Hollister and Abercrombie. Two stores that made you feel sexier than a perfect potion of booze and MDMA. Those stores were so sexy that I would plan outfits to wear into the store. Abercrombie was basically a night club; the music was SO loud. I’d brush my teeth beforehand and do some pushups in the dressing room before ogling the incredible black and white 12 x 12 portraits of angelic asses and sultry smiles that hung like pornaments on the walls. Good luck getting those jeans on when you’re stiffer than my new driver thanks to this meat gallery:

When you walked out of Abercrombie or Hollister, with a paper bag in your hand containing a new pair of cargo shorts and a crisp white polo for summer, you knew you were about to get your dry hump on. Nothing like dry-humping a chick in your Hollister cargo shorts, all 38 pockets and 400 buttons folding up and mashing against your unit, tears squeezing out of your eyes from the searing pain as some tiny sophomore tries to start a friction fire using your thigh. Man oh man, those were the days.

And then, overnight, someone flicked a switch. Abercrombie, Hollister, American Eagle, and Aeropostale (if you were poor) became un-cool. Dudes traded in the moose and the seagull logos for the Polo horseman and the Lacoste alligator. Anyone who didn’t catch the switch was mocked for being a douchebag, a juvenile delinquent who hadn’t stepped forward into young adulthood. It was a fate worse than getting your braces in high school.

Not everyone remembers these institutions so fondly…

Unfortunately, fat and poor are not the target demographic for Abfitch and Holl. We, the beautiful, cannot accommodate everyone. The clothing is cut specifically to show how little you eat. The sleeves on the polos rode up so high that they were basically tanks. Those sleeves were impossible short. I suppose if you had massive guns, they looked cool because they would choke your biceps like a condom ring, but my 7th-grade arms weren’t juiced like they are today.

And girls who put the bags up on their walls! Not that I found myself in chicks’ bedrooms too often back then (nowadays, I would never hang out in a chick’s bedroom. Home games only.) Hey Katie, it wasn’t a “smug” thing; it was a sex thing. Those bags were pure sex in wallpaper form. I much preferred to pull out my history textbook and catch a whiff of nipple before diving into the fall of the Roman Empire. Way more uplifting than one of these bedazzled rags:

And of course, an American Eagle enthusiast piped up from the coal mine in which she works:

How you doing down there, Koby? Still putting in the hours, day after day, with your blue-collar American Eagle mentality? That store fucking sucked. If Abercrombie and Hollister are Mercedes and BMW, American Eagle is a hand-drawn rickshaw in Chinatown. It will get you where you want to go, but you’ll look like a total fucking asshole in it.

Please don’t mention Aeropostale in the same sentence as Abercrombie or Hollister. Aeropostale was like a slightly more expensive Goodwill. These clothes were cobbled together from recycled mosquito netting and dried gum. They didn’t even have a real logo! It was simply the entire word Aeropostale written out across the shirt, as though you were playing in a charity soccer team sponsored by Aeropostale. Talk about an inferiority complex.

We didn’t have a Hollister in Maine, so it was Abercrombie or bust. The brand has become a punchline, but I’m thinking quite seriously about revisiting those days. Bring on the A&F renaissance!