Browsing Out Loud

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI

NEVER has a store that sells bluejeans and T-shirts more closely resembled a hookup joint.

The four-story Abercrombie & Fitch flagship on Fifth Avenue is a sprawling nightclub of a place with muscled young men standing guard at the front entrance, their smiles entreating passers-by to look. At their backs, the front windows are mysteriously shuttered. Inside, the lighting is a moody chiaroscuro, and the music thumps at such high volume that you have to shout to be heard. A central staircase with subtly lit frosted glass-block flooring is a dramatic sculptural counterpoint to the darkness.

On a weekend afternoon, knots of conspiratorial-looking teenagers huddled out front, blowing on their cupped hands, talking on cellphones, casting eager gazes at one another from beneath eyelids at studied half-mast. In the store, which opened last month, hotties circulate the catwalklike floors, touching up their lip gloss, gossiping with one another. Only the fact that they occasionally lean over to fluff at a sweater, their hair fanning silkily across their shoulders, would lend you an inkling that they are actually employees.

Right. Because you are not in a nightclub. You are here to shop.

This is what Abercrombie does with distinction: the most efficient way to move tons of jeans and T-shirts is not to sparkle with antiseptic, anodyne cleanliness like Gap, but to sell these relatively generic pieces of clothing using the sexual ideology of the new millennium, an era informed by readily available pornography, the strip-club aesthetic and a post-AIDS abandon. The nightclub setting and the racy marketing campaigns make the clothes more appealing to the kids. And tick off the parents. Which, in turn, makes the clothes even more appealing to the kids.

For all the hype surrounding Abercrombie, the clothes are, well, just clothes. Upon entry, you find a row of glass cases displaying denim jeans. This is the denim "bar," a term increasingly employed by public relations people to connect the act of shopping to the act of ingesting food or drink, to subtly convince shoppers that buying clothes is an intimate activity providing either nourishment or intoxicating pleasure. And the jeans are fine, priced from $69.50 to $198 for the Ezra Fitch premium styles.

For women the preppy Ezra Fitch collection includes tailored shirts, embroidered with a tiny moose on the front, and saucier camisoles, like a strapless beaded one with an Empire waist for $128. In gray or white, it was actually elegant. I would skip the holiday T-shirts with phrases that are as corny as lines from the 1970's show "Love, American Style," like "Santa loves a hot cookie," "Never a silent night" and, my personal favorite, "Is that a candy cane in your pants?"

Men's clothes are simple: polos, fleece items, jeans, khakis, sweaters, overcoats. I liked the cable-knit sweaters in lamb's wool, nylon and cashmere, many of them bearing the embroidered moose.

On the walls of the store a three-story mural depicts a kind of adolescent sexual Guernica: young male athletes in all manner of gymnastic contortion, mostly stripped to the waist, their torsos striated with muscle, their pants packed with cartoonishly provocative, eye-popping bulges of which even Porfirio Rubirosa would have been skeptical.

Abercrombie has a long history of provocation. In 2002 the company marketed thong underpants for the 8-to-10-year-old set that bore slogans like "wink wink" and "eye candy." In 2003 it released its Christmas Field Guide, a catalog that featured naked or nearly naked young models and offered advice on oral sex, group masturbation and orgies. "Sex, as we know can involve one or two, but what about even more?" one layout proposed. Abercrombie recalled it after protest from parents' groups. Even teenagers have finally taken offense. Earlier this year a group of Pennsylvania girls organized a "girl-cott" of T-shirts with slogans like "Who needs brains when you have these?"

In May the company settled a class-action lawsuit charging that it discriminated against nonwhite job applicants. Abercrombie agreed to pay $50 million, including nearly $40 million in damages to female and minority employees and job applicants who claimed that because they did not conform to the Nordic, preppy Abercrombie & Fitch look they were exiled to the backroom, fired or never hired in the first place.

If I were an employee today, the thing I would be most concerned about is the noise in the store. A booming sound system delivers ear-splitting dance music every minute of the day. On my first visit I couldn't stay in the store longer than 10 minutes because the thumping club-mix version of Erasure's "Oh L'Amour" - an annoying piece of postdisco detritus - was so loud. On my way out I approached a sales clerk.

"How can you stand this noise all day long?" I asked.

Her mouth moved as if to say, "What?"

"HOW CAN YOU STAND THIS NOISE ALL DAY LONG?"

She nodded. "I EAT TYLENOL LIKE IT'S CANDY," she shouted, holding her hands up to her head. Oh, great, I thought. By this time next year she'll be deaf and need a liver transplant.

ON my second, third and fourth visits, I arrived with a decibel meter because I wanted to find out exactly how loud the place was. Following guidelines set forth by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I recorded decibel levels from the low to the high 80's most of the time I was in the store, although a few songs were played at higher volumes. One reached a peak of 97 decibels. Anything over 85 decibels can damage hearing, according to Amy K. Boyle, the public education director of the League for the Hard of Hearing.

"If you have to shout in order to be heard, you are probably in an environment that could be damaging to your hearing," she told me. "A simple rule of thumb is that if you have to yell from three feet away, the background noise is too high." (Typical conversation registers at about 60 decibels, busy city traffic at about 85; gas mowers and tractors register in the 90's.)

On one of my visits I sought auditory refuge in the dressing room, but even there speakers pumped out the music. Half-naked in the semi-obscurity, the bam-bam-bam of the music a continuous assault, I wondered if perhaps Abercrombie's marketing director had ever worked psy-ops for the military. I asked a clerk if she could ask the manager to turn the music down.

"I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it," she said.

Thomas D. Lennox, the Abercrombie vice president for corporate communications, said the company monitors music levels throughout its stores. "It is loud," he said. "And we do monitor it." He added that the company had not received any complaints from customers.

With the exception of the moose-imprinted clothing and the slogan-bearing T-shirts, there are lots of perfectly lovely things to like at Abercrombie, like a women's long-sleeve T-shirt in silky cotton and polyester ($24.50) and a lamb's-wool-viscose-nylon-angora-cashmere belted cable-knit sweater ($228) that Katharine Hepburn would have worn with, perhaps, the khaki cargo pants ($69.50).

But I'll have to buy items I like from the user-friendly Abercrombie Web site. Because shopping at the flagship store is among the more unpleasant experiences to be had in usually retail-friendly Manhattan.

Abercrombie & Fitch
720 Fifth Avenue (56th Street), Manhattan; (212) 381-0110

ATMOSPHERE Marquee without the cocktails.

PRICES Inexpensive to moderate. Men's down jackets, $178; Ezra Fitch cashmere sweaters for women, $148; vintage bead necklaces, $19.50; cotton T-shirts embellished with the word "Lust," $39.50.

SERVICE Not attentive, considering there are enough staff members on hand to make the place look like a bustling club at any hour of the day. Best line from a sales clerk (while peering at my hand-held decibel meter): "Dude. That is the weirdest looking phone I have ever seen."