I don’t care about Dov Charney, the creator of American Apparel, being an overly sexual 70’s porn star, my problem with American Apparel is how much their clothes suck. Fire a photographer and hire a design team, then maybe you will pull yourselves out of your niche market and actually produce some fashionable products. If you’re in the market for a thin, fitted, burgundy tee-shirt, then by all means, check out American Apparel, but how many plain tee-shirts can any one person own? Their products are just boring, plain and simple. They have no design department, just a really good marketing strategy, and for this I say forego American Apparel. They have created the macaroni of minimalism, destroying the tee-shirt and turning it into a brightly colored fashion atrocity. The company takes no risks, American Apparel, with Dov at the helm simply takes the simplicity of loungewear and turns it into something infinitely more complex. The best corkscrew is the waiter’s key because of its minimalism, you don’t, however, need 27 different waiter’s keys in different colors, each with separate back stories of the humane process the company uses in making them, you simply need one. American Apparel does effectively objectify women and sexualize the tee-shirt, however, they do not effectively design their products.
