American Apparel’s billboards were hard to miss when traversing Los Angeles in the 2000s. The ubiquitous ads for the L.A.-based clothing company featured gritty, amateurish photos of seemingly ordinary young women, posed suggestively, in various states of undress. As for the clothing, there wasn’t much of it. A tube sock here, a thong there. American Apparel’s apparel clearly wasn’t the draw.
The underage appearance of the models was disturbing but not entirely shocking given the controversial Calvin Klein ads over previous decades, and by the year 2000, Britney Spears’ schoolgirl-meets-stripper-pole routine in her “Oops! … I Did it Again” video was popular with tweens and moms alike. Yet there was something about the voyeuristic, predatory nature of American Appeal’s ad campaign that felt different, worse, beyond exploitative.
“Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel,” a documentary now streaming on Netflix, explains why those billboards felt more like criminal evidence than sexy ads. The 54-minute film breaks down what was happening on the other side of the camera at the company, led by problematic founder and CEO Dov Charney, and there’s nothing hip or fashionable about the abuse chronicled in it, which features footage, research and firsthand accounts from former employees.
The doc is part of a Netflix series that touches on messy, disastrous events, brands and people such as the Balloon Boy scandal and the so-called Poop Cruise. High-end stuff it’s not, and this installment of the series isn’t nuanced or long enough to be an in-depth exploration of a troubled company and its volatile founder. It does, however, lay bare an abusive culture at American Apparel and how Charney — who shot many of the ads himself — turned his own alleged regressions into a wildly successful branding campaign.
The documentary tracks the rise and fall of American Apparel and its CEO from the company’s inception in 1989 to it becoming one of the largest garment manufacturers in the United States until its bankruptcy in 2015. Reimagining plain sweatshirts and other wardrobe basics as hip alternatives to blingy jeans and gawdy UGG boots, the L.A.-made clothing was promoted as “Ethically Made — Sweatshop Free.” It later garnered the unofficial title of indie sleaze, just in time to resonate across a new thing called social media.
Charney is seen in action through reams of footage captured by employees and others in his orbit. Former workers tell their stories, recalling how they were hired or advanced into management positions despite having no experience. One recalls how new hires at the company received a welcome gift box that included a vibrator, a book by Robert Greene titled “The 48 Laws of Power,” a Leica camera and a Blackberry so Charney could contact them 24/7. They were also asked to sign nondisclosure agreements which would later make it difficult to hold Charney accountable for alleged misconduct.
Footage shows Charney as a wiry, supercharged figure who frequently berated his staff as “losers” and worse. He housed chosen employees at his Silver Lake mansion, the Garbutt House, and they included a gaggle of young women whose roles seemed to be as surrogates and enforcers for Charney — workers referred to them as Dov’s Girls. Then in his 40s, he’s shown verbally accosting young employees, some of whom were teenagers at the time. At least one clip captures him parading around naked in front of two female employees.
After defining fashion for roughly a decade, the thriving company began to nosedive by the 2010s as news of Charney’s inappropriate behavior and oppressive conditions in the workplace surfaced. He was accused of mistreating young employees in the company’s stores and offices, as well as exploiting undocumented employees in the factory, but it was allegations of sexual misconduct and assault in the workplace that made headlines, leading to his ouster as CEO. Women who claim they were sexually assaulted by Charney are interviewed in the documentary.
Charney did not disappear after his fall from grace. He founded another clothing manufacturer, Los Angeles Apparel, and he reportedly works on Yeezy, the fashion brand created by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Rolling Stone reported that Charney printed West’s controversial “White Lives Matter” T-shirt.
As for American Apparel, it was bought by a Canadian clothing company that relaunched the brand shortly before the pandemic. The clothes are no longer made in L.A., but curiously, the indie sleaze billboard campaign has returned to the city. It’s disturbing in a throwback kind of way, pointing to a time when pedo-marketing was king, and the creepy folks behind the ads were heralded as marketing geniuses.
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