting their vision and wanting to match their personal preferences. There’s also a story about their wantonly discriminatory hiring practices, keeping minorities in the back or with overnight shifts, wanting to maintain their CEO’s image of people in stores, including hiring people based upon attraction (i.e. thin and white) and not even whether they could be a functional employee. However, director Alison Klayman, no stranger to documentaries that feel rushed and uninformative (Jagged, The Brink, Take Your Pills), would rather speed through an armada of interview talking heads for clipped sound bytes and vague explanations for what made Ambercrombie so popular and then stopped being so (“It was really cool… and then I guess it wasn’t”). The doc completely misses relevant subjects like the online shopping revolution, the decline of malls and mall culture, or anything of actual meaningful cultural contribution beyond the rise of social media. According to the movie, because of social media, more people have voices, I guess just forgetting there was an Internet beforehand. It is strange, by today’s standards, for a large fashion company to be willfully uninterested in its brand being more inclusive. By the end, the documentary even seems to sell a redemption story, so it doesn’t go far enough in its condemnation because that would get in the way of its nostalgia trip and would actually push the interview subjects to confront more of their own actions or inaction. Alas, White Hot is yesterday’s news without any lasting appeal or insight.

Nate’s Grade: C