Hot Topic

This media portfolio post is about Hot Topic, their ads and the store’s general appeal. If one goes to the Hot Topic website or visits one of their many locations located in malls all across the country you will see in the ads and it the customers who shop there, typical white middle class teenagers wearing white makeup and black baggie clothing.

In Hot Topic’s ads and stores one rarely sees an African American. Although Hot Topic never overtly supports white superiority in some of the female t-shirts that the store sells say “I dig pale white guys.” Although the saying was more in reference to the style of makeup that is worn by the teens that Hot Topic is trying market rather than race the meaning is still there.

This relates to McBride’s article about Abercrombie and Fitch in the way that both Hot Topic and Abercrombie and Fitch market to a specific audience and that both market whiteness. Although Abercrombie and Fitch and Hot Topic are marketing to two very different subcultures both are portraying a very similar message, “African Americans don’t wear our clothes.”

As a person who formally frequented Hot Topic once a week or more I never really thought about what kind of people were shown in the ads, I always noticed that the clothes that they wore were stylish and that they were always shown with a group of other young people that were dressed like them. However I never paid attention that all the teens shown were white.