American Apparel Came Back Decent, Which Is the Problem

The thing about American Apparel ads was that they made you vaguely uncomfortable in a way you couldn’t entirely object to. Shot to look casual and intimate, always slightly too close, always on the edge of too much skin—that particular quality of available light that felt either authentic or like a very expensive simulation of authentic. That ambiguity was the product. Dov Charney built a fashion brand on the premise that desire and transgression were the same thing, and for a while, during peak hipster culture in the late 2000s, it worked.

Charney was removed from his own company in 2014 after a sustained pattern of sexual misconduct: sending explicit photos to employees, masturbating in front of them, pressuring women for nude images. The kind of behavior that, in retrospect, explained exactly why the ads felt the way they did. The company survived him by about a year before filing for bankruptcy. Canadian clothing manufacturer Gildan bought the brand for around $90 million, closed all the stores, and sat on the name.

The relaunch came in 2018 as a campaign called "Back to Basics"—a reworking of some of the old visual language, noticeably toned down. Less edge, more palatable, better suited to an era in which the context around the original ads had become impossible to ignore. Which is the problem. American Apparel’s whole identity was built on discomfort. The clothes themselves were basics—t-shirts, tights, hoodies, the kind of thing any brand sells—and the only thing that made them feel like something was the energy around them. Sanitize that and you have a mediocre basics brand with a complicated history attached.

The Charney era was ugly and shouldn’t be mourned. But what replaced it isn’t really American Apparel—it’s just the name.