The Basic Manifesto, Discontinued

The disco pants were genuinely excellent. Worth acknowledging before everything else collapses under its own weight—which, as it turned out, it eventually did. American Apparel’s whole proposition was that even the most boring garment could carry a philosophy: made in downtown Los Angeles, domestic labor, no overseas manufacturing, the politics printed right on the tag. That made it easier to spend twice what you should on a t-shirt. The clothes fit. The brand had a position. These two things together are harder to find than they sound.

The ads are the part that aged worst. Shot like found Polaroids—young models in cramped apartments, low light, accessories that made no sense—they walked a line between sexually charged and vaguely predatory. In retrospect, that wasn’t incidental. Dov Charney, who built the company from nothing in the nineties, was the company in the way that some founders are: the aesthetic, the ethics, and the liability were all the same person. Sexual harassment cases accumulated alongside the revenue. The board eventually tried to remove him. He fought it. American Apparel filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and again in 2016. A Canadian company bought the name and manufactures nothing under it now—just the word, stripped of the downtown factory, the labor argument, the uncomfortable ads, all of it.

I still have the socks. They hold up fine.