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- [00:01]
Vanessa Grigoriades
This episode is brought to you by ebay. We all have that piece, the one that's so you. You've basically become known for it. And if you don't yet fashionistas, you'll find it on ebay. That Miu Miu red leather bomber, the cousteau Barcelona cowboy top. Or that Patagonia fleece in the 2017 colorway. All these finds are all on ebay.
- [00:19]
Natalie
Along with millions of more main character.
- [00:21]
Vanessa Grigoriades
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- [00:27]
Natalie
Ebay things people love.
- [00:32]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Campsite Media.
- [00:38]
Amy Merrick
Hello everybody and welcome back to Infamous, a Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media podcast. I'm Vanessa Grigoriades and I am here with Natalie again this week and we have a wonderful guest named Amy Merrick, a journalism professor at DePauw University in Chicago and a freelance writer who wrote a fascinating article about about American Apparel and Dove Charney, which, yes, that is what we are talking about today. For those people who were full adults or teenagers who did a lot of shopping in the 2000s, there's no way you did not know American Apparel. Natalie wore a lot of it. She's gonna talk about that. But before we start, I do wanna read a little bit of an article from the New York Times from 2004 which describes the owner of American Apparel in the terms really that he wanted to be known and things careened wildly out of control after that. There is a new documentary out that is under the rubric Train wreck. If you want to search for that. All about American Apparel and it's really, really good. You might have noticed you don't go to American Apparel store anymore and there is a reason for that. And so if you didn't know the whole scandal behind going to learn it today. But again, as I said, let's start from the beginning. So the owner of American Apparel, his name was Dove Charney. He told the New York Times in 2004. I think I was born a hustler. I like the hustle. I like selling a product that people love. It's nice when a girl tries on a bra or a tie dye T shirt and it's ooh, I love it. He says, affecting an ecstatic moan. So basically from the beginning he was like, I'm selling sex and I, I am just doing this and you should all be into it. He's this sort of, you know, mud and chops look like this sort of garmento. 1970s pornographer, Lower east side dude, very snug polo shirt, you know, mustache, just urban hipster 2000s to the max and created this really, you know, risque vibe for a company that, that then went public and became crashing down to earth. So let me throw it over to Amy and to Natalie, who are going to tell you a lot more than I know about American Apparel.
- [03:20]
Unnamed Guest
Thank you, Vanessa, for that intro. I mean, Amy, your. Your story was titled Dove Charney's Failed Utopia. And it was. There was a utopic vision. What was that vision?
- [03:32]
Vanessa Grigoriades
There were really two distinct strands to Dov Charney's vision for American Apparel. And it's interesting to think about how both of them existed side by side. There were kind of two separate selling points. One is that this clothing was made in the United States. So for some people that was a big draw. This is American made sewn in America. It was portrayed as giving people better working conditions. That is highly disputed, but that was how it was built. And with a lot of this, we're going to be talking about marketing, right? So this is the story that sold the product. So one of the stories was this is American Made. At one point, it actually was one of the biggest apparel manufacturers that still was in the United States. And the other was this idea that, that people could be free to do what they wanted. This freedom was centered around both self expression, creative expression, and also sexual freedom. If you kind of think about American mythology, sort of both of those strands are often true, right? This idea of people who are kind of self made, this is being done in America. And also this idea that you can kind of choose your own path, choose your own expression, or love who you want to love. But of course, when you get down to the details of it, who gets to choose freely, whose self expression, whose identity, then of course it becomes much more complicated.
- [05:05]
Unnamed Guest
That really sets the stage for what would end up happening. But you know, I think it's interesting that he himself is Canadian. We should say that it does seem that he came to America to kind of be like, this is the American dream. I'm making it. And it's interesting to me that a lot of what he espoused, this sort of made in America has come back around, you know, and it's something that in the broader climate we're talking about, but the free love aspect of it that, that you're describing, I think we can't talk about that free love side of it without describing these ads, which were infamous, I guess. So when I came to college in the US I started wearing a lot of American Apparel. There was an American Apparel store six blocks from where my university campus was. And I couldn't really afford it, but I was there trying on the clothes all the time. And those disco pants had an absolute choke hold on me. These were these like satin fabric, really tight, almost like jodhpur, like pants that were super high waisted. But more than that, it was, it was the billboards plastered like in the front of the store. You describe them in your piece. The retailer is also known for its hypersexualized advertising. Many of the photos, often shot on a rumpled white bed, show half naked young woman wearing a single piece of American Apparel clothing. Frequently the images show only the women's body parts, thighs, buttocks, pelvis, but not their faces. In one, a woman wearing a black leotard spreads her legs towards the camera next to the words now open. And I mean these were very arresting, very affecting ads. They were usually in really high, pretty high contrast, Often shot by Terry Richardson if I'm not mistaken, who's pretty infamous photographer we can talk about later as well.
- [06:54]
Amy Merrick
They're basically porn. They're basically look like porn. I mean I don't know what they look like. To me they look like onlyfans, but all the women are sort of flat chested and you know, they're like hipster porn. I remember being really a little scandalized by them totally.
- [07:11]
Unnamed Guest
And I mean I think that this was the beginning of like what was happening around this time in fashion was the use of noddles. That's like not mod. Um, so a lot of the American apparel girls, as they were called, the women featured in the ads were not actual models. You know, they might have a slightly different look but still be. Ultimately it seemed they would be hot to Dove Charney.
- [07:37]
Amy Merrick
You always gotta be hot. Apparently, except for this one period of time where they allowed normal looking women to be in Dove ads and stuff like that.
- [07:45]
Unnamed Guest
True. So let's talk about the clothes a little bit. These, these famously made in America clothes. What did they look like?
- [07:53]
Vanessa Grigoriades
So the clothes that American Apparel made often were relatively basic. They were known for their T shirts for example. But a lot of times it was the way that they were presented that was different. So a woman might be wearing a T shirt and incredibly short shorts or I remember an ad with a woman wearing a very, a miniskirt and bending over and you could see her underwear. And so a lot of times the clothes themselves may not have been particularly striking, but they were shown on a person's body in a way that the body was emphasized and it was not difficult to imagine A woman's body without the clothes. And I think that was in the advertising. What you would see is that there would be clothes, but there would also be quite a bit of a person's body visible. And that was what I remember a lot about the ads.
- [08:54]
Unnamed Guest
And, you know, a lot of these clothes, they tended to be in these sort of block colors. Usually there weren't a lot of patterns, and it was a lot of very specific silhouettes. A lot of crop tops, a lot of spandex. So it was either these sort of really, really tight, tight, tight things, or these kind of crop tops that were loose and swishy. I remember one particular shirt that was very popular when I was in college that was sort of this long and loose crop top that. That people would wear a bandeau bra underneath as sort of like a little, like strapless bralette. There were skinny jeans. There was this zip hoodie that everybody had where it would be whichever color hoodie, and then a white zip all the way up. I remember so many people having that. And a lot of these skirts, they kind of recreated almost like a school uniform skirt. I remember kind of the pleated, almost tennis skirt. There was this sort of circle skirt that was kind of wide, but they were all really, really short. And then bodysuits.
- [09:58]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Yeah. And I think part of what Natalie is talking about is things that look like school uniforms or things that are kind of preppy, really just kind of adds to the transgressive quality of it because it emphasizes youth. And a lot of the women did look really young. And so you had these things that looked very preppy in some ways, but also very sexualized. And so that just really added to the kind of friction or the scandalous nature of what you were seeing.
- [10:25]
Unnamed Guest
Absolutely. It's like somebody took American Beauty and made it a clothing brand in some way.
- [10:33]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Right. That wasn't supposed to be the instruction manual. Right.
- [10:35]
Unnamed Guest
That was supposed to have a different message, but never mind.
- [10:48]
Vanessa Grigoriades
The Hamburglar was just a mascot, but Jerome Jacobson was the real deal. A McDonald's security chief who almost pulled off the ultimate inside job. On Wondery's podcast, the Big Flop. Comedians join host Mischa Brown to chronicle pop culture's biggest fails and try to answer the age old who thought this was a good idea at the time. The McDonald's collab with Monopoly was a genius idea. Come get a Big Mac and you could go home with a million dollar prize piece. The only problem, when they picked their head of security, the one guy in charge of protecting those million dollar pieces, McDonald's drew the wrong card. Comedians Ify Wodiwe and Beth Stelling join Mischa to break down what really happened with the McDonald's monopoly scandal. Listen to the Big Flap wherever you get your podcasts.
- [11:47]
Unnamed Guest
For a long time I thought it was enough to have good locks and maybe an alarm that would, you know, make a lot of noise if someone actually broke in. But after people close to me were broken into, I've realized that true security takes more a system that works to prevent that break in, that violation of your space from ever happening in the first place. That's why I trust SimpliSafe to protect my home and family. With SimpliSafe, they use AI powered cameras and live monitoring agents to detect suspicious activity around your property. If someone's lurking, agents can talk to them in real time or turn on spotlights, even call law enforcement proactively deterring crime before it starts. Named Best Home security system of 2025 by CNET, monitoring plans start around $1 a day with a 60 day money back guarantee. Visit simplisafe.com infamouspodcast to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free. That's SimpliSafe.com infamouspodcast There's no safe like SimpliSafe. American Apparel was founded in 1997, but it really took off in the early to mid 2000s, the era of Paris Hilton, low rise jeans and a frosty lip. In 2003American Apparel opened its first retail store in LA, and that same year it launched its first bodysuit, a soft cotton number with a halter neck. From there it kind of exploded. Within a year it expanded to Europe and by 2005 the business was generating more than $200 million in revenue. A big part of the branding was the message that you could feel good about buying the clothes. Dove Charney, the company's founder, was super outspoken that American Apparel's factories were not sweatshops. This was coming after all the uproar in the 90s over Nike and other companies use of sweatshops. American Apparel's clothes, he said, were made in LA and his workers got paid decent living wages.
- [13:50]
Amy Merrick
Our average wages in this sewing factory in the last quarter I heard were.
- [13:53]
Vanessa Grigoriades
12 or $13, which is per hour, which is fantastic.
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Unnamed Guest
In context of this industry, Dove wanted American Apparel to be known as ethical but also sexy. Dove decorated stores with covers of Penthouse and Wii magazines from the 70s. He allegedly walked around in his underwear in front of staff and he apparently gave his inner Circle of employees, employees, some unorthodox gifts. You would get a starter kit. So the starter kit was a Leica camera, a new BlackBerry phone, a copy of 48 Laws of Power, and a Hitachi magic wand vibrator. It was all, he said, part of the company's ethos of self expression and freedom. This was how American Apparel set itself apart from its competition. Because, remember, this was still the era of the mall. Online shopping was only in its nascent stages, and physical retail was still where it was at. Dove was selling an experience, a curious blend of morality and sexual freedom.
- [15:00]
Amy Merrick
Amy, tell us what was going on in retail at the time. Was it all Old Navy or Juicy tracksuits? Like, where were they stepping into?
- [15:08]
Vanessa Grigoriades
I think what's really interesting is that it was this deliberate way to set themselves apart from something like an Old Navy that was a $6 billion brand at the time. So one of the things to think about is American Apparel was not one of the juggernauts of retail. You had Old Navy, you had places like Limited and Express and really these very kind of much more sort of mainstream in their presentation. You had H and M, which affected to have a little bit more of a designer look, but you had all these brands that were not trying to be edgy in the same way. And so this was in some ways a way to set itself apart. The era that we're talking about is also the very early era of social media. So when you bring up OnlyFans, that's kind of an interesting point. It's interesting to look at those ads now because in some ways that aesthetic has been adopted so widely. The aesthetic of the ads attempted to make it look more authentic so not so airbrushed, not so perfectly presented in some ways. And yet that's part of the story as well, right? Like the authentic aesthetic is affected in its own right. But that, that was another attempt to say, hey, this is sort of true self expression. We're going to have this different look. And as Natalie was talking about those billboards, they had to catch your attention. They were different and they were eye catching. And to Vanessa's point, they were supposed to scandalize because that transgression was what caught people's attention to sell them, in a lot of cases, a pretty basic T shirt.
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Unnamed Guest
Right? And it's, I mean, you know, it's the age old adage, sex sells. Right? And Vanessa already talked about that. But I really appreciate that framing because American Apparel was a startup, you know, like it was the upstart trying to get a Foothold. And at first it seems like it was pretty successful. Right. Like, in part due to this marketing that was really eye catching. It started growing very quickly. And I think the Netflix documentary that just came out does kind of capture that frenetic rush to growth.
- [17:35]
Amy Merrick
The new brand of clothing has been.
- [17:36]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Appearing in cities around America.
- [17:38]
Unnamed Guest
American Apparel.
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Natalie
American Apparel.
- [17:40]
Vanessa Grigoriades
American Apparel. It's one of the fastest growing and hippest clothing makers in the country.
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Unnamed Guest
So there was a point when it was growing very quickly, correct?
- [17:49]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Absolutely. At one point, American Apparel had about 250 stores. So when, if you think of it as it felt like it was ubiquitous in malls across the country, it. It was in a lot of the top malls. And so you would kind of see this everywhere you go. And I think the word normalized gets overused. But when you, when you see these ads and you see these stores all the time, it does kind of become part of the retail landscape because it, it really was with the advertising and the stores kind of kind of everywhere and in some ways, I think becomes accepted just because you see it so often.
- [18:27]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah. And the stores themselves, I remember distinctly when the American Apparel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and it was really big, and the stores recreated the ads and that they were super brightly lit, like neon white lights. Just these clothes set up in very orderly sort of colorways. And all of the employees looked as though they could be in the ads themselves. Like they were very, very cool. And that was something that you, that you saw in the documentary too. Like, oftentimes the employees would end up in the ads.
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Vanessa Grigoriades
This model works here?
- [19:00]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, she works.
- [19:01]
Amy Merrick
She lives downstairs.
- [19:02]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Absolutely. And this gets to the aspirational side of retail. The stores create an environment that you want to step into and you want to be a part of. And the disco pants are not just disco pants in their own right. They represent this greater feeling that you want to have when you wear them, the things that you want to do when you're wearing them. And so I think especially when the mall was such a big part of culture, the more you could sort of immerse people in your aesthetic, the more appealing it was, because it was almost like you are stepping into this fantasy that's been created for you.
- [19:40]
Amy Merrick
But then, of course, you know, Dove Charney sort of has a sick, twisted fantasy, Right. I mean, you speak about how, you know, he's walking around the floor of this Las Vegas trade show called Magic. He's got a reporter from a Hispanic men's magazine trailing him. And his assistant, who is, of course female, holds up A hamburger to his mouth so he can take a bite of it. I mean, come on.
- [20:10]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Really? That's nuts.
- [20:13]
Amy Merrick
And that's sort of. I mean, this guy's almost running this, like, you know, what we think of as a cult. Right.
- [20:21]
Vanessa Grigoriades
I think that idea of whether it is a cult really needs to be answered by the people who participated in it. It's really hard for me to say from the outside. That said, his behavior was so transgressive that even in a culture that's often sexualized, it really stood out. There is infamously an article from Jane magazine where he masturbated in front of the reporter. Things like that just go so far beyond the boundaries of what most people would do that it really does catch your attention as being an outlier. This, of course, will then lead to a lot of other problems, legal problems. His behavior was deliberately transgressive. And I remember talking to someone on the board when legal disputes blew up around the company, who said that he. That Charney stood by this vision of free love, and he felt that American culture was too repressive and that he wanted to liberate it. Then, of course, the question again is, who is being liberated and how are the people around you being treated? It certainly did not seem like an atmosphere in which everyone was equally liberated or equally able to make their own choices.
- [21:53]
Unnamed Guest
Right. It's not free love when he's the boss, you know, And I think, as the Netflix documentary portrays, he was a very demanding boss, by all accounts. Not just, you know, having the assistant hold a burger up to his face, but also, you know, requiring really long hours and all the things you have to do to get a company off the ground.
- [22:13]
Vanessa Grigoriades
He lived, breathed, ate American Apparel all the time. He almost never slept.
- [22:19]
Unnamed Guest
He wouldn't even take breaks to eat food. And he expected the same of his employees, but he was doing it in a very, very extreme way, and we haven't talked about yet. He had this mansion in Silver Lake, which is a neighborhood on the east side of la. American Apparel was sort of based in Los Angeles, and it had this factory where, you know, all the garments were made. And it was really espousing. Oh, we're vertically integrated as a company, and we do everything in house. But the backdrop of this was that Dove had this mansion that kind of seemed like a free for all. There were what were called Dove girls. So just sort of like women kind of around him, catering to him in whatever way, wandering in and out of the house. And it just, by the accounts given in the documentary, Seems like it was this kind of free for all, never ending party. And that's where I think a lot of the indiscretions and allegations that would come up took place. So how exactly did this utopia fail?
- [23:29]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Well, I think you can kind of see the seeds of the failure from the beginning. I think Dove Charney's willingness to push boundaries eventually caught up to him. So eventually, by 2014, there had been a series of sexual harassment lawsuits from former employees. And I should say that they were either dismissed in court or they went to arbitration. So there was never any finding against him in court. One of the challenges around this is that there were very restrictive non disparagement agreements that people signed a mandatory arbitration. And so if somebody did have a sexual harassment claim, it was set up from the beginning to be very difficult for there to be any kind of court finding because of the way it was set up from the beginning. At a certain point, the board of directors told Charney that they intended to fire him because of his behavior. They claimed that his conduct violated the company's sexual harassment and anti discrimination policy and that it was becoming a legal liability for him. I should say again that he continues to deny all of these claims. And they did ultimately dismiss him. There were many lawsuits and counter lawsuits, and ultimately the board decided that although he was the founder of the company, his behavior was becoming such a problem for them that they couldn't continue. And so there was a big blowup that led to him exiting the company.
- [25:12]
Unnamed Guest
Right, right. And as you mentioned earlier, you talked to one of the new members of the board, and this was right around the time they were trying to oust him or whichever verb we want to use, and attempting to turn the company around, which didn't really work, it seems.
- [25:29]
Vanessa Grigoriades
So one of the things that was happening at this time as well is that American Apparel had a lot of debt. This is not unique to them. So what happens in retail a lot is when businesses are hot, they try to capitalize on that opportunity and rapidly expand. They take on debt, hoping that their revenue will expand to cover often, I shouldn't say it often doesn't, but that doesn't always work out. And so for public companies, this can really become a problem. And so this was kind of happening simultaneously. And in fact, that was one of the things that the board talked about is one of their claims was that Dov Charney's behavior was making it difficult for them to get money from lenders because the lenders were concerned about his behavior. Now, again, Dov Charney denies this, but so there was a financial situation that was tied up in this as well. Eventually American Apparel did file not long after this for chapter 11 bankruptcy, which kind of allows you to wipe out your debts and reorganize and then eventually some of their intellectual property was sold off. It does kind of still exist online, but it is nothing like the huge brand that we saw at its peak.
- [26:52]
Natalie
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- [28:16]
Vanessa Grigoriades
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- [28:41]
Natalie
Customer offer for first three months only speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks.
- [28:44]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Busy taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com.
- [28:49]
Unnamed Guest
So essentially Dove's bad behavior led to the downfall of the company, and it seems as though that behavior was really very bad. According to former employees, he was a demanding verging on an abusive boss. It was probably 10 o', clock, 11 o' clock at night.
- [29:08]
Vanessa Grigoriades
And my phone rang and it was My boss and I answered the phone, and he didn't.
- [29:15]
Unnamed Guest
Say anything other than just, I hate you.
- [29:17]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Just, like, the middle of the night, he just called me to tell me he hated me.
- [29:23]
Unnamed Guest
I mean, that was like a regular day at American Apparel. But it was also an open secret that Dove was sleeping with some of his female employees. Women are important to have around, and.
- [29:34]
Amy Merrick
They'Re easy to fall in love with. So what are you gonna do?
- [29:38]
Unnamed Guest
As we already mentioned, Dove had a huge house in Silver Lake, a hipster neighborhood on LA's east side. Dove lived in a big gray mansion with about 20 rooms perched on top of a hill overlooking a small reservoir. And in this house, Dove allegedly hosted a rotating cast of young women known as Dove girls. Here's how some former employees speaking in the Trainwreck documentary remember it.
- [30:05]
Vanessa Grigoriades
I left Dove's house after my manager at the factory warned me, look, if you stay at his place any longer, you're going to become a Dove girl. The Dove girl, that was somebody who. They don't really have a job title. Maybe they're Dove's girlfriend. Maybe they just travel with him. But they do the things that he wants, and they have that responsibility because of the way they look.
- [30:37]
Unnamed Guest
Dove's behavior really came under scrutiny in 2005 when Dove got sued for sexual harassment. According to one suit filed by a former American Apparel recruiter, Dove called workers into his office to give them vibrators, saying, quote, it's great during sex. The former recruiter said she was terrified of being alone with him. In another suit, a customer service official recalled Dove exposing himself to her. In yet another lawsuit, a sales manager said that Dove asked her to masturbate with with him. Years later, American Apparel revealed even more of Dove's alleged behavior. According to court documents, Dove called accounting employees, quote, filipino pigs with your faces in the trough. He also apparently sent sexually graphic texts to employees and saved his sex videos with employees on company video cameras. It makes me wonder if maybe all. All that Made in America stuff, all. Duff's passion about labor rights and ethics was partially a smokescreen for his own bad behavior, a way to distract from how he was creating awful workplace conditions in other ways. And so what. What is your takeaway from this? From this kind of failed utopia? What. What have we learned?
- [31:59]
Vanessa Grigoriades
I see American Apparel as being the product of a particular person with particular goals that largely suited himself. And so in some ways, I think it is this company driven by this outsized and charismatic personality, despite all the problems that surrounded it, and also a culture that was receptive to it at the time. This is a time when American Apparel was not the only brand. They probably were the most transgressive or one of the most in pushing the boundaries. But this was also a time when Vice magazine was very popular and this hyper sexualized atmosphere was something in the culture that was ready to receive it as well. So it's not just that someone is selling a story, someone also is willing to buy that story. So you kind of have to look at both sides of it. Who, what are they selling, who is selling it, but also who is receiving it and why do they want to receive it. So there's that have. Has anything been learned from it? I tend to think, having covered business for a while now, that a lot of these stories come back around just in different ways.
- [33:27]
Unnamed Guest
Where do you see this as having come back around?
- [33:30]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Well, a couple of years after Dove Charney was ousted from American Apparel, he founded a company called Los Angeles Apparel that exists now. They are poised to open a store in soho by the end of the summer. And online people are saying they're excited for it.
- [33:53]
Amy Merrick
The new store looks exactly like the old store. No, I mean if you click on their website, Los Angeles Apparel, which is Dove's new store website, there's just like a bunch of hot 20 somethings in G strings and like cool T shirts.
- [34:11]
Unnamed Guest
Well, I should say I see these, I live in LA and I drive around and I see these billboards everywhere and they're to me, to my untrained eye, almost indistinguishable from American Apparel. Like there's sort of a woman in a mesh bodysuit or just kind of a lot of butts. That's, that's sort of the aesthetic. It's very, very, very similar. And of course, now we've had, I don't know, 10 more years to get used to it, of seeing people where we've seen this very hypersexual imagery on our Instagrams daily.
- [34:44]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Yeah, I think, I think from both of you, these are really good points. As I look at the website, it does look really similar. Maybe some of the wording around it is, is not the same, but definitely if you look at the top of the website, a lot of it is really similar. I think we should keep in mind too that a lot of the consumers that this is aimed at don't know this story of American Apparel because they would have been really young when this is happening. And that is, that is one of the things, you know about reinvention. I don't know if Reinvention is the right word. Recycling is that you don't necessarily have to recapture the same people. You can have a whole new group of people to sell this story to. And in that way, it does come back around.
- [35:34]
Unnamed Guest
That's a great point. So thank you so much, Amy, for, for coming on Infamous.
- [35:39]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Thanks for having me.
- [35:41]
Unnamed Guest
No legal cases have stuck to Dove since opening Los Angeles apparel in 2016. Dove has worked with, Yay, you know, Kanye west on some controversial designs, including in 2023 printing Ye's White Lives Matter shirts. He's apparently set to open a Los Angeles apparel store in New York's SoHo neighborhood soon. Dove, talking to the Guardian, had this to say about the differences between American and Los Angeles Apparel. Quote, the people aren't different. The materials aren't different, the environment isn't different. I guess he's betting that the same strategy that worked in 2005 will work in 2025. And whether you want to call it it repetition or regression, there are some similarities. There's a lot we were working through in the early and mid 2000s that we haven't exactly figured out, like how to fairly compensate immigrant workers or how to handle sexual harassment in the workplace. They do say fashion Trends run on 20 year cycles. So maybe in the case of American Apparel and Los Angeles Apparel, what sold really is new.
- [36:52]
Vanessa Grigoriades
Again.
- [37:04]
Unnamed Guest
That'S it for Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Natrobe. That's N A T R O B E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book Blurred Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus.
- [37:26]
Vanessa Grigoriades
See you next week.