smorgasbord-design

I’ve been following the Riam Dean case with a great deal of interest. On the surface this is a girl who, born with a disability which led her to wear a prosthetic, has been sent to a stock room because it didn’t fit with the Abercrombie & Fitch look. The reality is surely something quite different.

I should declare I am a fan of A&F so I speak from a biased position but I cannot believe it is as simple as the Daily Mail and others would have us believe. A&F customers – and let us be clear there are millions of them – buy in to a brand look. This look is stage-managed, it’s cultivated, it is meticulously controlled. The reason for this is because it works, it sells billions of dollars worth of clothing. When A&F opened in London it was preposterously popular and the queues in Burlington Gardens at Christmas (during a recession) were lengthy even when a basic Polo short costs over £50.

When I go in there it’s no secret that I would like to look like the models in the doorway, like the handsome lads serving me and I probably gawp at the cute girls dancing on the balcony above the door. A&F (like many image-conscious brands) only employ good-looking people, Riam is good looking and they will have employed her no-doubt because she is pretty and would add to their cultivated look.

Riam is their target market: ‘college’, educated, petite, cute and willing to spend disposable cash on an aspirational brand (Aside: the brand is not so aspirational in the US, in fact they have created a premium A&F brand, RUEHL No. 925, to meet this market). It would make no sense for a well-manicured brand to piss off their market and create this kind of publicity.

So let’s start unpicking this case, bearing in mind we’ve heard a lot of Riam’s testimony but very little from A&F.

1. As a major American company that has experienced discrimination lawsuits in the litigation-happy USA their employment policy is likely to be watertight.

2. By agreeing to work for them (and there will be hundreds applying for each job) you agree to meet their look criteria. If she was not comfortable exposing her prosthetic limb then don’t work there, they were happy with it, they employed her. Girls not comfortable exposing their breasts aren’t strippers. Muslims not happy working with pork don’t make bacon sandwiches.

3. If she was unhappy to expose her limb why is is she is now happy to be photographed with it exposed?

4. It was her decision to wear a cardigan to cover the arm, not the firm attempting to cover it up and hide it. If I was happily employed by my employer but felt embarrased by something and wore an unauthorised (by contract) item of clothing I’d expect it to be considered a breach of contract.

5. The management team offered to resolve her dispute, she – according to their evidence – decided not to but rather go to court. What was the process that A&F would have followed to settle the dispute?

6. She is a student lawyer who will no doubt benefit from the exposure amongst an increasingly-competitive profession by making sure she is articulate and apparently principled. Call me a cynic but this smacks more than a little of self-promotion.

The way this has been made to sound is that Riam didn’t feel the need to mention her limb at interview, A&F found out, thought it didn’t look nice, made her wear a cardigan and then used a look policy to hide her in the store room.

I’m open to debate but I would hope that our proud and noble legal process are able to cut through the hyperbole here, on the face of this piece by CharonQC, I don’t hold out much hope.

UPDATE: 26th June 15:51 based on Maria Barbera’s evidence reported on BBC News

7. Abercrombie & Fitch told Riam Dean she could work in the store wearing short sleeves. Something Riam appears happy to do here and here.

8. Abercrombie & Fitch were aware of her prosthetic limb but were not aware that she had been given approval to wear a cardigan, her cardigan prevented her from working on the shop floor (not her arm) as it breached the look policy.

9. Riam was not distressed by the decision that she should work in the stockroom.

10. Riam’s initial complaint was that she had not been given the opportunity to remove the cardigan. The reason this was done was apparently due to the manager’s sensitivity to her body image – assuming she wouldn’t want to take it off, rather than insisting she did.

11. This is where the evidence from Ms. Barbera causes a problem because, rather implausibly, she asserts that she “did not make the link between the student’s reluctance to take off her cardigan with her disability”.

12. Taking a look through the statements presented on feminist Zelda Lily’s exclusive, “I Questioned My Self Worth” it seems Riam resigned via email and the company failed to follow this up or invoke the process that might have dealt with the apparent discrimination at an early stage.

13. There is an unsubstantiated suggestion that Riam was offered $10,000 (£6,000) to settle out of court.

So, I continue to follow this case with interest. For an discussion on the A&F look, this BBC News Magazine piece does a digestible job, though the usual narrow-minded comments add little to the debate.