American Apparel: Clean up your act!

I don’t care whether this gets me labeled a total square: American Apparel’s advertising campaign makes me a little sick to my stomach. For years and years I, and the rest of the world, have been seeing in newspapers, on the internet and blown up to life-size proportions in its stores, AA’s wildly slimy marketing exploits—or is it marketing exploitation?—which do not seem to be changing anytime soon.

AA sells functional, simple apparel. It is usually comfortable and of a relatively good quality. It was first recommended to me due to its wholesome manufacturing practices: its factory, the largest T-shirt manufacturer in the country according to the New York Post, is in downtown LA, and workers are reportedly treated and paid well. I thought the clothes were pretty boring and overpriced, but I was down with the sweatshop free shtick.

I am not, however, down with the decidedly unwholesome soft-core porn advertising shtick. It is not that I am against soft-core porn, but American Apparel is just being downright trashy here. Your typical ad features a vaguely ethnic 20-something girl, scraggly bohemian hair hanging in her eyes, laying in some unnaturally “candid” position across a rumpled cot wearing some AA undies and maybe a pair of its renowned tube socks for good measure. May as well imagine a Vaseline-smeared camera lens.

AA boasts—frequently accompanying the ads—the fact that these models are store employees, or sometimes just passersby from the street—the former makes sense considering the company requires a Polaroid with every employee application. Fidget-inducing perversion level, achieved!

American Apparel, clean up your act. I feel like a disappointed mom, such promising beginnings, such respectable habits, but there are only so many sexual harassment charges to be filed against CEO Dov Charney before I start to get suspicious. Also, I am bored. It is typical for a company to change up its advertising campaigns in order to keep things fresh and creative. American Apparel, however, is content with luring in naïve and desperate would-be artists who still think the trashy agenda is subversive and shocking.

Be proud of the important issues—sweatshop-free labor, safe worker conditions, fair retail practices—and lose the shady overtones. Until then, AA has most assuredly lost at least one little customer. So sorry, but seeing two grease ball hipsters mackin’ on each other does not incite me to buy your boy briefs.

(This article was edited on March 29, 2008 to match its print version.)