The Price of the Fuck-You Aesthetic
There’s a certain kind of man I’ve always found compelling—the narcissist with enough creative force to build an entire world around his own ego, and enough contempt for convention to make that world genuinely interesting to other people. Steve Jobs did it with Apple. Karl Lagerfeld did it with himself. And for a long time, Dov Charney did it with American Apparel.
The company felt, for years, like the closest thing fashion had to a sustained middle finger at its own industry. Not because the clothes were special—blank cotton basics, mostly—but because the whole enterprise ran on Charney’s refusal to behave. He ran campaigns like Legalize LA and Legalize Gay, funneling T-shirt profits to immigration and LGBTQ organizations at a time when that was still a commercially risky position for a retailer. He paid his workers above-market wages and manufactured everything domestically, which in the fast fashion context is practically a manifesto. The Canadian-born founder brought a specific outsider’s aggression to the whole thing—the sense that American culture was a system you could game harder than its insiders understood.
That he was also a perverse bastard was never a secret in the industry. The ads made the subtext explicit: a mixture of young amateur models and working porn actresses shot in harsh natural light, often undressed in ways the fashion press found thrilling and alarming in roughly equal measure. Terry Richardson was operating the same way in the same circles at the same time, and the industry tolerated both of them for the same reasons—the work was interesting, the money was good, and everyone understood the implicit arrangement. Charney occasionally appeared naked in his own campaigns. He seemed to find this unremarkable.
Until, apparently, the implicit arrangement stopped being sufficient.
Irene Morales, eighteen years old and working in a Brooklyn American Apparel store, filed a $250 million lawsuit against Charney claiming he’d stalked her, forced her to photograph herself nude, then invited her to his home shortly after her eighteenth birthday and sexually abused her there for several hours. The details in the complaint were specific and ugly in ways that didn’t leave much room for interpretation.
If the court found in her favor, it was hard to see how the company survived—Charney had already been running American Apparel into the ground for years through spectacular mismanagement, and the industry had been speculating about his departure since the balance sheets went dark. The label and its founder had always been the same thing, indistinguishable in the way that sometimes works and sometimes destroys you. Whatever the lawsuit meant for the brand, it meant the end of one version of what a fashion company could look like: broke, horny, politically inconvenient, and entirely itself. There’s something worth mourning in that, kept separate from everything else.