army of shirtless pranksters invade NYC Abercrombie & Fitch

lol @ improv dorks

well that was a good use of their time

do the actual male employees that work @ abercrombie & fitch not wear shirts?

one wandering model, it seems

Everything I ever thought about American commerce and advertising has been ... shattered

the best buy one seems better cuz it seems as if it sent the store into some type of panic. is it really a good gag if all the employees are laughing w/ you?

yeah for real.

There are photographs all over the store of bare-chested men, both on the wall and on the products themselves.

news flash!

"No one is coming to our shitty college improv shows! Hey, maybe we should bring the improv...to them!"

i would find these guys a lot funnier if they didnt have a website and just posted a couple youtube videos every few weeks

u ppl hate fun. this thread needs more fags (and schefter).

What's wrong with these dudes clearly just having a laugh? Also, possibly money, once PR people start calling them and paying them to pull a stunt at their place of choice.

flashmobs are the dumbest thing ever but at least they're picking good targets

morbs, any interest in seeing a lagerfield doc with me and schef?

gabbneb, maybe you could suggest some to me since i never go above 14th st!!!

theres something really annoying about the way they call themselves "agents" and the semi-smug sense of self-satisfaction (look at us topple consumer culture using the weapon of improv!!). i still think its funny--this one not as much as the starbucks or best buy ones--the website, and the writing, just gets to me.

i think the agent thing is tounge-in-cheek.

yeah, and still annoying

what is this abt lagerfield doc

gabbneb, maybe you could suggest some to me since i never go above 14th st!!!

some what?

I assumed gabb was an A&F man.

Who in hell is lagerfield?

Someone might have to explain to me, a bit, what makes these amusing or meaningful, as opposed to generally banal. I seem to remember the Best Buy one consisting mostly of managers having the obvious, sensible reaction -- eye-roll, headache, ha-ha very funny but you're going to have to go now. This one seems to bring some small, lame delight to a few people, but mostly it just seems indulgent -- people going aww, look at these wacky kids.

way to throw 'em off our tail, agent nabisco.

trail* ugh :(

I assumed gabb was an A&F man.

cheney to leahy

Granted, I would totally like to see this as some kind of hidden-camera prank on an A&F brand manager, standing in a store watching its advertising vision literalize itself in the doorway (especially if followed by frantic phone calls: "our shirt sales are tanking! you've ruined us!").

Kyoto
SCHIP

the Roberts court

WHOOPS

A&F is responsible for these things too, though

I believe gabb is having a dyslexic thread stroke.

the starbucks one was brilliant!!

i don't think any of this has anything to do with consumer culture - it's just that stores are the only public social spaces left.

agree abt the general limpness of this one.

Lagerfeld doc is sooooooooooo boring!

that's what happens when they make docs abt ppl I never heard of (except Mr. Death I guess)

"it's just two hours of sewing"

what was the starbucks onE

600 guys attempt to order a "fremme neppe venetta"

So when I went to a Kiss concert, were all those people dressed up as Kiss just doing a clever improv stunt?

see, they're shirtless guys WITH DIFFERENT BODY TYPES

time loop setup with a few people doing the same thing over and over

xpost 2 jon

Was this sponsored by Dove?

You know, it'd be more interesting if there was actually some sort of critique or statement being made beyond simple prankish interference with retail culture. Yes, Abercrombie is a brand centered around a fetishized ideal of a certain male body type, but being shirtless in their store doesn't communicate anything in regards to that. I could give a shit about "culture jamming" but these guys are just too self-aggrandizing to be appraised for their amusing silliness.

To be fair, it doesn't seem like these people think they're any kind of culture-jamming guerrillas or anything. It seems like they (a) like having social crap to do with their free time, and (b) think they are making the world a more fascinating, entertaining place. Hahaha "and if we make someone think, that's just a bonus" ARGGH

This clip is not quite the opposite of funny.

really, i just don't get the notion of getting a mob of people to all behave the same idiosyncratic way for an hour == improv.

bizzaro thread. morbs advocates fun. everyone else grumpy critical.

I hope the word "fun" is getting paid overtime for the work it's doing in that sentence.

If they all got shirtless and started wrestling or playing touch football or making out, I might have a different opinion.

I read this yesterday and thought it was pretty funny with the heavy dude and the back hair dude and all that. Like 0 ink though which is a little odd. But then I got to the bottom with this guy

http://www.improveverywhere.com/images/noshirts68.jpg

and immediately thought "that dude is ILX, lol"

i don't feel like it's improv at all, but it's kind of a neat idea. i mean, they're not hurting anybody and they're injecting a little surreality into the world w/o some overbearingly political conscience. sure it's immature, but it's also kind of funny.

nabisco you fake being a fucking puppy dog on the internet and you've got something to say to these people about fun? loser alert

I don't see what the big deal is about a bunch of guys walking around shirtless and provoking practically no reaction.

If they were going to do this, they should have sent people people into the store one by one in 15-second intervals. Each guy should have gone up to the model, looked the model up and down, then removed his shirt and started copying the model's poses/posture/etc until all 100 of them were in there shirtless.

dan's right.

e.g. as long as the impetus is having fun and being silly, not actively irritating other people or trying to prove a point through really weird means -- i think it's fun. i wouldn't participate, but i'd certainly stay to watch.

my dad had this book around the house when I was a teenager and it kinda raised my standard for provocative stunts....

http://www.alternativetentacles.com/img/products/book022.jpg

good shit.

oh man i luvd that book in hs

The thing about "a puppy" is that, until the attempt to explain his ability to type being a result of some science experiment, the posts did totally capture the exuberance and attention span of a puppy, which is what made them funny; the bacon sandwich reaction was pretty priceless. This whole A&F thing is lacking commitment.

One of the interesting things about New York is that it's (a) the kind of place where people are inclined to and comfortable with doing stuff like this, plus also (b) the kind of place where other people are going to take hardly any notice of it at all. I feel like there's some kind of whole complex around it, but I can't put it into words well enough to give a short version here.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/19/business/worldbusiness/PolesHomePage.jpg

polish sausage girls

I'm not sure what kind of commitment is supposed to be involved when you know you're going to get kicked out of the store at some point.

and my post was about "fun" not the quality of the stunt.

additionally if I had been in the store at the time and seen these people, ditto with the best buy stunt, I would most likely have had an immediately knee-jerk response of jealousy that I didn't think of it, or wasn't part of it, which is good enough for me to approve of it as a whole.

I can't help but think the dismissive reaction here (and I imagine from other men in the store, lol @ them) is exactly what a bunch of dudes do when they feel like they got one-upped, e.g. blow smoke and come up with some reason those other people are lame. big surprise really

I feel like there's some kind of whole complex around it, but I can't put it into words well enough to give a short version here.

where nothing is possible, everything is permitted?
e.g. everybody minds their own business, therefore everyone's business is nobody else's problem

tom, the only things i am envious of are the nice fit pectorals of some of the shirtless dudes. well, envious AND covetous, maybe.

really, it's just nice to see a wide spectrum of shirtless men somewhere other than a leather-bar beer blast.

next up: They should all go to an Arcade Fire show and climb the stage scaffolding, wearing football helmets and banging drums.

attend the blade runner final cut en masse dressed as star trek/star wars characters

I find the idea that A&F keeps a shirtless greeter on the payroll seven days a week infinitely more interesting than improv shenanigans.

I'm not sure anyone has said these guys are lame, just that (shocker) some people don't find their, umm, work interesting. P.S. my in-store reactions would probably be:

1. Best Buy = "argh, what are these dorks trying, now it's gonna take me like 45 minutes just to get this replacement battery and I'm gonna be WAY late"

2. Abercrombie & Fitch = "wtf am I doing in an Abercrombie & Fitch" / "man do I hope none of you guys brush any sweat off on me while I'm leaving"

I am not jealous of this stunt. I think it was boring. If you want some pranks I am jealous of, check out the escalating evil shit in the Prank War series on collegehumor.com; pranks 1 and 2 are pretty tame but 3, 4, and 6 are all unbelievable and 5, even though it doesn't really come off that well, is still fantastic in scope and commitment to execution.

I've seen wider spectra.

Also I don't think this is supposed to be a "pranky" thing?

I heard it wasn't a prank, I heard they heard some internet vixen was going to make a rare live appearance and they were all trying to impress her.

The NYC complex I have in mind has to do with people having a strong desire to do some quirky public thing, as if it's significant to do something strange and public in the midst of the big bustling city. If it's aimed at other people, that's untrue; it means a lot more to do something weird on small-town Main Street than in a huge city where no one cares what you're up to. But being in a big regimented city DOES make it harder to have the kind of self-directed self-planned fun, which pushes people to like the accomplishment of, say, doing a big scavenger hunt across Manhattan or something, which I think creates this sense that you're, like, gaming the city somehow. But then there's such emphasis on this -- there's a desire for it that gets ... weird, I guess. I dunno, like I said, I can't really sort it out.

It is good that things like this happen because it shocks people into the awareness that organized, unauthorized abnormality is possible. It is bad that this particular thing happened because it makes people think that organized, unauthorized abnormality is somewhat lame and lacking consequence.

walker percy has probably nailed it at some point.

Haha.

I was thinking about making some isolationist go-america signs about shoring up the dollar and helping citizens pay their home loans and going down to the IMF/world bank protests

ILX Pranks Everywhere!

For the record, I'm very disappointed that nobody asked after the science-experiment explanation for the puppy. I was actually going to do a season-long Flowers for Algernon thing where the dog becomes intelligent, starts dropping sophisticated posts on political threads, etc., and then the treatment stops working and he slowly, sadly returns to being a dog.

lol

dean koontz?

That's even sadder than the original FfA

For the record, I'm very disappointed that nobody asked after the science-experiment explanation for the puppy. I was actually going to do a season-long Flowers for Algernon thing where the dog becomes intelligent, starts dropping sophisticated posts on political threads, etc., and then the treatment stops working and he slowly, sadly returns to being a dog.

"puppy OTM."

am I the only person who does not actually think it would be cool if pets could speak english

No. There is a very good Dexter's Lab about this issue.

Tom outed me before I could even rip off the joke where the dog gets all alarmed and runs Dexter over to a particular machine:

- The thing! The thing! It's the thing!
- What's wrong, boy? What's wrong with it?
- It's a thing! The thing!

kudos on the puppy plan

nabisco OTM

ur all 100% crazy

nabisco that would have been gr8

http://www.bakedziti.net/images/Davey.jpg

also, this is easily the lamest stunt ive seen these guys do.

best gig ever and the moebius are awesome and much more creative.

look up more creative but not omg hilarious.

okay that look up more thing is very good

nabisco was "a puppy"???

my puppy has an oozing heat rash under his armpit.

BEST GIG EVER story is really touching!

i know some one who participated in the mp3 experiment.

Best Gig Ever is genuinely great.

http://beta.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/oct/18/abercrombie-fitch-boss-extraordinary-male-model-demands

The extraordinarily detailed manual, which also requires crew to play Phil Collins' Take Me Home over the jet's intercom as the jet takes off on homeward bound flights, was disclosed in an age discrimination lawsuit brought by a former pilot.

soundtracks of people who seem to have figured out how to live

I think I was out of high school before Abercrombie marketing fully embraced softcore

This old Abercrombie campaign was the real challengers pic.twitter.com/EWuXdLMyJ1

— f (@FerdiaChris) May 12, 2024