American Apparel Ads: Sexy or Sexist?
Jan 18, 2008
artchick
So I am walking down some trendy street in Shoreditch, London and come across one of my favourite stores; American Apparel. For me it’s iconic. A great fashion label that restores some simplicity to design. I’ve never been a fan of Versace flamboyance. The retro seventies modernism with a splash of 80’s style has made American Apparel a hit with what the American media calls young “hipsters”. The sort of kids that read Vice magazine.
Controversy
But all is not well in the land of apparel. The brand’s controversial founder and CEO Dov Charney could be facing a sexual harassment trial. Is this any surprise? American Apparel has been pilloried on blogs, newspapers and billboards for its sexualised images of what one viewer called the “exploitation” of “prepubescent models”. Unlike other ad campaigns the women in American Apparel (AA) look very young, in their teens and are often in sexual positions with suggestive typography etched across the page. Evidently, sex sells because AA is doing great business.
The controversy reached a high when an AA advert was defaced late last year. A giant billboard had a female model bent over wearing nothing but leggings. Green paint was splashed over the image with the caption “Gee, I wonder why women get raped”. It seems like a bit of jump from sexually suggestive billboards to rape but this is how the issue is clouded. Feminist blogs rant how these images contribute to acts of rape but I couldn’t disagree anymore.
Sexist
AA is an example of a controversial advertising campaign that is all. We know sex sells and AA is exploiting that fact. While it could be argued that these images objectify women and thus devalues them in the eyes of man it doesn’t follow that that devaluation necessitates rape. Rape is about the criminally violent act of men who have clearly lost any sense they once had. It is unlikely that an American Apparel poster has anything to do with this.
The feminist bloggers should attack things like alcohol and drug abuse which are more likely to result in rapes. AA ads are art. Just like the Chapman Brothers’ works are considered art. However, they are not blamed for pedophilia crimes. We need to inject some reality back into the discourse of sexually suggestive ads. They are not a force for moral decay.
The CEO
Dov Charney doesn’t make the lives of those who call his ads art any easier. Dov is alleged to have conducted meetings in his underwear, called female employees “sluts” and “whores” and once masturbated in front of a magazine journalist who was interviewing him. His lawyers simply call American Apparel a “sexually charged workplace”. But I don’t think it’s in anyway appropriate for your boss to invite you to masturbate in front him, as Dov is alleged to have done.
Despite this bad rap, the art must be separated from the man, just like we have done with Michael Jackson for all these years. Is American Apparel sexist? No. Does it exploit women? No. It simply takes advantage of those whose purchasing decisions are swayed by the glimpse of a young buttock. Shame on them, no shame on American Apparel.