I’m tired of beating the dead horse that is Treasury, so here’s some billboard vandalism for you. Our leggings-clad senior retail analyst LoLo has been out on the beat and found this; there are reports that François-Henri Pinault and PPR are rumored to be considering snapping up Abercrombie and Fitch ($ANF) to add to their mishmash of brands:

PPR owner (and Salma Hayek’s husband) François-Henri Pinault is looking to sell some of his less glamorous brands to pay off debts and invest in mid-market clothing brands. Brands owned by PPR include Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, and Sergio Rossi. But the luxury conglomerate also owns Conforama, La Redoute, the Golf Warehouse, and FNAC. Conforama is a mid-market European furniture chain, while FNAC is sort of like Target but without the one-off lines by designers like Rodarte. Meanwhile, La Redoute is a JCPenney-ish mail-order business. So if PPR were an outfit, it would be like Miley Cyrus’s $6 Wal-Mart leggings paired with an Alexander Wang dress, and Pinault can’t be seen in that. No need to buy a $425 Wang pair, but he may as well spring for American Apparel tights. PPR is said to be looking to invest in Ralph Lauren, Levi Strauss, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

At least he didn’t pull an Iconix and buy Ed Hardy or Playboy or something, but Abercrombie? Perhaps Pinault is just hoping to acquire the secret Abercrombie and Fitch ad models’ abdominal workout so he can keep Salma Hayek around, we don’t know. It might not be a terrible investment, because for all ANF suffered due to its refusal to discount during the long national retail nightmare that was 2009, it is the popped-collar brand that has sorta retained its cache because of it.  We see that Levi is also mentioned, another brand that isn’t doing so hot in the US but is still huge in Europe. So that could make sense.

Not really related, but here’s an extract from a recent email exchange with how I think it would go down if Ed Hardy and the A+F founders (presumably in zombie form since they would be all kinds of old otherwise) ran into each other at a club:

David Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch: “Back in our day, we were outfitting expeditions in 1892, not popping collars…”

Ed Hardy: “F— you guys! I know muay thai!”

Fitch: < grabs musket >

Hardy: “Oh, no wait brah, it’s cool, you need any temporary tats or
for me to paint dragons on your tents or s—”

* BLAM *

Meh.  Or maybe Hardy would just run off and moon the camera that “Epic Hollister” uses to broadcast images of the beach into the NYC Hollister store. (Hollister = $ANF-owned brand for those who are lucky enough to not know these things.) I guess Abercrombie’s a classy enough brand to hang… just don’t let Stella McCartney see how many moose they had to kill to get those decorative heads for all their retail locations, or it might hit the fan under the big umbrella of PPR.