On a High "We're a fantasy," says Dov Charney. "We can do whatever the f-- we want." Fantasy meets reality where workers make a million garments a week.
Charney conferencing in the corporate apartment.
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Dov Charney, Like It or Not
Published September 2005
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE"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.
Bad Dog Hed Kayce, Charney's constant
companion, has had a problem. American
Apparel stores are precise, but not fuzzy.
Charney is fussy, especially about the
women who work the floor.
Strolling up the Bowery, Charney checks out every woman who walks by. Spotting a beguiling, bosomy girl in a tight American Apparel T-shirt, he smirks. "See--I'm keeping America beautiful!" In rare moments of weakness, he appears to be sensitive to some of the jabs he's taken in the media, but he is unashamed of his ongoing pursuit of models and, importantly, salespeople. He's recently come to the realization that one reason his stores--which, it should be noted, break their own records regularly--are not as successful as he'd like is that the makeup of the floor staff is just a bit off. "Our cast isn't quite right yet," he explains. "You know how Ian Schrager hires his staff at the hotels? He uses a casting company. Because that's what it is--casting! You can't have all Mary Anns on Gilligan's Island--you need Ginger!"
The makeup of AA's staff is a mad science that is hard to teach--or even explain. Right now, Charney feels there's no one here he can trust to do it, and so he's interviewing staff himself--hundreds of prospective workers a week. "I made a mistake with these stores," he says. "I didn't do it myself and it's wrong. So I've had to let people go and there's nothing I hate more than having to get rid of kids. It breaks their hearts. But you know what? It affects sales. Should garment workers at my factory suffer because we f-- up the casting?
"What I'm looking for is style--that's not something you can teach a person. You have it or you don't. Let's say one girl has an acne problem but good style, while another one is beautiful but has no style. I'm picking acne!"
The nexus of Dov Charney's T-shirt revolution is a trio of monolithic pink buildings just off Alameda Boulevard, in an industrial section of downtown Los Angeles that would cause your average tourist to roll up the windows and lock the doors. Over seven floors of the main building, Marty Bailey, Charney's VP of operations, monitors a frantic but efficient vertically integrated production that starts with massive rolls of fabric and ends with finished garments in the course of a few hours. Arriving on the scene in 2002, Bailey found a small company that didn't know how to be big. Sales were booming and Charney--who has a 50% partner (whom he declines to discuss at length) but manages American Apparel exactly as he sees fit--was running out of fingers to stick into a dike on the verge of collapse.
Charney admits he was in trouble. "I called up a guy I trust and asked, 'Who's the best out there at organizing a factory?' He said Marty. So I called him on a Saturday and said, 'Dude, my name's Dov and I need help.' He started Monday; that's the way I operate."
