In response to complaints from the media and advocacy groups across the country, clothing designer Abercrombie & Fitch announced that it will withdraw its t-shirt line containing suggestive alcohol-related taglines. CADCA joined the Center for Science and the Public Interest (CSPI), MADD and NCADD to express its disapproval of the new line of t-shirts. The t-shirts set off a red flag in the prevention community for glorifying alcohol use and binge drinking.
The t-shirts displayed messages such as “Don’t Bother/I’m Not Drunk Yet,” “Bad Girls Chug. Good Girls Drink Quickly,” "Candy is dandy. But liquor is quicker," I Give to the Pour,” and “Filler Up.”
In a letter to A&F, CADCA noted that the T-shirts’ messages are “unconscionable” in light of the staggering rates of alcohol abuse among youth. “With the highest prevalence of both binge and heavy drinking for young adults aged 18 to 25, and with the peak rate occurring at age 21, Abercrombie & Fitch’s marketing of alcohol-related merchandise only serves to condone and glorify a very serious problem,” said CADCA Chairman & CEO General Arthur T. Dean. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4,554 children die each year due to excessive alcohol use.
The t-shirts, CADCA noted, are particularly worrisome considering that the product is marketed to young people, and the brand that is closely affiliated with healthy American teens. As of May 17, the men and women’s short-sleeve “humor” t-shirts were no longer available on the A&F website and on May 18 A&F pledged to discontinue their sales.
The announcement from A&F comes after a recent study showed that adolescents who collect and brandish promotional hats, shirts, bags and other merchandise displaying popular alcohol logos are far more likely to start drinking before they turn 21. According to the study authors from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H, the alcohol industry currently spends more than $1 billion a year on all aspects of marketing—a figure that includes expenditures for such youth-oriented promotional items as baseball caps, backpacks and t-shirts. Researchers urged the alcohol industry to officially halt the practice of distributing and selling alcohol-related paraphernalia—much as the tobacco industry did with tobacco-related items in 1998.
This is not the first time, the prevention community has complained about A&F’s marketing practices. In 1998, CADCA coalitions joined with other national substance abuse prevention organizations to decry the “Drinking 101” promotion in the A&F “Back to School” catalog.
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