Scandal Works
American Apparel’s whole thing was knowing how to piss people off. Dov Charney had it down to a science: push until someone screams, apologize just enough to avoid consequences, then push again. Every few months another ad campaign banned somewhere, another lawsuit, another misunderstanding.
The company ran on scandal the way other brands run on quarterly earnings.
Maks was twenty-two, worked for the brand, and posed topless for an ad with Made in Bangladesh
printed across her chest. The copy explained she was the daughter of conservative Muslims, the implication being this was somehow transgressive—liberated, honest, a real person owning her body. She showed her skin, the ad showed where the clothes came from, everyone got to feel smart about the brand’s transparency and her individual choice.
Except Tanwi Nandini Islam, a journalist from Bangladesh, pointed out what nobody wanted to think too hard about: the actual women making these clothes for twenty cents an hour stayed invisible. They didn’t get to pose for ads. They didn’t get to narrate their own lives in an American Apparel campaign. Maks got to be a person; they got to be a supply chain.
That’s the whole move, really. Charney’s genius was making you feel like buying the t-shirt was a political act, like the ads were radical and self-aware when they were just regular exploitation dressed up in better language. You could jerk yourself off about supporting a Muslim woman’s choice while the actual labor disappeared into the background. Progress sold the exact same way as everything else.
I don’t know what Maks thought she was doing. Maybe she believed it. Maybe she needed the work. Maybe she understood that posing for American Apparel meant your body was always going to be the message anyway, so you might as well be the one telling the story about it. But the campaign wasn’t about her choice or her faith. It was about Charney using her as the argument against the argument, making her the subject so nobody had to look too carefully at where the real work was happening.