As counterintuitive as it might seem, being trendy can be a curse for a clothing brand. Abercrombie & Fitch for years was a trendy tastemaker that told customers what was cool, not the other way around, and it worked. Until it didn’t.

A decade ago, the ‘it’ brand of the 2000s and early 2010s crashed. Customers were turned off by the highly sexualized marketing and leadership’s disdainful attitude toward shoppers it said weren’t cool enough for Abercrombie & Fitch’s clothes.

So when Abercrombie CEO Fran Horowitz, previously president of A&F’s sister brand Hollister, went about repairing the parent company in 2017, she had her work cut out for her. As detailed in a Fortune feature in 2022 , she dropped her predecessors’ command-and-control way of managing the company in favor of letting

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