The Text Over Her Chest and What It Was Hiding
American Apparel has always known exactly what it’s doing. The brand built its entire identity on a specific kind of provocation—the suggestion that skin and politics could be the same gesture, that showing a body was inherently radical. For a while that argument had some traction. Then you looked at the fine print.
The campaign in question features Maks, a 22-year-old employee, photographed topless, her chest partially covered by the text "Made in Bangladesh." She’s the daughter of conservative Muslim parents, the copy informs us, and she knows how to live her faith on her own terms. The ad is nominally for a pair of jeans.
Bangladeshi journalist Tanwi Nandini Islam took issue with it, and not for the reasons American Apparel might have hoped. The problem isn’t the nudity. The problem is what the text claims and what it conceals. "Made in Bangladesh" is being used as a caption for liberation—for an act of personal defiance—when in Bangladesh those words mean something entirely different. They mean women stitching garments for twenty cents an hour in factories that collapse, that catch fire, where exits are locked to prevent theft. Those women remain off-camera, as they always have. The branding borrows the gravity of their situation to make a sex-positive ad feel politically meaningful, without paying them for the loan.
Dov Charney, the brand’s founder and CEO, had accumulated his own considerable list of allegations by this point—sexual misconduct, hostile working environments, behavior that was by all accounts significantly worse than anything he was publishing in his ads. There’s a specific irony in a company built around progressive sexual politics being run by a man with that record. But American Apparel had always thrived on that gap between image and reality. The provocations were real. The ethics were optional.
Maks gets to make her own choices, and I don’t doubt she did. But the campaign uses her to paper over a much older and less photogenic story about who makes things and who gets to be photographed wearing them.