Horny Conscious Consumption

American Apparel, Dov Charney, worker rights, and a rape factory

Somewhere there’s footage of me, 21 and topless, ranting, “If American Apparel has one redeeming quality, it’s showing bush in their ads.” It was filmed during an open-call audition featured on Vice’s web series Shot by Kern (2009-13), which captured the behind-the-scenes dynamics of castings and shoots with photographer Richard Kern. I was barely legal and already so full of contempt for things I’d cycled through envying, imitating, and loathing in just a few short years. American Apparel and Vice were lame to me. Magnets for sycophants and wannabes. But also part of a hipster-industrial machine I thought I was the right shape to become a cog in. No one called it indie sleaze back then.

I booked the job to shoot with Kern. I looked like all the girls he chose: pale, hairy bush, kinda wide-set small boobs, big eyes. I felt already famous finding out it was going to be only me for several pages in the print magazine. But my then-boyfriend, who’d worked at American Apparel, relegated to the stockroom for not being white, got wasted and bullied me into canceling. He said he’d break up with me if I went through with it and called me a slut.

Had I done the shoot, I would’ve spent the day with this guy Rocco Castoro, who was editor-in-chief of Vice back then, and I thought I could turn the hours endured together into another job. I thought of men at sleazy photoshoots less as threats than potential stepping stones—like the “Adrien Brody” in Marie Calloway’s “Adrien Brody,” a story which would a few months later break the alt-lit net. The rate I declined was $250, a month’s worth of rent for my half of the bedroom I split with that ex in a basement apartment in Montreal’s Mile End. Losing the money wasn’t what bothered me. What I really wanted was to be an object of desire.

There wasn’t an American Apparel in the hipster enclave where we lived. The closest one was in the Plateau, the slightly more gentrified neighborhood over, a little closer to Montreal’s downtown. It was like every other American Apparel storefront: flat and unadorned, an architectural reflection of its generic logo with that black Helvetica text on a white background. Walking into one of their stores for the first time as a teenager, I short-circuited. Alone, each item was pretty boring, but arranged together on racks in a rainbow spectrum they were dizzying. I felt frustrated; buying one item would not capture the experience of being in the store. A single burgundy zip-up hoodie or yellow high-cut bodysuit was not enough. The lamé stuck out like a sore thumb: garish, retro, something you might wear with roller skates. I bought a dress that hugged my butt so well it embarrassed me. I feared looking that good could inspire contempt.

Sometime between when I bought that clingy dress and when I didn’t pose topless for the hipster magazine, Tao Lin released his novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009). The design of the book’s cover mimicked the store’s logo. He held a launch event at the bookstore around the corner from our apartment—the flyers taped to utility poles in the neighborhood seem quaint now, looking back, but then they made people talk. I remember hearing complaints: “You know the book isn’t even about American Apparel; that’s just one scene.” The haters didn’t seem to understand that “American Apparel” didn’t just mean the store where you bought—or didn’t, procuring by five-finger discount instead—slutty, ethically-made clothes. “American Apparel” was the signifier for a sensibility that Lin’s novel helped articulate and preserve—securing his place in the New Sincerity canon alongside authors like David Foster Wallace and Miranda July. Rereading Lin’s book today, what sticks out most is the way he drops question marks throughout the first exchange, the sentences punctuated with a flat affect:

“What is wrong with us,” said Sam…

“Are we fucked,” said Luis.

It drains the emotionality to a fluorescent-light hum, not unlike the ambience of an American Apparel store.

I couldn’t say for sure if any of the characters in Magic Farm ever wear American Apparel. The brand’s plainness makes it easy for the clothes to go undetected, much like the stores themselves, which blended into the structures surrounding them by design. Their signage was minimal. No significant interventions were made to the exteriors of the buildings they took over, making conversion fast, easy, and cheap. But the company chose locations with large windows, maximizing sightlines into their cornucopia of normcore. Certainly in Magic Farm, we never see an American Apparel store, and the brand is never namechecked. Still, American Apparel is everywhere.

It’s there in the sleazy boss on the brink of cancellation, played with pitch-perfect charisma by Simon Rex. It’s there in the way power is distributed within an American video-journalism crew in Argentina. The nesting-doll dynamics between the bosses and their subordinates, between the subordinates and the locals, parallels the interdependence of American Apparel’s founder Dov Charney, the employees he is alleged to have sexually harassed, and the immigrant factory workers that made the clothing. It’s there in the visual consumption of spectacle that the video crew orchestrates in towns around the world—like the way American Apparel billboards and store windows framed bodies and their stand-ins, display mannequins. And everywhere there’s the “American Apparel” Tao Lin means when he writes characters that are alienated and numb, with a stunted sense of self-pity.

Similar to Ralph Lauren, American Apparel rose to prominence by offering 100% cotton garments at a time when the market was oversaturated by poly blends, the desirability of cotton exceeding its supply. Montreal-born Charney attended boarding school in Connecticut, and started selling Hanes and Fruit of the Loom T-shirts to his friends back in Canada, smuggling them in via Amtrak. American Apparel formally got its name in 1989 when Charney, who has a knack for self-mythologizing, was only 20. For over a decade he focused on manufacturing cotton garments and selling them wholesale, often for screen-printed merch, racking up tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues by the turn of the millennium. In 2003, he opened his first retail store in Los Angeles. Six years later, there were 281 American Apparels around the world. Wikipedia calls it “the fastest retail rollout in history.” I checked the source: an interview with Charney.

The American Apparel story is bookended by 1990s conscious consumerism (Fairtrade coffee, culture jamming, etc.) and 2010s #MeToo villainy. As more and more US garment manufacturing moved offshore by the end of the twentieth century, Charney distinguished his brand by investing in workers’ rights. No longer able to compete on price, he marketed American Apparel as offering better-quality clothes guaranteed not to be made in sweatshops. Charney offered his factory workers wages, health benefits, and safety standards that exceeded industry norms, as well as courses in English and math. This was a powerful way for the brand to differentiate itself, given that earlier in the decade many retailers faced high-visibility scandals and boycotts over worker conditions, including the 1992 protests against Nike at the Barcelona Olympics. In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, 2012), Slavoj Žižek contends that conscious consumerism—which lets you feel relieved of guilt as you consume because there’s a countermeasure to the destructive nature of capitalism—is the “ultimate form of consumerism.” You can do what you want and not feel bad about it. Though brazen shoplifting from the store did not directly support the brand’s ethical business model, it’s a natural extension of that id-forward ethos.

Like Žižek, Charney always seems comfortable assuming the pervert persona. Take American Apparel’s horny advertising: a sex-sells, low-budget strategy that helped their fair-wage threads compete. He played up his perversity in interviews with reporters, stunt marketing and predation coalescing over the years into an unsettling performance. Charney has been sued for sexual harassment by numerous employees (including an 18-year-old who alleges she was held captive in his home for hours and forced to pleasure him). Did the lawsuits spare a fresh crop of hipsters from a kind of rape factory? The irony is Charney thought he was saving people through a factory not from one. I wonder how much believing he was a savior of immigrant workers—and therefore infallible—enabled him to cause harm. He remains stubbornly unapologetic to this day, keeping a bed in his office at Los Angeles Apparel—the copycat company Charney started after his ouster from American Apparel.

American Apparel was selling a stylized version of “vintage,” both in its clothing and advertising. Ringer tees, dolphin shorts, contrast piping, and deep V-necks evoked the 1970s, while their high-cut bodysuits, tube socks, neon Lycra, and acid-wash jeans conjured the 1980s. There were even some throwbacks to the 1950s in the form of cardigans, striped boat necks, and high-waisted tailored shorts. American Apparel collapsed references to multiple decades in the visual lexicon of horny Americana they constructed in their messaging. In a similar vein, Magic Farm collapses the years since 9/11 into one film. In many ways, American Apparel and Vice were birthed from this post-9/11 reality. The attack on the World Trade Center stoked nostalgia for an Americana of yesteryear while at the same time forcing Americans to reckon with new geopolitical complexities. Many young people understood that this attack on American soil was unprecedented but not entirely unjustified, and a new generation sought to understand international realities through a kind of gonzo journalism. This moment spurred an archetype that referenced both pleasure-seeking nonconformists and a globally-conscious worldview, with a bricolage of signifiers drawn from figures like gonzo pioneer Hunter S. Thompson, porn star Ron Jeremy, and Rebel Without A Cause (1955) idol James Dean. At the time, the internet offered access to information previously unthinkable, thereby accelerating pastiche. And Montreal, the cheapest cosmopolitan city in North America, with an economy still just limping along after Quebec’s near separation from Canada in 1995, but buoyed by American tourism to the strip-club mecca, was the perfect breeding ground for these era-defining empires: American Apparel and Vice. Both possessed a hedonistic irreverence that presented geopolitical awareness as beyond morality and instead a part of lifestyle consumption.

Unintentionally, I started writing this wearing a gray American Apparel tee that’s been in my closet for years. I thought about how long I must have had it, and realized I’d taken it with me from apartment to apartment, city to city for 14 years. Now that’s a testament to made-in-USA quality! It’s a shirt that dates back to my relationship with the ex who didn’t want me posing topless for Richard Kern. I remember this lesbian who’d been dating one of our roommates had left it at the apartment. The end of their relationship was so hostile that she asked me about the shirt, not her ex. I said I hadn’t seen the shirt around. I lied because I liked how it looked on me.

Now finishing the essay, I’m wearing a T-shirt Amalia gave me. Maybe I’m subconsciously doing this on purpose, for the story. More likely, it’s because I like to write in comfy, easygoing tees. The shirt says Meowmax Films, a cheeky riff on Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax logo Amalia designed for her production company Holga’s Meow. I’d never inspected the tag, but it’ll be almost too perfect if it says Los Angeles Apparel. I strip off the shirt to check. My hunch is spot-on, and now I’m sitting here, topless, like I could’ve been in Vice magazine.

A version of this essay was commissioned by Amalia Ulman and Mubi for a companion book distributed at screenings of Ulman’s film Magic Farm. I thought I’d put it up online because the doc series Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel was released today on Netflix. I haven’t watched it. After I wrote this essay, but before it was published anywhere (so it felt kind of kismet), I was asked to interview Richard Kern. Our conversation is in the “desire” issue of Autre.