Fashion, of course, is rarely just fashion — it tells a story about whoever’s wearing it. And in the ’90s and 2000s, the preppy youthquake mall-fashion outlet Abercrombie & Fitch told a very big story. It was a story of where America — or, at least, a powerful slice of the millennial demo — was at. As recounted in the lively, snarky, horrifying, and irresistible documentary “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” (which drops April 19 on Netflix), that story gets less pretty the closer you look at it, even as the models who were used to market it were gorgeous.

As a company, Abercrombie & Fitch had been around since 1892. It originally catered to elite sportsmen (Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway were loyal customers), but after falling on hard times and kicking around as an antiquated brand, the company was reinvented in the early ’90s by the CEO Mike Jeffries, who fused the upscale WASP fetishism of designers like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger with the chiseled-beefcake-in-underwear monochromatic sexiness of the Calvin Klein brand to create a newly ratcheted up you-are-what-you-wear dreamscape of hot, clubby elitism. The models — in the catalogues, on the store posters, on the shopping bags — were mostly men, mostly naked, and all ripped, like the missing link between Michelangelo’s David and “Jersey Shore.” The rugby shirts and fussy torn jeans weren’t all that special, but they were priced as if they were. What you were buying, in many cases, was really just the logo — the Abercrombie & Fitch insignia, splayed across sweatshirts and Ts, which signified that you, too, were a member of the ruling echelon of youth cool.

…

Bobby Blanski, a former A&F model, says, “They literally made so much money marketing clothes. But advertising them with no clothes on.” But that made sense, since “the clothes themselves were nothing special,” according to Alan Karo, an Abercrombie fashion marketing and advertising executive. It was the label, the brand, the club, the cult. The journalist Moe Tkacik recalls that the first time she walked into an Abercrombie outlet, she said to herself, “Oh my God, they’ve bottled this. They have absolutely crystalized everything that I hate about high school and put it in a store.”