American Apparel Controversy

Montreal/Tokyo/ New York/London/ Barcelona/Zurich Beijing/Milan/Seoul/ Mexico City/Berlin/ Amsterdam/Rome/ Paris/Los Angeles American Apparel Controversy

This is a newspaper I have produced about American Apparel and their advertising. I have always admired their advertising however many people don’t know that a lot of adverts have been banned in the UK because of how controversial they are, but this makes them unique and gets them noticed.

Throughout this newspaper I have replicated a lot of American Apparel adverts with my own photographs and layouts, I have done this to complement them and show just how well the brand does advertise. I have really enjoyed the making of this newspaper and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Aimee Parker

Contents The 201- Ryan

pg 3

Yoga Pants- Hollie

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Founder About Controversy

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The Tri-blends- Anne

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Photographer- Thomas Alleman

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Fluffy time- Barney

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Dogs Dinner Why Helvetica

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Self Portrait- Gary

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Sexy has no expiry date

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In with the new- Anne

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Good Morning- Hollie

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Most controversial

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About American Apparel is a Los Angeles, California based clothing manufacturer, distributor, and retailer in the United States. It is a vertically integrated clothing manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer that also performs its own design, advertising, and marketing. It is best known for making basic, solidcolor cotton knitwear such as T-shirts and underwear, but in recent years it has expanded—to include leggings, leotards and vintage clothing

Founder The founder of American Apparel is Dov Charney, he started the brand at the age of 20.

As a fashion entrepreneur, he’s known for a passion for simple basic clothing and unusual leadership style, which includes being involved in nearly every part of the business process from design, manufacturing, and marketing.

At American Apparel, Charney pioneered the Made in USA sweatshop-free model of fair wages and a refusal to outsource manufacturing. Charney has also been associated with several controversial lawsuits, including a $10M lawsuit from film director Woody Allen and sexual harassment lawsuits involving ex-employees.

The Los Angeles Times named him as one of the Top 100 powerful people in Southern California and in 2009, he was nominated as a Time 100 finalist

by Time magazine.

Controversy American Apparel designs, creates and prints its own advertisements. The company is known for its provocative and controversial advertising campaigns, which is largely the inspiration of the company CEO Dov Charney. According to Adage, American Apparel’s advertising ‘telegraphs the brand’ from person to person Their print campaigns are widely considered to be some of the best in the industry. The sexually charged advertising has been criticized, but has also been lauded for honesty and lack of airbrushing.

Sasha Grey American Apparel Advert The company has also used pornographic actors in some of its ads including Lauren Phoenix, Charlotte Stokely, Sasha Grey and Faye Reagan.

Some of the company's other ads, which feature nudity or sexual themes, have been banned by various advertising authorities. In 2009, an American Apparel ad which appeared in VICE Magazine was banned in the UK, because the image "could be seen to sexualise a model who appears to be a child". While the model was 23 at the time, it was said the ad had the potential to "widely offend" people. In one image the woman's nipple was partially exposed. American Apparel complied with this ruling. American Apparel also came under fire for a 2014 ad for mini-skirts, which featured a model bending over so that her underwear was prominently exposed. In 2013, the company released an ad in which the model lay on a bed with her feet up in the air without wearing pants. The company also released an ad in which a model posed in a series of photos focused on her crotch, in which her face was not seen. The UK Advertising Standards Authority criticized the ad for being "voyeuristic," and "vulnerable."

Banned American Apparel Advert 2014 in UK

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Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that American Apparel ads are effective in eliciting a reaction. They’re bold and vaguely pornographic, and the company even prides itself on using its own employees as amateur models. But what if we went beyond looking at the images alone? That’s what photographer Thomas Alleman dove into with his new project, “The American Apparel.” After photographing the streets of Los Angeles for years, Alleman— whose work has appeared in Harper’s, TIME, and U.S. News—was struck one day by the way an AA billboard looked juxtaposed with his urban environs. And so a series began, challenging the ads by placing them in a framework that transforms them to look a bit dystopian, ridiculous—and even a little silly.

Thomas Alleman One afternoon in 2011 I drove past an auto repair shop in East Hollywood, and noticed a really striking juxtaposition above their building: four TV satellite dishes were installed in a neat line right next to one of those American Apparel billboards, which showed four women in a similarly neat line, all doing some bizarre, yoga-style stretch, wearing leotards.

Like most Los Angelenos, I’d seen those AA billboards a million times, but had never given them a second thought, and certainly hadn’t considered photographing them. One of the conventions that most mature photographers adhere to is that there’s no benefit or wisdom or glory in shooting someone else’s art. However, that confluence of billboard design and real world happenstance seemed too cool to pass up.

The commodification of women’s bodies especially very young women is one of the Top Five worst and weirdest things about our hard-hearted culture. And American Apparel is clearly a big-ass participant in all that, without doubt. But they didn’t create this state of-play there are many other competitors on the field, some even darker. They simply excel at the game, in a very contemporary way that’s relentless and unapologetic and kind of cutting edge, for better or worse.

American Apparel famously claims that when they’re not hiring porn stars for their sessions, they use young women from the company or the neighbourhood, and that’s apparent in many of the images. Indeed, many of those amateurs look startlingly plain, almost anti-glam. And their poses are usually pretty awkward, sometimes even bizarre. In other words, those amateurs are allowed to be—or encouraged or directed to be—really amateur. And, when an amateur is in front of the camera, the photography itself becomes correspondingly unsophisticated: the light is flat, the backgrounds are simply white, and the pictures are often black and white.

It’s as if those pictures of gawky teenagers were made by a cousin or uncle, on the sly, down in the basement with crude equipment. our skin, Thomas Alleman- Elle Magazine.

Above are the images from Thomas Alleman, I really like how he has caputed LA in all its glory and incopriated American Apparels adverts as inspiration. I like the angle of the photograph with the white van, however the image with the man on the bike is my favourite as the advert fits in so well and looks so real.

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Dogs Dinner American Apparel introduced a line of clothing for dogs in 2012 and has since expanded the collection, which includes canine wardrobe items such as the classic hoodie and this neon pink “dragon dogzilla” costume.

The now-defunct culture website Hipster Runoff once made a point of covering American Apparel’s every move and gave context to the company’s decision, explaining, “The hoodie is often worn by swaggy teens, emos, pokemones, and cool dads who aren’t wearing a cardigan. But now the hoodie is officially a dogwave fashion statement.”

Why Helvetica?

Helvetica font is the most widely used font all over the world and now it has become a subject of its own movie. Every font has its own characteristic that it represents and therefore fonts should be selected carefully in order to convey the right message and create the right impression. The relevance of Helvetica font in design through the years appears invincible. You can say that it is the most recognizable font that is going to stay for years because of its multitude of styles and versions. It is one of those typefaces that can never be dwindled down.

One of the reasons American Apparel advertisements are so well recognised is the use of Helvetica. They use Helvetica Neue Heavy in their logo and on the titles of their adverts, the brand is very consistent and minimal and it works so well.

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Sexy has no expiry date To say that American Apparel campaigns love to provoke would be an understatement. In the 15 plus years that the company has been around, the brand’s identity has become inextricably intertwined with vaguely ‘70s porn-ish images of barely legal barefaced girls in various states of undress and straddle poses.

But after 15 years of pretty young things staring seductively into the camera wearing nothing but some combination of bras, tube socks, and gold lamé, how to shake things up?

Enter Jacky O’Shaughnessy, American Apparel’s newest model. In her latest ad for the brand she wears lace lingerie and holds one leg up extended over her head. It sounds like more of the same, only O’Shaughnessy is 62.

“I was game the whole time,” O’Shaughnessy said of the latest campaign shots.

“I’m comfortable. I don’t feel that any of this is inappropriate. When people talk about age appropriate hairstyles, and age appropriate dressing, well, whose age?

And who are you?”

Her couldn’t-care-less attitude comes across in the photos. It’s a kind of confidence that only comes with age. “[When] I was handed the lace underwear, it was like, yeah, sure, let me have it,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Want me to sit on this stool? Fine. Legs in the air? Great, lets go.” She admits that it wasn’t always that easy to say “let’s go” though. “Like anyone, I have had aspects of my body that I have been not pleased with since I was 13,” O’Shaughnessy admits. “When I grew up, the models of my day were Veruschka, Twiggy, and I remember very clearly a shot of Diana Ross and she was in a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt and she was absolutely skeletal. And I remember thinking ‘Oh, I want to look like that, I don’t want an ounce of fat on my body.’”

“Personally, I don’t want anyone selling me lace underwear in weird vaginashowing poses in what looks like a poorly painted low-rent apartment in Chicago.

This lady is gorgeous, but there are plenty of reasons to be uncomfortable with the underwear photos that aren’t just about ageism.” An opinion of Hanna MarieProgramming Chair at Graduate Student Organization The gentleman on the left is Morris Charney, the farther of Dov Charney, he was used as an American Apparel advert in June 2007. On the left hand page I have replicated this photo with my Dad, I like how different this advert is and doesnt show the normal teenage girl, but some classic vintage fashion.

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1

2

The Advertising Standards Authority claims a complainant stated that the ads made the models appear "vulnerable" due to their positions.

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3

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Most Controversial 1 & 2 - The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority has demanded that two ads for American Apparel which appear on the company’s web site “must not appear again in their current form.”

The ban stemmed from a single complaint by an unnamed woman who alleged the ads were “offensive, because she believed it was overtly sexual.”

U.K. bans ads so prolifically that companies are almost certainly creating ads in hopes the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) bans them, and then reaping the reward of publicity online as a result.

Many of American Apparel adverts have been banned in the UK due to the ASA as they are very strict, however in many other European countries allow all of their adverts.

3&4 - Here are another two adverts that can’t be shown in the UK but in other countries. I personally think that these are two of the worst adverts that American Apparel have shown. The ‘Now Open’ ad is so sexual it makes you feel rude looking at it, and the ‘Hello, Meet Steffi’ advert just looks pornagraphic in all the wrong ways, yes it grabs your attention, but surely American Apparel should be drawing more attention to the models colthes and not their bodies.

Take some time to veiw the American Apparel advertising archive on http://www.americanapparel.net/presscenter/adarchive/ taking you through every advert that American Apparel have produced from 1995-2009, it is interesting to view how the brand has changed.