You’re casually walking down a hallway when suddenly you are suffocating in a signature scent that is strong enough to be smelled from a mile away. You try to make your way through, but it’s too dark to make out any escape routes.  You can see what appears to be a tall and muscular shirtless man standing in front of a poster of another equally tall and muscular shirtless man. What happened? Well you just accidentally walked into an Abercrombie & Fitch store.      

Even if you don’t wear Abercrombie & Fitch clothing you’ve probably seen people walking around wearing the signature A&F logo. But Abercrombie & Fitch is not for everyone.

CEO Mike Jeffries has made that very clear.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

Although, Jeffries’ honesty is refreshing, it stirred up a hurricane of controversy. Abercrombie & Fitch does not offer plus sizes which excludes a large demographic of customers, but to Jeffries that is worth it to be the “coolest” clothing franchise out there.

“Listen, do we go too far sometimes? Absolutely. But we push the envelope, and we try to be funny, and we try to stay authentic and relevant to our target customer. I really don’t care what anyone other than our target customer thinks.”

“I would never wear Abercrombie & Fitch clothes ever. Especially after what the CEO said. It’s extremely shallow and disrespectful to exclude plus size people from a store for the sake of being exclusive,” said senior Christine Farawell.

In an effort to keep up their “cool kid” image, the company was rumored to be collecting their used clothes and destroying them as opposed to donating them to the homeless. This would ensure that the “wrong” people would never be seen on their clothes.

As a response, a huge group of people united via the Internet to organize a movement to “Fitch the Homeless;” they collected donated Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to distribute to the homeless.

Their double goal was both to clothe the homeless, and help ruin Abercrombie & Fitch’s snobby image by making A&F the most popular brand among the homeless.

It is too soon to see if their movement was successful. But they did manage to get #FitchTheHomeless to be a trending topic on Twitter.

So if you see a homeless person clad in A&F attire, you’ll know that they’re among the exclusive, cool and popular homeless clique.