It was a freezing New York morning, minus 9 with wind chill, but I needed to stock up on T-shirts. The cab dropped me off outside a store on Fifth Avenue and I darted inside.

“Good mornin’, ma’am,” said a friendly male voice. I looked up. And then down. The man with the welcoming voice was stripped to the waist. So were his two friends. He flashed me the kind of wide, toothy smile that suggested he was pleased to see me. I took one look at his perfect swimmer’s torso and the feeling was mutual.

Inside, the store was dark, like a nightclub, and high-decibel, high-energy dance music pounded out from the sound system. The air was thick with the smell of cheap perfume, the shrill kind that teenagers like to wear. In the gloom, I could make out other topless hunks, as well as pretty cheerleader girls. All around, jeans and brightly coloured T-shirts were stacked in neat piles — women’s on one floor, men’s on another. Trying to find anything bigger than a medium was nearly impossible, but a cute-looking jock with sleepy eyes and just-got-out-of-bed hair did his best to help me. Perhaps he’d been up all night finishing a college project, but we didn’t find anything. Still, he was so sweet and puppyish, I couldn’t hold it against him. I bought my boyfriend some polo tops instead and left with a spring in my step.

This is the Abercrombie & Fitch shopping experience. It’s oversexed, underdressed — and it’s coming over here. On Thursday, the brand opens its first UK store, and alongside the preppy basics, Mike Jeffries, the company’s CEO, promises “a store full of gorgeous kids”. Jeffries has a reputation as something of an eccentric: he always parks his Porsche at the same angle, wears lucky shoes on results day, and reportedly used to walk through the revolving doors of his HQ twice as a good luck ritual. But such idiosyncrasies aside, he’s canny enough to know that, in order to sell huge volumes of jeans and tees, you have to give the customer something extra. By putting the sex into basics, he has built the brand into a £3.5 billion business, with nearly 1,000 stores in America. “The people make the company,” he says. “They live this lifestyle on a daily basis. It’s theirs. We aren’t making up a story for these people.”

The sexy image is underlined by the ad campaigns, which are shot in artistic black and white by Bruce Weber. They always feature beautiful, scantily clad boys and girls cavorting happily in the great American outdoors. You used to be able to buy a glossy catalogue of Abercrombie images, but it was withdrawn from sale after conservative lobbyists accused Jeffries of peddling homoerotica to teenage America.

The brand has come a long way from its stuffy roots. It was set up in 1892 as a sporting outfitters for the super-rich. Presidents Roosevelt and Henry Ford shopped there, as did Katharine Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway, who is said to have bought the gun that he used to commit suicide at the store. By the 1980s, the company’s fortunes had declined, along with its customer base. “They were targeting people anywhere between 92 and death,” says Jeffries. His strategy was simple. “We decided we would go for the younger customer, using the heritage of the outdoors, quality and privilege.”

But can the formula work over here? “It’s not just an American issue,” says Jeffries. “These great-looking college kids exist all over the world. We think there are Abercrombie people everywhere.” The London shop is only the first in a large-scale European expansion plan.

Jeffries hired a team of 14 recruiters to make sure that his UK staff — referred to as “store models” rather than shop assistants — are just as hot as their US counterparts. As well as hitting the pub and club scene, they scoured the student bodies at the LSE, London College of Fashion and Chelsea School of Art. They also scouted gyms and went to athletics meets, all in search of Abercrombie archetypes.

They ended up with 500 who matched their fit, hunky, healthy look (heroin chic is not an image the brand espouses). As well as former contestants from Project Runway and Shipwrecked, hoping for another chance to be noticed, the new London store boasts a rugby-playing Cambridge student, a semi-professional football player and a swimmer from the Welsh national team. “They love working for us, because its an opportunity to meet other good-looking kids,” says Jeffries. Indeed, being known as an Abercrombie boy or girl is hardly going to hinder your pulling power. And that is what this brand is all about.

Abercrombie & Fitch, 7 Burlington Gardens, W1; 020 7025 1550

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