SHORT HILLS, New Jersey. Amanda Crum wasn’t expecting to land in the middle of international crisis when she went to the mall in this affluent suburb of New York last night, but when her friends Tia Moniz and Karen Coelho came rushing out of the Abercrombie & Fitch store on the second level, that’s exactly where she ended up.
“Shoppers: For your inconvenience we are closed for afternoon prayers.”
“Do NOT go in there!” Moniz said as she whirled Crum around and hustled her off in the direction of The Gap, another upscale clothing and accessories retailer.
“What happened?” Crum asked without taking her lips from the green plastic straw in her vente Starbucks salted caramel mocchanino.
“Muslims took it over!” Coelho replied in a hushed but anxious tone as they brushed past other shoppers unaware of the strategic shift in the world’s shopping balance of power that had taken place while they were eating oversized pretzels from Auntie Anne’s and washing them down with drinks from Orange Julius.
But the high-schoolers weren’t just being drama queens; on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an 8-1 decision in the case of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc. that will require the high-end retailer known for its pouty, preppy models to accommodate job applicants who wear the Muslim headscarf known as a hijab, despite the company’s otherwise neutral “no caps” policy.
“This is a really easy case,” Justice Antonin Scalia said as he read the Court’s decision from the bench. “Abercrombie has been annoying parents for decades with their overpriced clothing and hypersexy ads–they deserve a little jihad.”
“The dusty rose looks good on you!”
As the girls fled the coming of the caliphate to their favorite after-school hangout like refugees fleeing advances by ISIS, they turned to international relief organizations such as Cinnabon for sustenance on their long journey to The Gap, only to find a Muslim woman applying for a job there as well.
“Abercrombie is for Sunnis,” said Aida Hussain, referring to one of the two principal Muslim denominations, the other being Shia. “Plus The Gap has a 401(k) match up to 4% of an employee’s pay. Pretty good for The Great Satan, huh?”
Cinnabon: “Eat this, you’ll need it for the long trek up the escalator!”
Desperate, the girls retreated as a last resort to a Chico’s store frequented by their mothers, although this meant fashion sacrifices they would not have made in ordinary times. “We won’t see the long-term effects of this diaspora until the fall,” predicts Niles Chang of The Focus Group, a Washington-based international strategy and women’s clothing consultancy. “When these girls show up for their senior years wearing Chico’s bold prints and patterns their mothers wear to the country club in a vain attempt to look hip, they’ll die a thousand fashion deaths.”