The early days! Plenty of celebrities dabbled in modeling before making it big — and a shocking number of them worked for Abercrombie & Fitch.

The sportswear brand found itself back in the spotlight after the April 2022 release of Netflix’s documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, which explores what happened after Michael Jeffries became the company’s CEO in 1992. The businessman stepped down in 2014 amid declining sales and accusations of racism within the company, but the many photos of pre-fame stars modeling for the brand live on.

“I was actually one of the guys in the catalog,” Channing Tatum told Interview magazine in April 2009, noting that he was not one of the shirtless guys who stood outside the store. “I had to put on a chicken suit at one point. I was like a mascot. We were in a locker room, and there were a bunch of dudes with abs all the way down to their … whatever the hell — their perineums? And then I was in the chicken suit standing next to them.”

Jennifer Lawrence, for her part, participated in a football-themed photo shoot before she became an Oscar-winning actress. The pictures never saw the light of day, however, because she was too invested in winning the pretend game.

“All the other models are, like, playing football in a pretty way, but not me,” the Joy star said during a December 2015 appearance on The Graham Norton Show. “[In] all of the photos, I’ve got a red face, [I’m] covered in sweat, my nostrils are flaring. … At one point, a girl yelled, ‘Just get her away from me.’”

When the Kentucky native realized that she’d never seen any snaps from the shoot, her team helped her investigate. “My agent wrote and asked why, and they literally only responded with the photos,” she recalled.

Though A&F is an apparel brand, some of their ’90s and early aughts campaigns made headlines for featuring very few actual clothes. Malin Akerman, for one, posed topless with a young Jamie Dornan circa 2002.

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“I don’t really know what we were selling,” the 27 Dresses star joked during a February 2017 interview on Late Night With Seth Meyers. “We got to set and after two shots, the clothes came off. [The photographer] didn’t want any clothes on us. … Needless to say, we got to know each other very well.”

Keep scrolling to see which celebrities got their start modeling for Abercrombie & Fitch.

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