Photo: Steven Meisel/Courtesy of Versace

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And now, the main event…

Last month in New York, the National Retail Federation gave its 2026 Visionary award to Abercrombie & Fitch Co. C.E.O. Fran Horowitz, who has guided the once-adrift teen mall brand to explosive year-over-year growth since taking over as chief executive. “First, we had to stabilize, then we had to transform, and next we had to grow,” Horowitz said, indulging in some business school aphorisms while accepting a made-up award from a trade association. It happens. Slightly more concerning: The day after the ceremony, A&F negatively updated its Q4 earnings and subsequently adjusted its full-year fiscal 2025 guidance downward to “at least 6 percent net sales growth.” The stock stumbled some 20 percent.

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Horowitz, who took over from scandal-plagued C.E.O. Mike Jeffries in February 2017, inherited a mess. For decades, Jeffries had defined the brand through its barely dressed Bruce Weber marketing campaigns. But by the dawn of the #MeToo era, marketing efforts that once read as sexy just seemed sleazy… or worse. Younger Millennials and Gen Z rolled their eyes at A&F’s mannered, erotic aesthetic. At the corporate level, there was a fear that Jeffries’ personal scandals—he was indicted on sex-trafficking charges in October 2024 but has yet to stand trial—would color the company in many consumers’ minds.

Under Horowitz, Abercrombie put clothes back on the models and started to become a cool, influencer-friendly brand. Revenue surged from $3.3 billion in 2016 to a record $4.95 billion last year, and the company announced approximately 40 net store openings—60 openings, 20 closures, plus 40 remodels and rightsizings. Meanwhile, in Q3 2025, sub-brand Hollister reported that net sales were up 16 percent year over year, and its total store count had eclipsed 520. 

The company has been on an inarguably impressive run, and yet the Abercrombie comeback narrative has become almost as old as some of its youngest customers. Following a surge in value from around $30 a share in 2023 to around $150 a share for much of 2024, the A&F stock has fallen back to Earth—trading around $100 as of this week. Yes, the Hollister sub-brand is still growing quickly, but Abercrombie revenue fell slightly in the most recent quarter, raising the question of whether the company has reached a post-turnaround plateau.

Maintaining that new normal may require convincing more Millennials to enter A&F’s doors. The company launched a wedding shop in 2024 and has sought out partnerships to expand its customer base. And as it will make abundantly clear this Super Bowl week, Abercrombie & Fitch is the NFL’s “official fashion partner”—the result of a deal announced in August. While Piper Sandler, an investment bank that runs an annual teen survey, has named Hollister as a top 10–favorite apparel brand for multiple seasons, Abercrombie & Fitch is positioned more to shoppers aged 23 to 40, according to their recent Q3 earnings. As one pleasantly confused older shopper recently posted on Reddit, “Am I legally allowed to be pushing mid-30s in Abercrombie & Fitch jeans? What are the rules?”

Double-digit year-over-year growth was probably never sustainable for Abercrombie, barring reinvention as a SaaS platform. But a number of fashion companies have recently demonstrated how to be successful with multigenerational customers. Jane Nielsen, the former C.F.O. of Coach, helped the brand clean up distribution and pricing. Thanks in large part to its success with Gen Z, Coach has enjoyed a well-documented resurgence, retaining customers, selling more units, and even raising prices.

Nielsen also brought this approach to Ralph Lauren, whose discipline-backed success offers another data point to consider. Since Patrice Louvet became C.E.O. in 2017, the company has closed wholesale stores, which were diluting the brand, and created clear, separate visions for Polo, Ralph Lauren Collection, RRL, Lauren Ralph Lauren, etcetera. The company created a baseline customer—the shopper who buys regardless of whether Ralph’s WASP prep school sensibility is in fashion or not.

Unlike Coach and Ralph Lauren, however, Abercrombie is a mall brand, and Horowitz must walk a tightrope—maintaining enough separation between Abercrombie and Hollister without playing the two off each other. As Guggenheim’s Simeon Siegel told me, a diversified, balanced portfolio should be the goal. Indeed, after chasing fickle teenagers for a generation, Abercrombie’s management team has every incentive to penetrate a more stable adult consumer base.

On today’s episode of Fashion People, Yasi Salek and I barely scratched the surface of celebrities who showed up to Sara Moonves’s W magazine x Saint Laurent x Charli XCX Grammys afterparty at Bar Marmont. Leo, Martha Stewart (?!), Kaia Gerber, Justin Bieber, and Teyana Taylor were all there. The power of Sara… [W mag]

Gwyneth Paltrow is the keynote speaker for the Meltwater Summit on May 5-6 in New York City. For your information, Meltwater is a media monitoring platform to track press mentions (and other data). I am also available to speak at the Meltwater Summit for an exorbitant fee! [Meltwater]

As Walmart’s new C.E.O., John Furner, started this week, the outgoing Doug McMillon shared his perspective on the retail business. In short, it needs more long-term thinking. [WWD]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

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