Requiem for the Neon Age

There was a moment, around 2009 or 2010, when American Apparel functioned like a religion. Not in the vague sense people use that word for things they merely like a lot—in the actual sense of shared symbols, a recognizable tribe, a space you walked into and immediately understood the cosmology. Basics in colors that hadn’t really existed before. A store aesthetic that looked like a Terry Richardson shoot that had gotten out of hand. Dov Charney presiding over the whole thing like a deranged high priest of the crew-neck.

Then in 2010 the numbers came out: a $17.6 million operating loss in a single quarter, shares down 41%, and word that the company had shed fifteen hundred undocumented workers in the span of a year. The edifice wasn’t just cracking—it was visibly collapsing. The fashion press ran the obligatory hand-wringing pieces. The hipster blogs ran the obligatory jokes.

What was actually at stake was something more interesting than a clothing label going under. American Apparel had become the unofficial uniform of a specific cultural moment—the electro-bloghouse era, the era of fixies and Vice and PBR somehow cohering into a legible aesthetic. Lose American Apparel and you lose the center of gravity. The neon t-shirt that made irony look effortless. The thing that made the whole visual language make sense.

Of course it all went anyway. The company finally filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and the cultural moment it represented had dissolved long before the paperwork. The aesthetic moved on, as aesthetics do. Charney got mired in lawsuits. The Vice issues yellowed in the rack. Ed Hardy inherited some of the wreckage, which felt like a just punishment.

I’m not nostalgic, exactly. But there was something almost touching about how earnestly that whole ecosystem believed in itself—the idea that the right t-shirt was a statement of values, that where you bought your basics was a moral position. It seems quaint now. Everything from that particular moment does.