American Apparel: Not a Good Place to Shop

I know I’m going to piss off loads of people when I say this, but to me, as a store, American Apparel makes no sense. It just makes no sense.

Maybe I’m stupid, but I just don’t get the appeal. The worst part of this confusion is that I feel so alone. When I talk to my excellent Sigur Rós-listening friends about what their favorite store is, they inevitably say American Apparel, and I am inevitably at a loss for words.

For those of you who don’t know, American Apparel is a store that almost entirely consists of t-shirts, tube tops, and spandex pants in neon colors. It came into vogue with the faux-socialist hipster crowd because it doesn’t use sweatshops to make said shirts, tube tops, and neon pants.

It became notorious with the readers of women’s magazines (i.e. myself) when the CEO of American Apparel, Dov Charney, pleasured himself and received oral sex under a desk, all while being interviewed by Jane magazine.

It received criticism for its advertising campaigns, which feature nubile young things outfitted in knee-high socks and posing as if they were in a low budget 70s-era porno. Well, I actually liked that part. But I digress.

Perhaps I don’t understand the concept of American Apparel because my own experiences there have been so unbelievably wack.

The first time I frequented the store was directly after it opened up at its new Harvard Square location. I was armed with a pack of Twizzlers and a friend who was incredibly excited about the grand opening partially, as she kept telling me, because it reminded her of clubbing in Ibiza.

I sauntered in, using a Twizzler as a straw to lap up the dregs of my Diet Coke, and was immediately reduced to a heap on the ground, blinded by pulsating neon lights and the dulcet beeping of The Decemberists.

As I screamed out in pain, yelling that all of my orifices might never be whole again, and that I was about to have a seizure, just like those Japanese kids who watch Pokemon, my friend pointed me towards a wad of neon spandex.

“Try this dress on,” she said. “And stop wailing about how much you hated ‘Garden State.’ Nobody cares about you.”

“This isn’t a dress! It doesn’t have workable seams! It doesn’t have zippers! It’s made entirely from recycled bike shorts!” I said, as she dragged me by my leg into the dressing room, which consisted of a see-through curtain and a neon light and looked vaguely like somewhere Jared Leto could be found shooting up heroin.

Finally, after much exertion, I came out of the dressing room.

“You can see the outline of my cellulite,” I said. “Do you know what a cellulite holster is? Because that is basically what I have right now.”

“Just wear it with leggings and the holster will go away,” she said. Despite my quasi-feminist leanings, I am incredibly suggestible.

I went back into the crack den/dressing room, and decided that, perhaps, I had been hasty and sensitive, and maybe I just needed to give this lascivious trash another shot. Besides, how expensive could a dress made out of scraps of cotton be?

I emerged from the dressing room and brought the garment to the counter.

“That’ll be $40, Miss,” said a woman wearing nothing but a track jacket and small polyester hot pants.

“Are you serious?” I said. “This is a piece of stretch cotton that can barely qualify as wearable!”

“Um, do you care about workers rights?” said a customer caustically wearing a sweatband.

“Sure,” I said. “I like workers.”

“Well, that’s what you pay for,” he replied.

Nowadays, the dress makes no sense to me. People wear an unaccountably expensive piece of junk, produced by a company that has excellent labor practices yet also allows its female employees to give blowjobs to the CEO while he is in meetings?

I guess the pornographic ads fooled me. See, when someone gets a hummer in a porno, the consumer reaps the benefits. American Apparel shoppers just get sperm all over their faces.

—Staff writer Rebecca M. Harrington can be reached at harring@fas.harvard.edu.