US retailer faces row over donation deal Calling guardian.co.uk

It was latest updated at 18:30 on March 12 2008. Photograph: Tim Boyle Getty With its extensive billboards displaying rippling six packs, heaving cleavages and denims at half mast, the American fashion retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has sporadic qualms approximately using sexuality beseech to sell clothes. So activists acquire questioned if its designation should be above the door of a children's hospital.

One of America's largest pediatric institutes, the Nationwide Children's Infirmary in Columbus, Ohio, is facing boiling protests over a agreement to grant "naming rights" to A&F in return for a $10m donation.

Under the philanthropic deal, the hospital's casualty middle testament become the Abercrombie & Fitch Emergency Department and Trauma Centre. Critics state it is a sponsorship arrangement absent extremely far. Corporate naming rights are an inherently slippery slope," says Susan Linn, employer of the Crusade for a Commercial-Free Childhood. A&F is approach down that slope."

A&F pushes the boundaries of suggestivity another than other mainstream American retailers. Police in Virginia last month confiscated posters from one store showing semi-exposed buttocks and breasts. They cited the boss with an obscenity charge. The firm's present span includes a T-shirt declaring that "one man's junk is another woman's treasure" and promotional A&F magazines own used photography by Bruce Weber, noted for his objectification of the workman physique.

At the firm's original London store carry on year, customers were greeted by two models draining nix but jeans and flipflops. They've built their trade-mark by sexualising and objectifying children," said Linn. A business which has such cynical disregard for childrens' wellbeing should not be allowed to align itself with healing."

The investigation is part of a broader discussion in America about the spread of corporate sponsorship over habitual facilities. One resident authority in Wisconsin recently offered to sell the rights to cognomen its aerial schools. McDonald's courted inquiry in Florida by advertising on undergraduate announcement cards.

A Florida museum even raised coinage last year by auctioning the naming rights to a latest species of butterfly discovered by its researchers. The president of the Nationwide Children's Hospital's fundraising foundation, Jon Fitzgerald, said A&F was one of alive with companies which back the hospital's business to feather interest regardless of patients' ability to pay.

As a not-for-profit, freestanding children's hospital, philanthropy is central to our ability to fulfil that mission and we are grateful to all donors that choose to base our work," he said. In a statement, an A&F spokesman said: "We are proud of our long-standing relationship with this hospital and satisfied to cure secure its blaze future."

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