Dov Charney, Like It or Not

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He has his store manager summon a group of workers he feels don't have quite the right look for sales. Nothing personal he'll tell them; I wouldn't want my sisters working in the stores.

Between calls, Charney micromanages. Take down those photos; get rid of these boxes. Why are these hangers here? We need a nice little Epson printer. He has his store manager summon a group of workers he feels don't have quite the right look for sales; he plans to reassign them to cleaning, stocking, and maintenance. Nothing personal, he'll tell them; I wouldn't want my sisters working in the stores. He asks for new lighting--referring to bulbs by price and product number--harangues a kid for wearing a skullcap, and then has an epiphany: "I want quicker transfers between stores. Let's get something small--maybe a moped! Get a kid to just ride it from store to store. Some kids get off on that--living off exhaust! A customer could wait while this yahoo gets on his bike and gets his ass over here."

He remembers that he's supposed to call a reporter from the Chicago Tribune and so an interview breaks out midmeeting as sweeping and folding go on around him. The salespeople, reassigned, basically, for being unattractive, sit and wait for the meeting to continue.

As Charney explains to the reporter, the whole sweatshop-free, made-in-America thing is no longer a selling point--"it's like a sexy girl who keeps telling you she's sexy; it's nauseating"--but will always form the core of American Apparel's success. It gives the company a vastly shorter supply chain that allows for immediate response to trends as well as the ability to cut off an item that is stagnating on shelves. With top-heavy management and factories half a world away, the Gap can't do that.

"We're a fantasy," he says, chuckling. "American Apparel is make-believe. We can do whatever the f-- we want."

In the words of American Apparel's "content adviser," Alexandra Spunt--hired on a whim after she interviewed Charney for an alternative weekly newspaper in Montreal--Charney "has no inner monologue." He will say whatever is on his mind, however bizarre, infuriating, or prurient, to anyone, from the homeless guy arguing with a parking meter in front of the Orchard Street store to his top executives to journalists. Now that he's successful and a brand name in his own right (at least in apparel circles), Charney has begun to acquire the slight taint of perversion, something he doesn't entirely discourage. (Sexuality, after all, is the primary component of his company's advertising.) As it pertains to him, the taint is partly understandable and not entirely deserved. He appreciates women, doesn't believe in marriage or monogamy, and isn't ashamed to acknowledge consensual sexual relationships with employees of his company.

"People think because I talk about hot ass that I'm some sort of pervert," he says, fast walking up Houston Street en route to the Broadway store. "Hot to me is intriguing, tastemaking. Just because my language is colloquial, people misinterpret me."

His style does, however, make him an easy target for critics, and also opens a door to the sort of problems executives across America--who go out of their way to project vanilla--dread. A few weeks after our last meeting, a former employee filed a lawsuit leveling sexual harassment charges against Charney, and though he vehemently denies the accusation, it's likely to haunt him for some time.

On the other hand, it's hard to see the company's sales being affected. Much of American Apparel's success in projecting an image of cool must be attributed to a branding image originating with Charney's wild, wacky, hypersexual persona and extending out to the highly targeted advertisements--provocative low-fi snapshot photographs of men and mostly women in various states of undress, in some cases wearing only, say, American Apparel socks. The ads, which appear exclusively on urban billboards or in small-circulation hipster magazines like Vice and Index, are often compared with a controversial Calvin Klein ad campaign of the '90s. But unlike Klein's ads, which were highly styled setups shot by top photographers, these are authentic snapshots photographed by everyone from Charney to, literally, the summer interns. They feature not models but regular people--employees, friends, Dov himself (his bare ass is the star of one), and especially girls Dov meets on the street.

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