Instead of celebrating the LGBTQ community, Abercrombie & Fitch has contributed to Pride Month with a tone deaf tweet that implies Pride is for straight people, too. Ugh.
According to GayStarNews, the fashion brand posted (and then deleted) a quote from an A&F employee, saying, "'The Pride community is everybody, not just LGBTQ people.' – Kayla, merchandiser."
The tweet also tagged The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, and included the hashtag #AnFxTrevor to highlight their new Pride collection.
Naturally, Twitter came out to drag the label for their insensitivity, especially considering that June is meant to focus on members of the LGBTQ community.
After deleting the tweet, A&F sent out two follow-up tweets, noting that they respect the LGBTQ community.
But people weren't having it, and noted that the company didn't even apologize for their original tweet.
Despite appearances, the company hasn't always tried to look inclusive. In fact, in a 2006 Salon interview, the now former Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries said that they were deliberately exclusionary.
"In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive, all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes] and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely," he said.
The New Yorker also noted in 2015 that the company had exclusionary advertising and hiring practices.
"In 2004, the company agreed to pay fifty million dollars to several thousand employees in order to settle a class-action lawsuit charging that it discriminated against African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans in both its hiring practices and its advertising," wrote Margaret Talbot.
So does Abercrombie & Fitch really care about Pride Month and the LGBTQ community? We're not so sure.