Instead I think of the groups of sad and weary dads flopped on couches in the one tiny seating area that every store possessed, bludgeoned by the din of club music, light-headed from the fug of sickly sweet perfume, and waiting for their kids to hurry up and buy something.

I think of the label’s shocking in-store posters which promised their jeans would make your backside look more curvy (if you were a girl) or your bulge look more pronounced (if you were a boy). I think of customers moving from shelf to shelf in semi-darkness, trying to shop by Braille.

I think of myself in their dressing room, bathed in a weird sepia light which somehow convinced me, and probably millions like me, that this overpriced plaid shirt had given me a tan.

None of these deceptions are covered in Netflix’s White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch. Instead the documentary begins with talking heads endlessly circling around the rather obvious concept that sex sells.

We learn how former company CEO Mike Jeffries, a sort of preppy lizard with a vision, took a fusty old heritage brand and sent it to the gym until you could count the abs.

He made the advertising into soft-core gay porn and hired bored models to act like they were doing you a favour by letting you shop at the stores.

The clothes themselves were deep background – barely a sentence or two is devoted to them in the documentary – but it was an era when wholesome sexiness was huge (think of Britney, Justin Bieber and all the other sexy faux pop virgins) and Americans, and soon the rest of the world, became Abercrombie devotees.

The brand became a gigantic publicly listed concern, and was among the first to have its own campus, which looks in the promotional videos like some kind of creepy retail cult. Celebrities like Heidi Klum and Jennifer Lawrence endorsed the clothes.

For Irish kids Abercrombie was part of the same Noughties douchebag uniform that also featured Dubarry shoes/Ugg boots and, as the brand was still decently confined to the US at that point, wearing it was evidence that you had money to travel.

The downfall of the label, for Irish kids anyway, began the second Abercrombie opened a store in Dublin. Suddenly, the gigantic lettering they emblazoned across everything they sold may as well have said: “I only had to go to town to buy this old thing.”

Like Burberry and Tommy Hilfiger, ubiquity was the death knell for exclusivity. People were tired of shopping at a store that played tinnitus-inducing house music and smelled like a stag party on steroids.

According to the documentary, however, it was Abercrombie’s problematic advertising and racist hiring policies (there were notes on people who “looked too Asian”) that did it in.

Lawsuits were filed in America, gargantuan claims were settled out of court, and a token black guy was hired to make it look like something was being done.

Meanwhile, the brand’s “white hot” presence had become a liability and there was a nasty whiff of MeToo stuff around Weber (who settled claims out of court but never admitted any wrongdoing).

Horrendous graphic T-shirts with taglines like “Wong Brothers Laundry Service – Two Wongs Can Make It White”, had to be pulled from stores.

Director Alison Klayman and her team tried and failed to get Jeffries, who got a payoff of $27m after he resigned, on camera, but I would have at least expected some kind of update on what he did next.

Their roster of interviewees was padded with far too many journalists, many saying the same things in different words.

There was a lot of hand-wringing about how exclusionary Abercrombie’s hiring policies were but little examination of the idea that most advertising features beautiful people and by definition excludes those who can’t afford a brand’s aspirational dream.

The villain of the piece is the vanquished lizard, but the public (me included) who ate up the white supremacist sexiness surely have to share the blame.

Style counsel: Three of the best fashion docs

McQueen
Apple TV

Working-class, gay and a little pudgy, Alexander McQueen had a number of hurdles growing up, but this documentary explores how his remarkable talent, and the support of some devoted friends, helped him become the most important designer of his generation.

Jeremy Scott: The People’s Designer
Prime

“I used to wear Moschino,” Lil Kim once rapped, “but every b**ch got it.” Surely, she didn’t mean Rita Ora and Katy Perry, who cameo in this story of Scott’s journey from small-town Missouri boy to creative director of Moschino.

The September Issue
Prime

Ostensibly this behind-the-scenes documentary on the production of American Vogue’s most important edition was to focus on its formidable editor, Anna Wintour, but it’s Grace Coddington – the magazine’s former creative director – who really steals the show

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