The Morning After

American Apparel’s whole visual language was one long morning-after photograph. The lighting always looked like an accident—a floor lamp knocked sideways, a window left uncovered. The models wore whatever they were wearing with the body language of people who had slept in it. The poses communicated a specific casualness that cost a great deal of money and calculation to produce, which is perhaps the most American Apparel thing about them. Dov Charney understood that the suggestion of recently-finished sex sells basics better than any studio backdrop, and he was right about that if about very little else. What made it work was that it also felt true to something—not aspirational in the usual sense, more like a document: a certain kind of young life, cotton-covered, on a mattress on the floor.