Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful

Neon beer signs blinked in the front window. Frost chalked the sidewalk outside. It was a Tuesday night at Harpo's in Westport, and the front bar was a shipwreck of tipped cups and overflowing ashtrays as people pressed shoulder-to-shoulder to flag down the bartender. On Tuesdays, the beer special was quarter draws -- people could get lit for parking-meter money. Twenty-three year old Dan Moon knew how packed the place could get, so he came early. There was still a line out the door.

He stood at the front bar, amid the confluence of dolled-up women and men in college T-shirts. Above him, the stereo blasted AC/DC. Behind him, people jockeyed for position. Tonight, Moon wore the basic club-scene uniform: tight black shirt, jeans and dress shoes. But he stood out in the barroom line-up. He was tan and muscular. Above his square cheekbones and smooth forehead, his blond hair crested in a perfect wave. Clutching a green bill, Moon looked toward the bartender expectantly.

If he looked familiar, he was: A part-time model with Kansas City-based Talent Unlimited, Moon's path to adulthood had been chronicled in the ads fueling various city rags (including this one) since he was six years old. Currently, he's the perfectly shorn stud promoting laser hair removal on a billboard along I-35 north of the city.

After graduating from Central Missouri State University in December 2002, Moon had moved back to town to look for a full-time job. Prospects were slim, and he had little idea what he wanted to do. On a résumé, he was indistinguishable from the rest of the city's job-seekers: He'd played football in college, made the dean's list and graduated in a little over four years with a degree in business management.

Facing a ruthless market, Moon contacted a few high school friends in Nebraska. One, a manager at Abercrombie & Fitch, suggested he apply to be a manager in training with the clothing chain.

"I was really unsure about it," Moon says. "It was not where I saw myself being after college -- with retail management." Still, he needed money, and the job looked like a good résumé-builder.

In January, Moon walked into the Abercrombie on the Plaza. He'd never worked retail before. Moon expressed interest in the management position and got a formal interview with a district manager. There, he brokered the only thing he couldn't put on a résumé: his looks.

"They didn't hire me on the spot," he says, "but I knew I had the job."

For its employees, Abercrombie pushed what they described as a "natural, raw look" synonymous with sex. The job was like an extension of Moon's nightlife -- he spent his days chatting up customers, everyone from über-hot sorority girls to shopping moms. Across the city, other guys who'd graduated with Moon's major were knotting ties and commuting to entry-level bank jobs. At Abercrombie, the dress code was simple: head-to-toe Abercrombie clothing, a style Moon loved to wear. As winter thawed, Moon wore a red, sleeveless shirt and sandals to work. He made $23,000 a year.

At night, Moon traveled with a two-person entourage. Another manager in training, Ben Matthews, was a charismatic 23-year-old with dark hair and equally good looks. His store manager, Andrea Mandrick, 22, was a knockout petite blonde. Moon and his coworkers hit the Plaza, boozing beneath teardrop-shaped lamps at Kona Grill or mingling with the techno dance crowd in the roped-off VIP lounge downstairs at Mi Cocina.

Their late-night antics blended perfectly with the company philosophy, which was to hire as many good-looking people as possible, give them discounts on clothes and send them out into the world.

"We are the advertisements outside the store," Mandrick says.

The late night scene was an exercise in social Darwinism, the best-looking people attracting others while the marginal-looking became nothing more than an alcoholic blur. At Harpo's Tuesday night, Moon smiled at girls, took a few sips from his plastic beer cup and stopped to shake hands with some guy he recognized. A group of cigarette-wielding girls at a nearby table eyed him like paparazzi.

On weekday mornings, dance music bumped from speakers at Abercrombie & Fitch on the Plaza. A chandelier made of faux deer antlers hung in one room; another, composed of whitewashed moose antlers, cast a glow on red, blue and gray Abercrombie Lacrosse, Abercrombie Athletic Department and Abercrombie Parks and Recreation T-shirts scattered across a long wooden table, flanked by rows of faded jeans and dress shirts crumpled to impart a secondhand look. A black-and-white poster of a topless woman lying on a bed ran the length of the back wall by the cash register, her curvy body rising and falling across the mattress like a panoramic landscape. Other pictures of half-naked men and women adorned adjacent walls. In another room, corduroy and khaki skirts -- their widths greater than their lengths -- postered the wall like college pennants.

The scene was the same at all five Abercrombies across the metro -- at Oak Park Mall, Independence Center, Town Center, on the Plaza and in Lawrence. Each Abercrombie followed one of ten specific store designs, says a former Kansas City district manager. Corporate formula dictated the vibe, from lighting to music to poster placement and the employees' clothes. Operations were detailed right down to how often store mannequins got sprayed with Abercrombie cologne.