Outdoor clothing retailer/cataloger Abercrombie & Fitch was ordered to stop selling its “Naughty or Nice” Christmas catalog to minors in Michigan last week by the state’s attorney general’s office because of its sexually explicit content.
Stanley F. Pruss, assistant attorney general in charge of the Consumer Protection Division, said in a Nov. 7 a letter to A&F president Michael Jeffries that he was giving the Reynoldsburg, OH-based firm, 10 days to stop selling the 300-page catalog, which costs $6, to minors.
The catalog, featuring a shirtless young man with unbuttoned jeans on the cover and pictures of nude models inside, “contains explicit and detailed verbal descriptions and narrative accounts of sexual excitement, erotic fondling, oral sex, sexual intercourse and sadomasochistic abuse,” according to Pruss.
Stopping short of calling the catalog pornographic, the assistant attorney general wrote that if A&F did not act within 10 days, it would be “viewed as persistent and knowing violations of the Michigan Consumer Protection Act [subjecting] A&F to a civil penalty of up to $25,000” for each catalog sold to a minor.
Attorney General Jennifer Mulhern Granholm, authorizing the action, said three children, aged 10, 13, and 14, unaccompanied by an adult, bought the catalog – covered in shrink wrap with a “mature content” label urging parental consideration for readers under 18, an A&F store in Okemos, MI.
A&F spokesman Hampton Carney, who likened those sales to a child sneaking into an R-rated movie, would not comment directly on Pruss’s letter, its demands, or what the company planned to do.
He would only say that the catalog directed to college students and “never has been intended for anyone under 18.” Store employees “are not in the practice of carding people,” (asking for identification and proof of age) before selling them the catalog.
Saying that response to the current and previous catalogs has been “incredibly positive,” Carney said it has a “great sense of humor, is fun, energetic, interesting and beautiful.” More than half of it is devoted to editorial matter, interesting articles, movie and compact disc reviews with advertisements for A&F’s line of clothing being “almost coincidental,” he added.
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