The American Apparel Adverts Capture the Rise and Fall of the Male Gaze

During my time working on the shop floor at American Apparel—the first job I ever had, after submitting polaroids of my teenage self in tight leggings and an oversized t-shirt—I became attuned to the provocative imagery that defined the brand. With a heady mix of intimate point-and-shoot photography, snapped seemingly off the cuff and frequently set in the bedroom, and models who looked more like art students, they claimed to redefine beauty standards. 

It was an easy line to swallow at a time when photographers such as Terry Richardson and Richard Kern reigned supreme, and Vice magazine was in the ascendant. American Apparel regularly took out full page adverts in Vice, and the two became associated with a new social class: the hipster. Women were considered either fun and liberated enough to “be cool” with the semi-nudity, degrading poses and innuendo of American Apparel’s advertising campaigns, or they were boring, old-fashioned and unenlightened. 

Shot by Charney himself, the adverts were brash and aggressively suggestive. One focused on a model’s crotch area only, cutting out her face, while others featured models bending over in short skirts so as to reveal their underwear beneath. Adult entertainment trade magazine Adult Video News even cited the American Apparel website as “one of the finer softcore websites going”. 

I never modelled for American Apparel, but I know several who did. It was a point of pride in certain indie circles at the time to have done so, in a pre-Instagram era when many male photographers included a submission page for aspiring models on their website, often with no offer of payment. Charney himself cast amateur, inexperienced models in this way, as well as visiting his stores worldwide to select employees for campaigns. The fact that the balance of power was so starkly tipped in Charney’s favour was rarely discussed, and his behaviour created a toxic working culture in the stores that encouraged staff to conduct inappropriate relationships with supervisors.