Business | Schumpeter

Facebook’s retirement plan

What happens when the world’s biggest social network becomes its most doddery?

“WHITE HOT”, a new documentary, traces the rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, an American fashion label that soared in the early 2000s before crashing just as dramatically. The film explores the firm’s obsession with employing a certain type of staff—handsome, chiselled, white—which led to damaging claims of racism and sexual harassment. But just as harmful to Abercrombie was that it became dated. Its low-rise jeans, cropped T-shirts and migraine-inducing cologne, “Fierce”, became inseparably linked with Americans who came of age around the turn of the century. The price of being so closely associated with one generation was that the next wanted nothing to do with it.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Facebook’s retirement plan”

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