There were the half-naked male models and pretty girls hanging around nonchalantly by the entrance, the so-called 'greeters' enticing customers into stores that resembled nightclubs – poor lighting, pounding music and the pungent smell of Fierce, the house cologne.
'You could literally write Abercrombie & Fitch in dog **** on a hat and sell it for 40 bucks,' claimed a company insider, bluntly. By 2006, profits had soared to around $2 billion. Jeffries, described by the company as its 'heart and soul', earned as much as $71 million a year, making him one of the highest paid executives in the world.
Now, however, the gilded world of Jeffries, who left the company in 2014 when its share price was faltering but is today still estimated to be worth $300 million, has come crashing down after he and his longtime British boyfriend, Matthew Smith, were charged this week with operating an international sex-trafficking ring.
Abercrombie & Fitch's astonishing success made a business icon of its American chief executive, the tirelessly driven, if eccentric, Mike Jeffries Jeffries and Smith have previously denied any wrongdoing via their lawyers. A lawyer for Jeffries says his client would respond to the accusations in court rather than via the media.
In a gruesome indictment, the victims were also required to use sex toys and have their genitals shaved. Jacobson, a man who reportedly wears a snakeskin sheath on his nose to hide the fact that much of it is missing after botched cosmetic surgery, is accused of being the middle man, interviewing and 'trying out' young men by requiring them to perform sex acts on him first.
Jeffries' reign at Abercrombie & Fitch was dominated by its controversial brand image and the equally controversial remarks he made about his customer base In October last year, one of Jeffries' accusers, actor David Bradberry, filed a civil lawsuit against Jeffries, Smith and Abercrombie & Fitch, alleging Abercrombie's support of Jeffries enabled the former CEO to 'successfully rape, sexually assault, and coercively sex traffic' him and others.
To many people, the idea of grown men not being able to simply say 'no' might be much harder to accept than if the victims were women – especially as one of Jeffries' accusers conceded, 'nobody had a gun to my head'. He says he was later given an Abercrombie gift card to buy an outfit and invited to a supposed casting at The Hamptons home of Jeffries and Smith .
According to Bradberry, 'dozens and likely over a hundred young models' were victims. He estimates at least several hundred people, from the flight bookers to the body shavers, were involved in an operation he described to the BBC as a 'slickly-oiled machine'. Overwhelmed by the bacchanal – which involved some wearing exotic costumes and others swimming naked in a gold-tiled pool – he retreated to a back room and went to sleep.
'In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then the not-so cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids,' he said. 'We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong, and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.'