Behind the image.
Beneath the surface.

Darkside of Fashion

Fashion. Power.
The untold cost.

The Fashion archive Explore Darkside ↗

01 / More than meets the eye

Abercrombie's 2009 'Humor Tees' and the Retailing of Sexual Provocation

Abercrombie & Fitch 2000s Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse Archive: verified 4/5 wildness

Abercrombie's Back-to-School 2009 collection showed how aggressively the company blurred youth retail, sexual spectacle, and brand promotion. Its so-called 'humor tees' included 'Show the twins' above an image of a woman opening her blouse toward two men, along with shirts stating 'Female streaking encouraged' and 'Female Students Wanted for Sexual Research.' The American Family Association objected that the designs promoted a lifestyle treating sex as recreation and asked the company to remove them. Abercrombie refused to comply, preserving the shirts as part of the provocative persona that had defined its advertising and store environments. Although the episode does not establish a criminal abuse case, it is authentic evidence of the brand's deliberate sexualization of youth-oriented merchandising, a practice that later became increasingly difficult to defend as parents, activists, and consumers challenged the company's exclusionary and eroticized image.

Follow the sources:

← Back to Fashion Archive

02 / The daily darkside

A new perspective, every day.
Abercrombie's 2009 'Humor Tees' and the Retailing of Sexual ProvocationAI concept artwork

Archive Record · 2000s

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse4/5 wildness

Abercrombie's 2009 'Humor Tees' and the Retailing of Sexual Provocation

Abercrombie & Fitch / 2000s

Abercrombie's Back-to-School 2009 collection showed how aggressively the company blurred youth retail, sexual spectacle, and brand promotion. Its so-called 'humor tees' included 'Show the twins' above an image of a woman opening her blouse toward two men, along with shirts stating 'Female streaking encouraged' and 'Female Students Wanted for Sexual Research.' The American Family Association objected that the designs promoted a lifestyle treating sex as recreation and asked the company to remove them. Abercrombie refused to comply, preserving the shirts as part of the provocative persona that had defined its advertising and store environments. Although the episode does not establish a criminal abuse case, it is authentic evidence of the brand's deliberate sexualization of youth-oriented merchandising, a practice that later became increasingly difficult to defend as parents, activists, and consumers challenged the company's exclusionary and eroticized image.

Archive: verified

03 / The fashion archive

More Stories from the Fashion Archive

Follow a name. Trace a thread.
Look a little closer.

1506 stories

1506 stories in this selection.

01

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse1970s

From Heroin Addiction and Tompkins Square Park to New York Punk Style Icon

Jimmy Webb

After leaving community college, Jimmy Webb hitchhiked to Florida and New York and began living in Manhattan in 1975. He developed a heroin addiction during the city's troubled 1970s, initially settling around Fourth Street and Avenue D and sometimes sleeping in Tompkins Square Park or at the St. Marks Baths. The biography offers no indication that Webb exploited models or was involved in a fashion-industry abuse scandal; the documented episode is instead a stark account of addiction, precarious housing, and immersion in the downtown milieu that later shaped his punk-fashion identity. Webb ultimately became the long-time manager of Trash and Vaudeville, where from 1999 he helped dress performers including the Ramones, Joan Jett, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Sebastian Bach. His trajectory—from street-level survival and heroin dependence to a celebrated authority on New York rock style—made him an emblematic figure of the city's punk retail underground. He later opened the rock boutique I Need More in 2017, before dying of cancer in Manhattan in 2020.

Archive: verified ↗
02

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2000s–2010s

The Casting Barrier: How Locs Were Treated as a Liability in Fashion and Pageantry

Fashion modeling agencies and international beauty-pageant industry

The text describes a quieter but pervasive form of fashion-industry exclusion: Black models were pressured to abandon natural hairstyles in order to satisfy conservative casting standards. Model Adesuwa Aighewi reportedly locked her hair and was warned that she might receive fewer, or no, casting calls because of her dreadlocks, while other Black women associated with modeling agencies were forced to straighten their hair. The prejudice was not presented as a single scandal involving one executive, but as an entrenched aesthetic system that treated Eurocentric hair as more commercially acceptable and locs as unprofessional, politically coded, or difficult for stylists to manage. The page also notes that no Black Miss America winner had worn locs at the time discussed, suggesting how pageant ideals of respectability reinforced the same hierarchy. Resistance became visible on international stages: Zahra Redwood, a Rastafarian and Miss Universe Jamaica in 2007, wore her locs in competition; Sanneta Myrie became the first Miss Jamaica World contestant to wear locs at Miss World in 2015; and Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers won Miss Universe Great Britain in 2018 with natural locs. Their appearances challenged the idea that Black women had to chemically alter or conceal their hair to be considered elegant, employable, or crown-worthy, although the source does not identify specific agencies, contracts, lawsuits, or disciplinary proceedings.

Unverified ↗
03

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The Hungry Catwalks of Sydney Fashion Week 2014

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney; Alex Perry; Vivien’s model Laura Mitchell

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Sydney, held from 6 to 10 April 2014 at Carriageworks, became the setting for a public confrontation over the fashion industry's treatment of extremely thin models. Marie Claire editor Jackie Frank reportedly contacted a model's agent to question the model's health after seeing her on the runway. Designer Alex Perry, whose show featured exceptionally thin models, subsequently apologised publicly. Frank argued that the apology could help shift entrenched attitudes about body image in Australian fashion, where the visual ideal promoted on the catwalk had increasingly attracted scrutiny from editors, health advocates, and the public. The episode revived an earlier industry pledge from 2008, when Sydney Fashion Week said it would promote a healthier-looking runway standard. The controversy was compounded by testimony from Vivien’s model Laura Mitchell, who told the media that most shows during the 2014 festival had not provided catering, leaving models hungry while they worked through demanding schedules. The account exposed a stark contradiction in the event’s polished commercial image: designers and brands were spending as much as $80,000 on individual presentations, while the young people whose bodies were central to those spectacles could reportedly lack even basic food provision. The source does not establish that any model was diagnosed with an eating disorder or deliberately starved, but the combination of extreme thinness, health concerns, and inadequate backstage catering made the incident a notable warning about runway labor conditions and body-image culture.

Archive: verified ↗
04

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The 2019 Nude-Photo Hack, Extortion Plot, and Petrol-Station Robbery That Forced Ms Puiyi to Reclaim Her Image

Ms Puiyi (Siew Pui Yi)

In late 2019, Malaysian model and influencer Siew Pui Yi became the target of a calculated digital extortion scheme after her laptop was compromised while undergoing repairs. Hackers gained access to her Google Drive accounts and stole private and unreleased nude photographs. Fans subsequently warned her about suspicious emails advertising the images for sale. According to her account, she paid MYR 18,000 in an attempt to stop the material from being distributed, but the incident escalated into a physical robbery: when she went to a Shell petrol station to meet the perpetrators, three helmeted individuals damaged her car mirror, seized the cash, and fled. The hackers later demanded another MYR 50,000, turning the theft of intimate images into an organized intimidation campaign involving both online extortion and an alleged street-level ambush. Rather than continue paying, Puiyi publicly described the ordeal and chose to monetize images on her own terms through OnlyFans. The episode illustrates how a hacked model's private photographs could be transformed into a coercive revenue stream, while also showing the blurred boundary between cybercrime, sexual exploitation, and influencer branding in the platform economy.

Archive: verified ↗
05

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

The 2018 Explicit-Photo Allegations That Ended Gosha Rubchinskiy's Label

Gosha Rubchinskiy

In December 2018, Gosha Rubchinskiy, one of the most influential designers of post-Soviet streetwear, became the subject of serious sexual-misconduct allegations. A 16-year-old boy alleged that Rubchinskiy had requested explicit photographs from him through text messages and published screenshots that he said documented the exchange. Shortly afterward, another man made a similar allegation. Rubchinskiy denied both claims, and the available account does not establish a criminal conviction or judicial finding against him. The scandal nevertheless struck at the designer's image and at the informal, digitally mediated casting culture surrounding youth-oriented fashion, where direct messages and personal access could blur professional boundaries. Rubchinskiy shut down his eponymous brand later in 2018. When he relaunched the label in 2025, its stated casting policy prohibited casting opportunities from being arranged through text messages and required the presence of a formal casting team, an apparent institutional response to the controversy and a broader fashion-industry reckoning over unsupervised contact with young models.

Unverified ↗
06

Drugs, Sex & Model Abuse2010s

Suitsupply’s “Shameless” Campaign Condemned for Turning Women into Sexual Props

Suitsupply

Suitsupply built part of its brand identity around sexually charged advertising created with photographer Carli Hermes, but its “Shameless” campaign crossed from provocative menswear marketing into a regulatory and public-relations controversy. Several images showed women positioned as sexual objects or in submissive relationships to male models. The campaign became especially contentious in London, where selected images were withdrawn from a store after complaints that they were visible to children, including criticism focused on the Westfield London location. Belgium’s advertising standards authority separately ruled that several photographs had to be removed from Suitsupply’s website and Facebook page because they objectified the female model and portrayed her as subordinate to the man. The episode illustrated the legal and cultural limits facing fashion brands that use sexual domination as a visual shorthand for male luxury and confidence.

Archive: verified ↗
Showing 1–6 of 1506

An image is only part of the story. Status labels come from the archive; follow the sources and distinguish documented accounts, allegations, and folklore.

04 / For readers & creators

Give the story
another audience.

A daily editorial for your website.
An archive worth exploring.

01 / THE EMBEDEmbed the daily editorial.

Add the existing Fashion daily widget to your website. Its artwork and story follow the daily selection.

Widget instructions ↗
02 / THE APIExplore the archive API.

Find stories by keyword, designer or brand, category, myth status, and wildness. Start with a simple request.

Read the API guide ↗

In the guide, choose the REST API tab for endpoints and filters.

From the Fashion archive

Abercrombie & Fitch / 2000s

Abercrombie's 2009 'Humor Tees' and the Retailing of Sexual Provocation

Drugs, Sex & Model AbuseArchive: verified4/5 wildness

Abercrombie's Back-to-School 2009 collection showed how aggressively the company blurred youth retail, sexual spectacle, and brand promotion. Its so-called 'humor tees' included 'Show the twins' above an image of a woman opening her blouse toward two men, along with shirts stating 'Female streaking encouraged' and 'Female Students Wanted for Sexual Research.' The American Family Association objected that the designs promoted a lifestyle treating sex as recreation and asked the company to remove them. Abercrombie refused to comply, preserving the shirts as part of the provocative persona that had defined its advertising and store environments. Although the episode does not establish a criminal abuse case, it is authentic evidence of the brand's deliberate sexualization of youth-oriented merchandising, a practice that later became increasingly difficult to defend as parents, activists, and consumers challenged the company's exclusionary and eroticized image.

Follow the sources

Status and citations are supplied by the archive. AI concept art is an interpretation, not historical evidence.