'Fitch the Homeless': A Tale of Abercrombie & Fitch, Homeless People, and Viral Videos: The New Yorker On a recent afternoon, a twenty-six-year-old U.S.C. graduate named Greg Karber read a story that inflamed his sense of opportunity. The article dredged up a seven-year-old interview with Mike Jeffries, the sixty-eight-year-old, eccentric C.E.O. of Abercrombie & Fitch, rehearsing the principles that made Abercrombie one of the most successful - and most hated - brands in retail history. "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," Jeffries observed. 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. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don't alienate anybody, but you don't excite anybody, either. When Jeffries gave the interview to a reporter from Salon in January of 2006, Twitter was five months away from its public launch and the "cool kids" rant was barely noticed. When the comments resurfaced this year in a post on Business Insider analyzing Abercrombie's refusal to carry plus-size clothing, the Internet erupted. Karber, who ekes out a living adapting novels into screenplays, knew he had to act quickly. "If you miss the window," he says, "it's pointless." A director of fifty-nine comedic Web videos, including a disco homage to Mitt Romney and a "Weird Al" Yankovic-style rap about a pigeon, Karber never had a personal beef with Abercrombie. He's a slight and sandy-haired boy from Arkansas, who easily fits Jeffries's target demographic, if not the rigorous standards required of Abercrombie models. Still, the more Karber probed, the worse things looked. Not only did the Abercrombie exclude plus-size customers - women's pants max out at size 10 and men's at waist size 34 - it also burned its damaged remainders instead of donating them to charity, as is the custom among non-couture retailers. To exact revenge on Jeffries and expose his company's "douchebag attitude," Karber uploaded a YouTube video imploring viewers to gather their old Abercrombie clothes and give them to homeless people. In the video, popularly known by its hashtag, "Fitch the Homeless," Karber travels to Los Angeles's Skid Row and foists clothes on unsuspecting tent dwellers. "Together," he intones at the video's end, "we can make Abercrombie & Fitch the world's No. 1 brand of homeless apparel. What happened next took Karber by surprise. "I had heard of the concept of going viral," he explained over lunch at the Grove, California's most famous outdoor mall, "but this really did. Two hours in, it had thirty thousand views, which was more than all my previous videos combined. Within days, "Fitch the Homeless" racked up more than seven million views and Karber was asked to appear on CNN, Fox Business, and "Inside Edition." During the first forty-eight hours, the Internet embraced Karber's project. By day four, though, Karber became overwhelmed by blowback from critics disturbed by his use of the homeless as props. A writer for Vice dubbed the video "backwards-ass activism," declaring that Karber dumped clothes on the homeless "as if they were pack mules," while The Atlantic called Karber "as insensitive as the A&F chief he's targeting." A controversy about Abercrombie turned into a controversy about Karber. He admits there were problems with original video. My greatest fear was that yahoos all over the country were going to search for homeless people on the street and give them clothing and that somewhere something bad would happen. Still, he rejects the notion that the video is exploitative. It's a fact that people look down on the homeless. I'm not making them any more stigmatized. Karber has received hundreds of e-mails from appreciative supporters, including plus-size women thankful that a man has taken up their cause. On the other side of the ledger are e-mails from diehard Abercrombie fans speculating that Karber must not have been cool in high school. The most annoying e-mails, Karber says, are pitches from marketers offering to help him "take the campaign to the next level." I got something from a viral marketer, something from a guerilla marketer - they're all marketing companies with some fake adjective in front. Now everybody I talk to says, "Why don't you write a book about viral marketing?" " The video, says Emily Segal, a brand expert who writes a trend-forecasting blog, is more complex than meets the eye. On the one hand he's doing his prosumer thing, using his YouTube ability to criticize a company he finds objectionable. On the other hand, he's actually intuiting something about fashion. The idea of the homeless is a major trope in fashion and has been for a long time - the Zoolander "Derelicte" joke is real." At the Grove, Karber wore a blue polo, faded jeans, a multi-colored watch, and the shell-shocked look of a teen-ager who has just been yelled at by his father. "I can only look online when I'm in a very positive psychological state," he said while munching on barbecued brisket. I totally understand why the Kony guy went mad. Karber was referring to his fellow U.S.C. alum Jason Russell, who amassed nearly a hundred million views for a controversial video advocating military action against African warlord Joseph Kony before suffering a nervous breakdown that culminated in an arrest for public masturbation. The low point for Karber came after he did an interview with Fox: "That's when it hit me. I was being accused of exploiting the homeless and here I was doing media appearances and being driven around in a limo by Fox. After lunch, Karber ambled from the food court to the local Abercrombie & Fitch, a mega-shrine to preppy eroticism, generously endowed, as all Abercrombie outposts are, with giant photographs of mostly male, mostly naked torsos, and further embellished, as the more important branches are, with murals of still more naked men. On this particular day, Mike Jeffries's "cool kids" were not in evidence. The store was virtually empty aside from an army of employees, all tan and ingratiating. Karber looked nervous, as if he were returning to the scene of a crime and someone might recognize him. None of the employees had heard of "Fitch the Homeless." A young African-American employee named Raven promised to check it out. "People come in here sometimes complaining," she said, referring to the controversy over the company's plus-size clothing policy. "One woman came in here was all like, "How can you work here knowing that? And how can you deal with all of this?" " Raven gestured at the photos. But then she bought something anyway. She was plus-size - well, kind of in between - but she found something she could wear. Karber slinked away, happy not to have to engage. While Karber is happy to be out of the limelight, a more enthusiastically earnest approach to the anti-Jeffries crusade is being led by Benjamin O'Keefe, an eighteen-year-old self-described actor, motivational speaker, L.G.B.T. activist, and political consultant from Florida who wrote a change.org petition that has been signed by more than seventy-five thousand people who want Abercrombie to amend its plus-size policies (there would be more, O'Keefe explained in a phone interview, but "so many people are so outraged by Mike Jeffries that they couldn't even bring themselves to sign the petition"). On May 20th, O'Keefe travelled to Abercrombie's headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, where he was startled to be greeted by executives wearing flip-flops and riding Razor scooters. "I felt like I was on a high-school campus," he says. He hypothesizes that Jeffries's now-infamous comments are "a reflection of how he feels on the inside. In his heart of hearts, this isn't something he believes. He just wants to be part of the cool clique. Exactly what effect the negative publicity will have on Abercrombie's bottom line remains unclear. The company's stock held up well until it announced that first-quarter sales, which predate the controversy, dipped fifteen per cent. The National Eating Disorders Association called for a boycott of Abercrombie after the company announced plans to launch a national anti-bullying campaign in lieu of altering its marketing strategy. But Abercrombie has weathered many storms in the past, from outrage over marketing thongs to tweens; to protests that its now-defunct publication, A&F Quarterly, advocates alcohol and group sex; to discrimination suits; to shareholder revolts over Jeffries's executive pay and meddling from his domestic partner, Matthew Smith, who has no official role at the firm. Since Jeffries took over the company, in 1992, its value has skyrocketed. As Robert Buchanan, then an analyst for A.G. Edwards, told Salon in 2006, "It's the most amazing record that exists in U.S. retailing, period." As for Karber, the ongoing controversy surrounding the Abercrombie kerfuffle has brought a silver lining. He's the author of five unpublished novels, the most recent of which features a monster terrorizing a college campus. After his fifteen minutes of viral fame, Karber is having an easier time peddling his latest book: "People are finally interested."