Bittersweet Infamy - #69 - Made in America

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Taylor tells Josie about the rise and fall of the hippest brand of the '00s: American Apparel. Plus: a menagerie of dolphin midwives and feral zombie hogs—but which ones are actually real?

Welcome to Bitter Sweden. I'm Taylor Basso and I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and indeed. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter and the sweet. We're going to start off with a little deception rodeo, right? Fact or fiction? Yes, we are. I'm just making sure that I did the assignment. I'm interested to see what you come up with because you kind of got your knuckles wrapped the last time. I felt I had to edit that episode so I heard it over and over. Just a shitting on you over and over for your wimpy lie. It influenced how I came to this but I'm also like, it might be too deep in me. I hope you lied with your full chest this time. That's what the judges, that's

what Paula and Randy and Simon want to see. Yeah. And Cara and Ellen, all those other people who are on there for two seasons. It just hits a little different considering how to the bone. Lucia came out last episode with my 97% weakass.org. She hadn't even decided yet if it was a lie. She just wanted it known that if it is a lie, it's a shitty flimsy one. Yeah. And to be clear everyone, what we're talking about is at the beginning of the show in April, we do a fact or fiction minfamous. One of the stories Josie's about to tell me is true. One is not, one is a lie. And I and you at home, if you'd like, need to guess the truth. So let me tell you another lie or maybe it's the truth. Who knows? Today I bring you, Taylor, a theme, an inadvertent theme.

Good. Let's enter the animal kingdom. Let's take- That was all elephant. That was all one elephant noise. I know. Yeah, it took me a little bit but I got there. Me too. We're gonna explore some wacky, wacky animal hijinks. See which one is true. Okay, I love that. Cheeky monkeys. No monkeys, unfortunately. At least- I can't have them all, can you? Not that I know of. We're gonna start with an animal that a friend of the podcast has been here

before. The dolphin, the majestic, the friendly, the humble, the English speaking. If we get our shit together and refine our curriculum, yeah. Yes, yes. Long known for their intelligence, their playfulness. Long nosed. Long nosed. Oh, you're sharp. I am, like a dolphin's nose. They're playful. They're known just for general good vibes all around. Yeah. There's been a long tendency to connect with dolphins to release-

to relieve stress in kind of overwhelming situations, a little animal therapy vibe. Yeah. But Taylor, did you know that there's considering this very friendly behavior and association that humans have with dolphins, there's a burgeoning interest in having dolphins around during pregnancy and even acting as midwives during childbirth. During human childbirth, not the dolphin. Okay. Known as dolphin assisted births. Dab?

You're right. Yeah, yeah. Those moms be dabbing. It markets itself. Dabbing dolphins, folks. You'll be wondering how we weren't already doing it. Water births are and have been for millennia a popular technique for natural childbirth. Just shoot it out into the water. Exactly. If you're connected to the umbilical cord, you can stay down there for a little while. But adding sea water and dolphins to the mix can apparently, accordingly, create a playful, relaxing birth experience that is beneficial to both the mother and the baby. In the 90s, there were a string of some 30 births that took place in the Red Sea in the

presence of dolphins. These happened under the watchful eye of quote unquote pioneering Russian midwife, Igor Charkovsky, who apparently is a very in demand midwife among Israelis, hence the Red Sea situation. The babies that were birthed in the Red Sea among the dolphins there developed much faster than babies who were born in hospitals, according to Charkovsky himself. They were faster to smile, walk, talk. They had very creative tendencies. They had a high rate of ambidexterity, so being able to use both of their hands. Many of these children who were born among the dolphins were reported to speak quote unquote speak their first words as clicks and whistles. Yes. See, we should be learning dolphin, not the other way around.

Mm hmm. Yeah, they are apparently much better teachers if these little baby kiddos are doing it. You got to get them before, you know, when you're setting up a computer and and they let you choose your language at the beginning, but they're like, listen, you only can do this once. We delete the rest of the info. Yeah, this is that. Yeah, but with people and dolphins under the guidance of Charkovsky, the pioneering Russian midwife, research assistants and doctors have studied these long term effects of dolphin assisted births. And one sex doctor, a doctor, Martha, who has spent 20 years researching childbirths, she believes that dolphins can help a woman deliver with almost no pain by passing underwater sonar messages of support. So like

Yeah, we're talking exactly in so many words and so many squeaks and clicks. Yes. Yeah. One of the mothers who delivered in the Red Sea, her name is Sarah Evans, and she said of her experience, this is a quote, giving birth in the Red Sea with the dolphins was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I was in complete control of the situation and didn't feel under any pressure to perform as you do in a hospital with the doctors and nurses milling about. It happened so quickly and I wasn't in any pain. The dolphins came close but not too close. It felt like they wanted their presence to be known, but they didn't want to be too intrusive. Like a good midwife. Like a good midwife. Yeah. I'm just popping in to see if you need some towels.

Support, support. And to like bat an inflatable ball. Yeah. Of course, there are some concerns with giving birth among wild animals. Is that so? Yeah. Just let him gnaw off the umbilical cord, huh? That's a concern. It's a concern. There has the potential to be a lot of blood in the water. That's no good. Doesn't that attract sharks? There's a concern there. And as we know from that one episode of King of the Hill, when Hank is pushed into the dolphin tank, do you remember that? Yeah, horny, horny dolphins. And the dolphin starts to mate with him. Do I remember that? Of course. Influential. More than there has been midwife situations with dolphins, there's been a lot more research and experience of pregnant women swimming with dolphins. So not giving birth

with them in attendance, but rather like chilling and vibing and like floating, hanging with the dolphins. And apparently they're very receptive to pregnant women. They like sense it and they're like, you chill? You good? Need anything? Okay. But the concerns don't only deal with the wildlife. There's also concerns of bacteria in the water and how that might create infections for the little baby or the mum. There hasn't been a very big conventional push for dolphin assisted births, as you might have expected. But for those who are interested in natural childbirth and this extra little extinction of employing dolphins to have at your side during this experience, it's out there. It is there and available. Where are we at on dolphin assisted suicide?

Listen. Yeah. No, you're right. Listen. This is your fault somehow. This is my fault. I know. Somehow. I haven't decided how I haven't come up with a way yet, but it will be your fault. Spoiler when I decide. You did do this. Yeah, that's the concern is that your dolphin assisted birth might turn into a dolphin assisted death. Oh no, a DAD. Yeah. Dads. Bad dad. And now we're going to move a little closer to a little closer to my home in Texas. And we're going to talk about feral hogs. Classic problem. I have had some experiences with feral hogs after having this Right Errors presidency. I have this opportunity to visit a site just south of Houston and just kind of like hang around and walk through this coastal prairie reserve and write about it. But

on this coastal prairie reserve, there are also a shit ton of invasive feral hogs. They're fucking everywhere. They're very cute. The little ones are fucking adorable, but they can be extremely aggressive. And they're pretty scary. There are about six million feral hogs in the US. And when I mean feral, you could say wild hogs, but feral implies this like invasive nature, the sense that they're not wanted. And that is definitely the case. Six million across the US and three million of them are in Texas. So there is a very serious problem with these hogs in this state. One part of that is that Texas is quite large. So like landmass is going to support more blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Everything's bigger in Texas, including the feral hog problem. Yes, exactly. Thank you. Thank

you. That's a good bumper sticker. So feral hogs, they can be aggressive. Doesn't mean that they're always aggressive, but they can be. And they are very large animals. They can reach up to 300 pounds. Dang. Yeah. Which you're like, okay, like a big cuddly pig who's like just... No, no. You know, like trudging around. They trudge, but they can also reach up to running speeds of 30 miles per hour. Yeah, that's the thing. I don't know where you're getting this. Oh, a 300-pound feral hog. Who says that? I don't know. I'm just trying to paint a picture here and then switch it. The male hogs have tusks that they use to gore and that it can be very, very aggressive with those in particular. And those can be fatal gorengs. I know you've seen Hunt for the Wilder people,

because I watched it with you. You remember when the dog got it? Oh, yeah. I forgotten that. I was crying so hard at the beginning of that movie. That's a good movie, though. I love that movie. Yeah, one of my faves. So even if their attacks are not fatal, they do carry deadly diseases that can be transmitted through an attack. Very infectious, very bad, very gross. But that also means that you can't eat their meat either. So if you were thinking of 300 pounds of hog dinner, then I got some bad news. Bacon tonight, baby. No, no, unless you want diseased bacon tonight. Harder to market that. Yeah, exactly. Typically, they eat grubs in the ground, so they root their little snoots into the ground and uproot any plants that are there. And so what it pretty much looks like

when they've been somewhere is it's just mud. It's just packs of mud. But that means that crops and any property, even foundations, they can uproot foundations, ruin props. And if you can imagine 6 million of them, it's a lot of damage. Reportedly, there's millions and millions of dollars of damage that they caused to property and crops. So it's a huge issue. And one of the ways that Texas has approached it is they have lifted all hunting regulation on feral hogs. Purge season. Yeah, you do not, it's open season, you do not need a permit. This, however, creates a terrible feedback loop where because you can hunt them at any and all times, people have devised all these ways to get rid of feral hogs. And in that process, it has become like a very lucrative and fun

hunting industry. So to give you an example, people hunt feral hogs from hot air balloons. They track them with drones. They use explosives to blow them up. So it's this very weird feedback loop where it's like, let's kill them all. Oh, wait, the killing's kind of fun. Let's like get a few on the property and like, oh, shit, but they breed faster than they can be killed. It's a very Texas feedback loop too, I feel. But another element that is uniquely Texan, I think really, things in rural Texas were getting really out of control in about the mid 80s with the hog population, especially in East Texas. The wise wise government in all of its wisdom, specifically the Texas commissioner of agricultural Sid Miller, decided that he would

do or he would issue farmers a specialized poison that would take down these 300 pound animals. And his plan was to get it across all of rural Texas, anywhere where there would be issues with feral hogs. But before they could get that passed, he did a test in a small town in East Texas, funnily enough, called Wilbur, Texas. Wilbur, of course, being the name of the pig in Charlotte's Web. From Charlotte's Web, yeah. I read that and I was like, uh, excuse me? So I don't know if Sid was on that and he was like, I got this town, this one here. But who knows? The poison, as you can imagine, 300 pound animals, this is some pretty strong poison, strong stuff. Yeah. Colloquially, it's known as kaput. Also, this poison causes a terrible death.

Animals apparently bleed out of every orifice once they've ingested it. Oh, no. Slow, painful. Oh, kaput. Yeah. But it's even worse than that. So in this small test town of Wilbur, Texas, on the east side of the state, the farmers were kind of wary of using this poison, kaput. There's a lot of different reports. The government says that the farmers failed to follow the directions carefully enough and they did not use enough of the poison. And the farmers claim that they used exactly what was, they followed the directions to the tee and gave as much as they were allotted. Well, you can imagine too, like if I were a farmer, I'd be pretty hesitant to like overdo on the poison because it's such heavy stuff. If I'm a farmer in Texas in the 80s,

I'm like, I'm the subject of God's chosen country. That's gas up. Fair enough. Instead of killing the hogs, the hogs would consume the poison in the feed that the farmers were instructed to put out. Later, the farmers would find these hogs dead in their fields. So like the hogs would just kind of like stop in their tracks and like, yeah. But they were not completely dead. Oh, no. 300 pound feral zombie hogs screaming in agony as they bleed out of every orifice and die in agonizing death. Yeah, Taylor nailed it. Wow. Is that what we're talking about? Oh, no. That's the title of this segment. Oh, no. That's awful. One farmer by the name of Ralph Palick, he's quoted as saying, I got out of my truck because I figured this thing

was deader than a doornail, especially when I got up close and saw him with blood coming out of his eyes. But all of a sudden, that dead thing popped right up and charged at me. I kid you not, it was like a zombie movie. Zombie feral zombie hogs. Luckily, Ralph was not injured. He had a shotgun with him and he took care of what he needed to take care of. I was pulling for the hog. Many of the other farmers who were involved with the test, farmers and ranchers reported that their hogs were also playing dead and arising like zombies when provoked. So when somebody came up on them. Yeah. Jesse Phyllis, another farmer in the area, says the hogs were dropping like flies only to then run around her property with blood seeping from their eyes. It's tough. You don't want them

to do that. The site was so alarming and in the end, obviously so ineffective at eradicating the hogs. It's a new problem. Yes. Right? Another zombie. We've got zombie hogs. That the Texas Commission for Agriculture did not deploy the poison statewide and they went back to square one, which is still where we are with it. There is no, I mean, I guess your AR 15, right? 30 to 50 feral hogs. Yeah. Wilbur Town Council, the town of Wilbur, settled out of court with agricultural commission to get funds to clean up the remnants of the poison used. As you can imagine, that was a very expensive process. But also the town of Wilbur has a really nice high school football stadium. Their mascot, the wild hogs. Beauty. And yeah, they're pictured with blood streaming from their

eyes. That would be a little too much. All right, my dude. Two stories. Two stories. One of them's stories. Actually, I fooled you. They're both real. Wow. If only. I like that a lot. I feel very warmed up from that. Thank you. As a good, infamous should. Yeah. Animal therapy, baby. It gets you through. Animal therapy. Very important. This can't get to a world where we're letting dolphins midwife our babies, I think. It's hard. Yeah. What world do you want to live in? Where are we? Where are we? Zombie hogs. Texas zombie hogs nonetheless. Texas zombie hogs. I can see it being a slow day on the old writing residency and you spot a little hog out of the corner of your eye and you're like, that'll do. I can see that. Oh, isn't that what the farmer says to babe? That'll

do. That'll do, Peg. And then I can also see my suspicion is that maybe it's good for dolphins to be involved with a human birth, but we're not having a duel of the babies just yet, so that's what I'm going to go with. I'm going to say that number one was the lie. Are you sure? Yes. The dolphins are true. There is such a thing as dolphin-assisted births. This is so stupid. Why? The dolphins got me again. There are many ways to bring life into the world and this is just another one of them. Another beautiful way assisted by dolphins. Yeah. The feral hogs, then. Explain how did you pull off the magic trick? How did that lie work? So, feral hogs, they are a problem, a huge problem in Texas. There is a feedback loop of the hunting

industry thinking it's so fun and then like, oh, we have a hard problem. You know the parts that were the wicked pedia facts get to the part with the zombies. Oh, the zombies is completely made up. Damn it. It was good. That was good. That poison idea was not, though. Sid Miller, the commissioner of agriculture at the state of Texas, was like, hey, let's get this highly lethal poison out there and that'll down these animals. And all the farmers were like, excuse me, I also have like cows and domesticated pigs and dogs and horses. I don't want them to touch that shit. That stuff, you have to, when you dispose of it, you have to bury it 18 inches under the ground. And it's just like, it's a very intense solution that would probably cause a lot more damage than

help. If that's killing 300 pounds a hog, what is it going to do to the wheat that you're growing or the pecans that you're growing or... I should have considered all these things. So you scaled back to like 75% true 25% lie. That's what I did. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I... That's fair. That's progress. See, that's what I mean. It's like, I think it's like in me. It's in me, dude. That's how I write fiction. Would you ask Picasso to paint a van Gogh? Maybe. There is no Wilbur, Texas too. I made that up. It was good. It was convincing. I tried to add more fake things. No, no, it was good. It was even Lucia would have to admit it was an improvement.

I'll check in with her. I'll be like, did you listen? What's my grade now? You know what? I stand by how I did this one. I still think the dolphin thing sounds fake. I think some things just sound fake. Yeah. It's definitely one of those things where like it is not a majority situation. It's a very like niche mommy fog situation. So we haven't reached 50% of births or dolphin assisted yet. Oh, wow. Do you know where this story came from? My brother devoted listener to the podcast. Pancho saw this article and he sent it to me. He just texted it out of the blue and I was like, oh, this is good. This is very good. Good material. Good material. Crowd sourced.

We haven't even talked about how this is episode 69. I know. Nice one. Nice one. Good one. Since it's episode 69, nice one. Are you ready to jump in or do you need to pee? I'm good. Let's jump. Let's go. It's 69, baby. You can't. You can't hesitate with 69. You can't pee while you're 69. You'll make a big mess. Okay. Okay. Okay. Who said that? Not me. Dainty. Demir. I'm a lady. No piss play jokes for me. So obviously as it is episode 69, I wouldn't let the occasion go unacknowledged, unthemed. For our racy 69th episode, I want to take you behind the rise and fall. Sorry. Actually, it doesn't quite work for 69 really. There's no behind.

I will take you behind the rise and fall of an iconic and provocative retailer that embraced sex both in front of the camera and behind it. JC Penney? I don't know. It is JC Penney. The JC stands for jacked cock. We need to get to this episode. Imagine if you will, a simpler time. You wake up to your flip phone blasting the newest Distell song or maybe your alarmist Kate Nash or the Go team or something you heard on an iPod commercial or an episode of Crazy Anatomy. The Love Train. Perfect. You used to get your culture fixed from Myspace but you've moved on to more sophisticated fare like Vice, Gawker, and television without pity. I'm wearing all American apparel. Are you? Oh,

shit. Oh, shit. You know, Mitchell used to work there. Let me finish my intro and we'll get all into it. Let's go. Mitchell working in American apparel is the funniest thing I can imagine from the jump, but we'll get there. We'll get there. You greet bad news with phrases like FML and epic fail. You can't see the text of Stephanie Meyers, Magnum Opus breaking dawn through your ladder shades. We are in the era of Deviantart and Newgrounds and Suicide Girls of Blackberries and Bacon Mania and Chuck Norris jokes of Little Miss Sunshine and 500 Days of Summer. We're watching Diablo Cody movies and reality shows set in Orange County. We are captivated by Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin. We are. We're taking no hate photos with our mouths

taped shut. We are not apologizing for party rocking yet. It's the late 2000s. Donald Trump is just a game show host and life is good. Wow. Wow. I'm going to slow clap on that one because yeah. Thank you. You really like, you brought me back. I don't, I don't even know what to say. I feel young again. My wrinkles have D wronged. Mm hmm. Slight little note here. So my niece is 12 and this is probably a year ago. She was like 11 and my mom still has like an iPod mini and my niece picked it up and I was like, do you know what that is? She's looking at it kind of like, and she's like, yeah, yeah, I know. It's an iPod. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it is. I think she kind of looks at it some more and she's like, where does the music come out of? And I'm like,

where do you keep the music in this piece of garbage? But it's I guess she doesn't like really recognize a headphone jack anymore. I don't know. They've retired those. So what's going on in fashion in Canada and the U.S. Okay, we are firmly entrenched in the era of the hipster, whether this is the graphic teed, Seth Cohen knockoff of the early decade or the tatted up plaid shirted urban lumberjacks that came in his wake. For the boys, stashes and beards are back for the first time since the 70s. Give or take a grunge era. Very exciting. Very venex reveal tantalizing chest hair. So deep. So deep genes are dick smashingly tight for girls. Maybe you had a little zoidation

alfringes, a knit, two or a beanie. I did baby. Remember my baby banks? You were there. I remember baby banks. I was a little late, but that's okay. Do you remember my deep venex and tantalizing chest hair? Yeah, I remember that purple one you had. It was like a belly button. That bitch went to the navel. That was like a J-Lo shirt. Rang your belly. Yep. You might have a quirky floral dress or a tattoo of a mustache on the inside of your finger. So clever. Across the board. Ironically ugly glasses frames are in. Cardigans are big. We are rocking canvas shoes and Doc Martin boots. We are hanging out in rooms with bare bulbs and hardwood floors drinking PBR out of repurposed jam jars and smoking American spirits and talking to each

other about vinyl. We are getting thigh tattoos of bears. We are wearing keffia, even if we are white. Especially if we are white. And everyone, or at least everyone, hip is shopping at former Mitchell Collins employer, American Apparel. Josie, when I say that name, American Apparel. Look at you. She's pumping her fists with joy. Okay. You held on. You got there. You got there. What a round 20. Oh, God. You had a question, but I interrupted you with my fist. When I say American Apparel, what does that recall to you? What are the cultural memories that you have associated with this? Made in downtown LA. That was always its little thing.

You're a Cali girl too, so that will have held particular weight there. Yeah. And that maybe that didn't hit the American market as hard, but that was a big thing for the advertising in the US was like, this is American made. Don't mess around with China. Don't mess around with Walmart. It looks all the same, but ours is better. And that's why it's $30 and not five. So I remember it being extremely expensive, especially for my little high school budget. But I also remember there was an American Apparel on Garnett and Fanguel in Pacific Beach. And Pacific Beach was the cool place to go. Kind of hip, a little dingy around the edges, but your American spirits were super welcome down there. And you would walk in.

No filter, no problem. Yeah. Come on in. Smoke is fine. And you would walk into the store and everything would be organized by color and very few patterns. It was all solid blocks of color. And it was like, oh my gosh, it's so simple and clean. How did they think of this? It's so smart. And I still have some of the items that I bought in high school. I have an American Apparel jacket. It's black lemay. I love it. I still wear it sometimes. It's not, it has no insulation. It's very thin. It's a jacket for when you want to look cute and nothing else. Yeah, it's there. Yeah, I have a red pocket skirt. I have a black Henley that I still wear all the time. And oh, leggings. I have some leggings. They were all about the leggings in American

Apparel. The leggings were really, really big. Yeah. And I just remember thinking it was so cool how simple and no insignias and they don't need to tell people. But those hoodies were iconic. Oh yeah, the white zipper purple hoodie. Yes, yes. A solid block color with the white. I knew at least two people who had that. Oh yeah, my acting team. We were like, let's get instead of sweaters, let's get vests. Let's get hooded zipper vests and put acting workshop on the back. So we did. Did you? Oh yeah, we did. Zippered hoodie never had a better decade than the 2000s, man. It's still Jason Baddye. Having said all of that, do you remember anything about, do you remember this label of the hipster and how by the end of hipster dumb it just came

to mean someone I don't like, even though at the beginning it started off being very narrow about a very specific type of person? Like we would have been clocked as hipsters back in the day. You and me both. Oh, totally. But I think a tenet of being a hipster is that you don't want to be known as a hipster too. But everyone wants to be so like, it's I feel like especially then it was very much a thing of like, how cool can you be without seeming to put in the effort? Okay, but was that how old we were? Was that the era or was that how old is that like your like late teens, early 20s? That is true. But that's who identity is marketed to, right? That's true. When they say, oh, you want to be the girl in the American apparel ad, who's in the ads?

How old are the people in the ads? Oh, questionably, like 13. Yeah. Yes. So actually, on that note, that was going to be my next question anyway. Okay, yeah, I was going to bring that up too. So what do you remember about American apparel advertising? That was another thing that I would see and be like, whoa, that's cool, because that's a normal person. Really? They were models who were never really like done up with any makeup. They always had kind of like a fresh, fresh look, probably because they were 13, but very, very young. And it wasn't kind of in the same way that the clothing didn't have any labels. Typically, the models weren't wearing a lot of clothes. So it would be like a girl with one of those zipper hoodies, but not zipped and nothing else.

And she'd be like laying on the ground or, you know, some very suggestive position that you really didn't see in a lot of other advertising. And it was pretty aggressive. And even though I thought American apparel was pretty cool, I was kind of like, that's a lot. It was definitely a lot. I feel like they were almost able to, by being such a notionally progressive, forward thinking company, they were almost able to spin their advertising as like, because it was supposedly, you know, real girls, real employees, which of course we'll find out through the course of this story that that wasn't necessarily always the case. But because that's how they positioned it, they were almost able to spin it as this kind of empowering feminist thing.

Yeah, I'm wearing American apparel right now. What are you wearing? My leggings. How do we, how do we steal the look? How do we get Josie's look? Okay, so I yelled into the mic leggings. I am wearing a printed dress that is too short, so it looks like a shirt. Peg Bundy dress, folks. Okay, yeah. And it's too short to wear as just a top. So I always have to wear it with either shorts or leggings. And I haven't done anything with my leg hair in about six months. So it's leggings today. Yeah, a pretty good staple. They're a pretty good basic. Though I think these leggings, I, and we'll probably, of course, get to this, but I think I bought them from American Apparel when they were doing like a

bankrupt sale. So. Yep. We will be getting to that one. Okay. Which bankruptcy? Ooh. American Apparel is a clothing brand known at the turn of the millennium for its mix of comfy basics in a variety of colors and throwback retro fashion pieces all proudly made sweatshop free in the US of A. That's right, sweatshop free. As Josie said, in a very iconic in the area downtown LA factory. Some of its more iconic pieces included its colorful men's Y front brief underwear, which everybody knocked off. Yeah. All kinds of leggings. They did like a gold LeMay disco. They did a metallics era. Yeah. And of course, as Josie mentioned, the iconic one color hoodie with the white zipper. Everybody I knew had it in purple, but it came in other

colors. I'm so stoked you're telling this story. Thank you. I'm stoked to be telling it. American Apparel is also known for its minimalist branding, including the iconic Helvetica text. Oh, yeah. And its borderline pornographic advertisements featuring beautiful, unphotoshopped women, supposedly exhibitionistic American Apparel employees with an emphasis on simulating reality. And probably most importantly, they were always photographed as though they were in the middle of a sexual encounter with you, the viewer. These ads truly were the most literal embodiment of the male gaze I've ever seen. And I don't even mean that as a diss, just as a fact. If you are having trouble understanding the concept of the male gaze,

look at American Apparel advertisements. It's one to one. That's yeah. And why don't we look at some American Apparel advertisements? Quick heads up because it concerns the photos we're about to see as well as the rest of the episode. We are going to be talking about sex, including descriptions of sexual abuse and assault throughout the episode, as well as a little bit of racism. So stay frosty out there. And we'll post these in the gallery on our Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. So I see a young, smooth-skinned young woman, and she's lying in bed. She has, I can't see a lot of the clothing, but I think it might be like a bikini top on or a halter.

Mainly I see her shoulder and a side of her face. She's like bunched up over a pillow. But lying next to her is a mustachioed man with large aviator glasses, aviator frame glasses. And it looks like he's maybe holding the camera above them. They're obviously lying in bed together. And that is Charney, the CEO. Oh, you know, dirty dove. Well, I know, but it also says here, NAD featuring Charney himself alongside a young model. So yes, that is Dove Charney. He is the protagonist, question mark of today's story. Our leading man for better or worse. And he actually appears in this next ad as well. Is it playtime? Yeah, it's playtime.

Okay, this is again another on a white sheeted bed. That's the other one was all white sheets. It's taken from the perspective of a man, male gaze, laying down in bed. He has the camera at his face and it's going down. What seems like it might be a young woman is straddling him in a pair of black or navy blue underwear. He's not wearing a shirt. He's wearing blue, maybe like jogging shorts and definitely has like half masked maybe. Yeah, visible chubbage happening. Visible chubbage. Her hands are on his like bare stomach and chest. And I believe this is Dove Charney as well. I'm not 100, but I think it's him. Okay, that makes sense. He has some chest hair and some like belly hair. She's completely hairless.

Girls don't grow hair. You want to take these legs off? You want to see? Okay, do you want to hit me with advertising number three? This ad has the text now open next to another young girl laying in a bed. She has like a romper singlet on, but it doesn't have shorts. It's like a, I don't know what you would call that. It sure doesn't. It's like a bathing, it looks like a cloth bathing suit almost full one piece, you know? Her arms are up by her head. She's looking directly at the camera. Her knees are up, I'd say, so that you are looking directly at her crotch and you see how the piece of clothing she has is like revealing her inner thighs. You see directly like inner thigh, only her like

coochie is covered by the cloth. Very gynecological kind of pose almost. Yeah, especially paired with the words now open because her legs are spread wide open. We're not trafficking in subtlety here. No. Again, I'll point out no hair, no pubic hair, no armpit hair, no leg hair. It's not like a typical beauty image because there's like, you see the texture of her skin and her thighs and like a little bit of fat. I think it's more that you just don't usually see that image beyond porn, so. All right, and here is the last image. It has the title schools out, period. Helmetica. And it is a young girl with a short black skirt like a school skirt kind of vibe. She's laying on a bed, she's looking directly at the camera

very, very young obviously because they're trying to play at the school girl vibe on that one. Yeah, they want her to appear young and she does. So what do you think? I've showed you a little roundup here. What did you think looking at them now and what did you think then? I don't know, it's making me a little sad because when I was that young and seeing these, I think I was more struck with like, whoa, you can see skin texture. Isn't that cool? Isn't that liberating? And you know, like this is what it looks, this is what it means to look real and I want to look real. Which obviously like looking at those photographs now, like they're very staged and the lack of body hair on the women too is very like that's kind of

pointing to me as well. It's pointed to me and they're also just extremely suggestive. They're very, very sexualized and they're all on the majority of them even as I was flipping through around beds. White sheets, yeah. I didn't notice it until you pointed it out but they're all on white sheets. All on white sheets, yeah. I have to say too, we're imputing 20 years of progress backwards in terms of the way that not just beauty standards but also the way that bodies are depicted in media. Obviously social media is a deeply imperfect way to perceive bodies but it's still democratized in a way that let's say the magazines of the 90s weren't. So when you compare American apparel to the magazines of the 90s, no shit, it looks better. Yeah. It's not only,

at least for me, I'll speak for myself, it's not only 20 years of like changed fashions and changed relationship to advertisement and you know, the male gaze and whatever. I'm also just like 20 years longer in my body and kind of like recognizing that like, yeah, that's that thing but that's not what I have or do or care about. What they're selling me is fake. They're curating a reality that never existed and so on. Yeah, they are selling something and I don't need to buy everything so, bye. And we will come to learn that not only is it a fake reality but the circumstances under which the images were conceived was quite gross. Right, yeah. The story of American apparel starts ironically with a Canadian. That's right, dude.

Dov Charney is born in Montreal in 1969, a member of the city's large Jewish community. His mother is an artist and his father is an architect. His grandparents work in the garment industry. His bubby stresses the importance of paying your workers fairly and this sense of justice and wages really follows Dov as he grows up. Dov is a hyperactive and eccentric child, getting into trouble at school and flouting all kinds of social norms. He writes his own newspaper at age 11 called The What's Up with articles about hard-hitting subjects like nuclear power and hashish. A born hustler, he moves on to selling TSKT. They're gonna say a born hipster. I was like, yeah. That too, that too. A born hustler, he moves on to selling TSKDA90 cassette tapes,

then fake glasses, which I had a pair of and they were great. I love them. I should have put those in the intro. Oh, I hated those because I needed glasses. I was like, I know, we were co-opting your disability. Thank you. Sorry about that. And then finally he gets a line on some extra small cotton t-shirts in New York City and they don't have these nice snug plain white teas back in Canada at this point. Y'all were wearing flannel. That was the only thing. Flannel for the winter, denim for the spring. And hockey jerseys for special occasions. Hockey jerseys for weddings and funerals. Yeah. Dov sees a uniquely American quality in these shirts. Quote, it was cultural, how I felt when I put on that t-shirt. Oh my God. My head hurts. I rolled my eyes back so far.

He starts smuggling the contraband cotton into Canada and flipping the t-shirts there for a profit. He gets arrested selling bootleg shirts at a Madonna concert. Oh, that's cool. Give me a nice Madonna joke here to see us into the next sentence. Oh, did the shirts come with conical boobs? Oh, interesting. Conical boobs joke. It was an older Madonna. Finally, he starts his own garment company in his dad's basement and in 1989 at around 19 or 20, he fucks off across the border to North Carolina to learn the ins and outs of making t-shirts. Okay. I did not know this. Well, that's what I'm here. I'm here to tell you all about. Right. I'm going to tell you the whole story beginning, middle to end. That's what I'm listening. Good. Okay. In 1994, Bill Clinton signs

NAFTA and all the garment making jobs go to Mexico for cents on the dollar. Oh, yeah, NAFTA. Y'all aren't still in NAFTA, right? Trump pulled you out of NAFTA. Yeah, but then he made like AFTA, and it's the same exact thing. Dov Charney, our passionate t-shirt impresario, is incensed. Not only are his distribution chains falling apart, but he feels strongly about providing opportunities to make garments in America at rates that offer quality of life to the workers. Okay. Speaking to Claudian Co for Jane Magazine in 2004, Charney stressed, make sure you pay wages that are internationally acceptable and that your business model doesn't rely upon these cute labor inequalities that are really vestiges of the past. So, spotting a gap in the market for High Quality

American Made Basics in 1997, Dov moves the business to Los Angeles, where it takes root as American Apparel, the brand Simmers slowly picking up buzz over the next several years via its provocative ads and provocative founder. For context, we've now moved into an era of George Bush and 9-11 and the Patriot Act and Janet Jackson's Nipple and all of these other things causing consternation about censorship and social conservatism among left-wing circles. In opposition to that, Dov Charney offers a new vision of capitalism and entrepreneurship. As the company expands, he not only offers his workers the best wage in the industry, but also on-site massage therapy and healthcare, subsidized transportation and free ESL classes.

That's all very dope. It is good stuff. It is legitimately all very good stuff. You can't fault the approach there. Yeah, healthcare, I mean, whoof, whoof, and that's before Obamacare, obviously, so that's a really, that's even bigger deal, yeah. The workers are offered the chance to buy the garments they produce at a steeply discounted rate at a sample sale every Friday. The garment workers are largely comprised of women, immigrants, many undocumented and many coming from sweatshop level factories to Dov's land of milk and honey. These workers are fiercely grateful to Dov and fiercely loyal, and Dov is loyal in return. I get it. I totally get it, yeah. When American Apparel goes public, for example,

Homa and Security comes down on the factory and Dov enlists the entire company to protest in the streets in favor of immigration reform. The campaign is called Legalize LA, a very famous t-shirt. Great font, another strong font. And then there's also a Legalize gay shirt when California votes to pass Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage in 2008. So again, these sort of progressive left-wing ideals borne out in the way that the company markets itself and the causes that it supports. But Dov Turney's vision of a business is unconventional in more ways than just that. At the upper level, he surrounds himself with 18 and 19 and 20-year-olds, people who grasp the lifestyle and the brand he's trying to evoke. Many of them happen to be beautiful young

women. Why are you cringing, Josie? Oops, yeah. And how old is he at this time? He was born in 79? 69, so that puts him like, that puts the height of American Apparel during his 30s. Okay. Oh boy. He likes to swear. He likes to do drugs. He likes to walk around the office in a cocksack and show up at the company Christmas party naked. I'm a cool mom. He's a cool mom. He likes to call his female employees sluts and whores and slaves, and it's chill. It's fine. Everyone loves it, but you don't like Dov. You're not cool. He pays my health care, so I have to be cool with it. But I also get that it kind of expanded into the Silicon Valley, like vending machines filled with free delicious nutritious snacks and, you know, like that kind of... We're all sitting on yoga balls

and working 18-hour days, but... Disnurcated by the juice bar. Under my desk, there's a king-size bed in case I need to take a little quick nap, but it means I have to live here. Back to work. Yeah. Back to work. Yeah. So Dov Charney becomes something of a mythical figure, the mustachioed, mutton-chopped, hipster king of Los Angeles. He has sick parties. He's always surrounded by teen girls in highways to pants. He says and does over age of shit, but he has enough star power that the people around him can don't and encourage it. He has the equitable labor, pro-gay aspect to his persona, marking him as a social innovator and a people-minded boss and so on, but he also smokes and wears trucker hats and fucks models in his own ads, which appear like

clockwork in the back page of the Counterculture Bible, Vice Magazine. A perfect iconoclast for a turn-of-the-millennium left unconcerned with political correctness. To borrow a phrase from Chris Chaffin writing for Brooklyn Mag, he's an inspiration for, quote, anti-authoritarian capitalists obsessed with being cool and monetizing that coolness. Yeah, Vice. I forgot that that was tied. That was the free magazine that you got. You spent your $50 on, you know, a pencil skirt and oh, I had a pencil skirt that I bought that I let Megan borrow because she crashed it my house one night. She never gave back. Love that purple. Do you remember that? I wore that to school a lot. Purple, like a tight pencil skirt. It's great. I do. You would wear it with like some green American

apparel tights. Yeah, it was great. RIP. But yeah, Vice. Vice, that was a whole, that was a whole thing. Yeah, Vice would be like, yo, I went to North Korea to drink piss on the back. There'd be no. Yeah, no, totally. Is that not the vibe of Vice? I did heroin with my boss and the head of Mexico's dick chopping office cartel. Is that on Vice? But I will say in like all the research we do for this podcast, Vice is still around. And it is, I wouldn't call it the most reliable and investigatory researching. I take them seriously. I do take them seriously and they do write interesting stuff. Like I think the pros are a little bit more interesting than other places. And that's that like, we're hip, we're cool, we're not gonna, you know, we're cool moms.

But it's kind of worked in a way. Of this, Josie is not to say that nobody is paying attention when Dov does get it out. Yeah. For example, do you remember that profile that I mentioned Dov did with Claudine Koh and Jane Magazine? Yes, yes. That article becomes very infamous due to the fact that it depicts Dov Charny masturbating in front of the reporter during his interviews. People are disgusted, but it's 2004, social mores are different, and American apparel is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So he can jizz wherever he wants. If you make people a lot of money, they will let you nut wherever. I guess so, yeah. So if the reporter's not complaining and Dov is helping us all eat well, maybe it's no big deal. Maybe we should all be jerking off in

front of each other at work, like this genius hipster tour, this chaotic modern Warhol of fabric and flesh Dov Charny. Maybe he's just doing it right and we're doing it wrong. Yeah, maybe we just need to undo the knots in our ties. And for every person who objects to Dov's provocations, he's surrounded by many more who embrace and mirror them, says one then employee. We're the kind of girls that would buy from this company 24, 25 year olds who know what's up. That's why he holds on to us the way he does. We're his demographic. Dov's not sexist. He wants nothing to do with PC backlash. He rejects early 90s feminism. Sure, he might come across as offensive, but truthfully, he really respects women who work here, and he would never hurt anybody. He's never masturbated

in front of me. That's a low bar. That's a low bar for your boss. Yeah, my boss is super bad. Never, never masturbated in front of me. Not once. I thought maybe once, but it wasn't. It wasn't. I was in the room. I think it was at someone else. Jesus Christ. Dov barrels through workplace romances, having gone through three by the time of the Jane profile quote, I'm proud that it happens and we're able to deal with it. I'm not saying I want to screw all the girls at work. I'm not a fucking mad man, but if I fall in love at work, it's going to be beautiful and sexual. In one little interview, we hear him say, religion freaks me out. I just believe in fucking, right, Karla? And then a woman off camera giggles. I like I'm having like a physical response to that. I'm

actually having like a kind of a physical response to this whole story because it's like I feel so duped. So the rise of American apparel continues. The company goes public on the stock market, resulting in a rapid infusion of cash nearing a billion dollar valuation at its height from the mid 2000s till about 2010. The brand is ubiquitous. It's opening a store a week. It has 10,000 employees, one of whom is Mitchell Collins. Do you want to tell me something about that? Okay, yeah. So he worked at the American apparel in Soho and he worked in back stock. He came to work high a lot and eventually was fired because he was late too much. He would work the till sometimes like up at the front and it was extremely obnoxious when

some guy in his business attire would come in and just be like, I love these socks, dude. These socks are great. And then Mitchell would ring them out and it'd be like four pair of socks for like a hundred dollars and she'll be like, I have to eat rice for dinner tonight and I can't. I hate this on you. Yeah. Yeah. It was just like I yeah. His Joker origin story. Yes. Yeah. Writing for the Observer in 2007, Jillian Reagan captures a really great slice of life showcasing American apparel at its cultural peak when she writes about the bench. Capital T the capital B bench. Okay. And basically it's a story about these people who are self-consciously

inhabiting this bench outside of an American apparel in the Lower East side of Manhattan, very hip. Yeah. And they've basically set it up so that it's in all ages night spots. They've got a little cooler with drinks in it and anybody who is anybody is now seen at the bench. Another thing that I love about this story that makes it very of this time to me is that it takes place during a time when we were just communally learning that you can activate space in unconventional ways. We're in the era of the flash mob, things like this. And now, you know, we're like, anybody could just break out into song at any moment. Occupy shit. Yeah. Yes. Wall Street, Occupy, whatever you'd like. And so this story is a very nice encapsulation of the time period in

that way. It's all these kids who grew up in the suburbs who it's like, well, actually the HOA says you can't inhabit that bench between, you know, dusk and dawn. So you can't do that. They said it was dangerous to sit on the little electrical box. Yeah. So let me read to you a little bit from this Jillian Reagan piece about this bench. At 2am last Sunday morning as the lower east side nearly burst with button down dudes and skinny Jean ladies making their way from velvet rope clubs to ripe smelling bars, Grammy award winning record producer Dante Ross strolled up to the bench in front of the American Apparel store at the corner of East Houston in Orchard. Swimming in an oversized royal purple t-shirt, the former A&R rap who signed Della Sol and Queen Latifa for Tommy Boy Records,

giddly whipped out his digital camera. He's scuttled around in his limited edition Iron Maiden Van Sneaker, snapping pictures of the pseudo celebrities lounging on a bench that has recently become the epicenter of perhaps the hottest anti-scene scene on Saturday nights. Fucking worst. The bench has the best snaps. The best, actually. The bench, actually. The bench has the best snaps in New York. Mr. Ross told the observer with a toothy grin I'm supposed to be promoting a party around here but I never showed up for it. This is the place to be. So that's the bench and it's at least partially the brainchild of this DJ named Big Black Matt and his quote in this piece is, it's to like get back at all the stupid promoters who

like send you a thousand emails each week like come see this fucking DJ in open bar so it's kind of to steal their thunder away. The whole idea of like promoting nothing as if it's something. In high school you could go, you could take your lunch and sit on like the quad because that's the time of high school I went to. We had a quad and me and my friends, we wouldn't sit on the quad. We'd sit on the Alternalon. What's the Alternalon? It's just a patch of grass that's right next to the quad but there's a sidewalk that deviates. I see. Yeah, that makes it the deviant cool spot. It's a piece of landscaping with a path but it's the same exact patch of grass. I see. It's the same exact yeah but it's the Alternalon. So you're saying the bench is the

Alternalon. It's a bench by any other name. Yeah. How about if I tell you who all shows up there? Project runway winner, Jay McCarroll. Kanye West's churn table guy is there. Graffiti artists, MTV films a segment. Special edition bench merch. Anyway, that's the bench. I would have loved it. As the 2000 sleaze on, American Apparel remains the height of cool. They run a best butt photo contest or fans send in Polaroids of their butts to the American Apparel website, which runs almost all of them. These photos mimic the style of the company's famous advertisements. We discussed them a little bit earlier. The civius shots of models bodies washed out by harsh flashes. Yeah, that's another thing we didn't talk about. Yeah, the lighting is always like

very intense and so therefore quote unquote real. Yeah. Many of these ads are shot by an influential photographer of the era named Terry Richardson, who styles himself very similarly to Dov Charny, this sort of chaotic hipster fuck prints surrounded by attractive yes people. You may know Richardson from his ad campaigns for Mark Jacobs, Supreme YSL, or his photo shoots for Rolling Stone and Vogue. He directed the music video for Miley Cyrus's song Wrecking Ball, as well as XO by Beyonce. Or you may know him from the many, many accusations of sexual misconduct that were levied against him. So just to heads up, the story's about to get a little bit more intense here. One of the first names to go on the record against Richardson is a model

named Jamie Peck, who alleges that he got naked in front of her and coerced her into jerking him off while all of his various hangers on in the room cheered her on. Oh no. Peck says that Richardson asked her to take out her tampon so that he could play with it and make tampon tea. These stories are echoed in others that emerged about Richardson's behavior. Meanwhile, a story in The Observer reveals that Richardson has an NYU intern who does his dishes and appears in photos quote, filleting Richardson from the kitchen trash can while wearing a tiara that reads slut. Whoa. While Richardson's alleged predatory behavior is an open secret, he continues booking clients for a long time. However, the stench around him never quite dissipates or perhaps his style of

misogynist photography just goes out of fashion. Or perhaps there are more drawbacks to working with him than benefits. But either way, by 2018 work has largely dried up. Old partners have cut ties and Terry Richardson stops working as a photographer. He of course denies allegations of impropriety. Why do I judge all this up? Because Terry Richardson was critical to the American apparel house style. His interpretation of the female body was plastered all over billboards in the company's name. And his vision had a lot in common with the Chinese own. It's perhaps not a coincidence that this company's ad shoots were such unsafe places for young women. And broadly, it seems like American apparel is rapidly becoming a not so good place to work as well,

particularly at the corporate and creative level, says designer Maceo Keeling. It was just as creative and innovative as it was toxic and abusive. Employees are encouraged to work 15 plus hour days where they're subjected to abusive tirades and rants about nothing from their boss, who himself works up to 20 hours. Because he does so much coke. That's why. Like, or speed. I would assume the cocaine helps. Yeah. For example, Charny is described getting down on his hands and knees and pretending to jerk off on an employee over a minor graphic design error. I hate it. I really hate it. Meanwhile, the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Cisa Puede, results in the aforementioned immigration crackdown on the LA factory that sees American

apparel lose a fifth of its garment workers. Dov is personally devastated by this and ends up paying out the affected employees about a million dollars out of his own pocket. So again, just the grossest guy in the world, but clued in on one or two things. Bubby said to pay your employees fairly, but Bubby didn't say to keep your dick in your pants when you're in the office. My grandma told me that if I walked around with my fly down, a seagull would take my dick. I feel like maybe Bubby needed to tell that to Tov. See, that is good advice. The audit really halts the company's momentum at a critical time during its growth, and it ends up having to take on debt to stay operational. Okay. These hardships are only compounded when

the company decides to upgrade its distribution by building a shiny new factory in La Mirada, California that ends up being a shiny disaster. A metallic gold lame disaster. A disco disaster. Everything that can go wrong does. Dov has to leave in the middle of a Las Vegas magic show and take his limo all the way to La Mirada where he moves into the factory full time until the problems are fixed. Whoa. This is apparently a very bad time for everyone involved as Dov is working 23 hours a day and not sleeping and will not shut up with his paranoid ramblings about how the company's new CFO, a gray-haired stuffed shirt named John Latrell, is out to fuck him over and stab him in the back. Yeah, that's a lot of coke. That coke budget.

It sounds coke-y on the page I grab you. It has a residue about it. Yeah. My gum's got a little numb reading that. Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, the lawsuits are rolling in. By 2006, three sexual harassment suits have already been filed. Another former employee sued in 2008, saying Dov forced her and her male supervisor to pretend to masturbate in front of each other. So again, your favorite thing. Again, the masturbation. I just can't. In 2009, American apparel is sued by Woody Allen for using his image on a billboard for years without permission. In response, Dov Charney issues a rambling statement about satire. The case is settled for five million. More money the company does not have to burn.

We also start to see a lot more bad press. From 2009 to 2010, Gawker does extensive coverage alleging Charney is discriminating against store employees based on looks and micromanaging their appearances, with one former manager additionally disclosing that they were told what kind of black women to hire. Quote, none of the trashy kind that come in, we don't want that. We're not trying to sell our clothes to them. Try to find some of these classy black girls with nice hair, you know? In 2011, a 20-year-old woman who started working as a retail employee at 17 sues for $260 million. Go girl. Alleging Dov Charney kidnapped and sexually assaulted her over a period of eight months. Fuck. In response, the company accuses her of extortion. Five more

former employees go on to sue in 2011. By this point, American apparel stock is down to 62 cents from a high of $15. The company, once the zenith of cool now seems increasingly stale and dated, sales are slumping without the introduction of new styles. The provocative ads have taken on an unpleasant new context in the wake of legal claims and have shifted toward depicting porn stars like Sasha Gray in the guise of real girls. Right. That's right. And the former feather in the company's cap, it's rock star hipster O Tour Dov Charney, is now its greatest liability. Jerking off in front of a reporter is one thing but a $260 million sexual assault suit. Now you've gone too far. Now you're fucking with our purse strings. Yep. So what do you do with a

sex pest CEO? You fire him? You kick him out of the company. That's John Luttrell's plan anyway. See Dov's paranoia was right on the money. His stuffy CEO is in fact scheming to get rid of him. Cause you're a fucking liability, dude. Get your digging your pants. Go listen to your buddy. Go home. Chill out. John gets his thoughts together by typing his plan up in a word processor completely incapable of managing a $700 million business, remove the CEO, replace with an interim replacement, put the company up for sale. Unfortunately, our boomer friend John prints up these notes, but he can't find which machine they've printed to. He's done nowhere he's sent it to. And unfortunately for him, somebody else does find his scheme and brings it to Dov.

I gotta say, it seems like it's probably a total of maybe like 20 words that why would you need to just. Who among us? Don't listen. That's true. Last night I tried to print a document and I sent it to the printer at school when I was at home. So it's just not, yeah. Okay. So now from 2011 till 2013, we have a power struggle between Dov Charney and John Luttrell. While American Apparel's consumer relevance enters free fall, Dov himself is entangled in accusations of financial mismanagement as well as allowing a staffer to post nudes of a female employee online. Nope. Don't do that. Nope. Don't do that. Dov has stacked the board of directors with his friends to delay disaster,

but unfortunately that won't be enough. This time Dov is blindsided when the board demands his resignation and he alleges that they threaten to make public his stash of self-made porn stored on company devices if he refuses to cooperate. I don't know. I think that's kind of fair. Like, don't make porn at your place of work. Yeah, but I'm absolutely certain that not all of those people consented. Like come on, it can't be. Oh, no, no. Absolutely not. Let's not blackmail people with their porn in general, but let's also not fabricate and store porn on work devices unless you work for a porn company, in which case go nuts, literally. It's in the mission statement. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah, just a lot of boundaries, a lot of boundaries getting crossed. There's no

way to easily solve that. Dov is out in American Apparel, but he's not out of cards to play. If we've learned nothing from TV's most popular drama about the schemes and scams of a Machiavellian corporate family, WWE Monday Night Raw, you've always got a loophole in the form of a hostile takeover. Mmm. Specifically, Dov is hoping to collaborate with Sue Kim, the head of a hedge fund called Standard General, and this is the plan they come up with. Okay. Now, mind you, much of this is from Dov and take any and everything from Dov with a big grain of salt. Take with a grain of cocaine, I think. Might be the idea there. Okay, so here's the plan. Are you ready for our hostile takeover plan? Uh, again, the bar napkin out. I'll take some notes and send it to the printer. Let's go.

According to Dov, the hedge fund will buy its way into the company and install a puppet CEO. Oh my god. In this case, a woman named Paula Schneider, previously of BCBG Max Asriah, who seems happy to carry out Dov's shadow edicts on his behalf and whose appointment will ease some of the misogyny claims. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh, we have an issue. Hire a woman. That'll look great. Let's glass cliff somebody. Anybody will do. Yeah. The plan takes motion in 2015. Paula Schneider is in his CEO, but row, row. She's not answering Dov's emails anymore. I wouldn't either. Evidently, the puppet has grown a heartbeat and the compliant Paula Schneider has landed on the throne and immediately scumbagged her former ally allegedly with the support of

Sue Kim and Standard General. Oh, wow. So they bailed on the misogynist sexual assault dickwad. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. A terrible thing has happened here. Fuck in corporate America, by the way. I don't want that to get lost here. Fuck in. You have to walk on the edge of a blade. I don't know how they do it. It is not the life for me. God bless all of you sociopaths in your big blouses. I couldn't sleep. True, true. I was actually in a fancy neighborhood early today and I was just like, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you all sleep at night. Is it worth it? Probably. They're probably really nice sheets. Yeah, it's true. Upon Paula Schneider's ascendance, the company which hasn't turned to profit since

2009, it's now 2015, files for bankruptcy. Yeah, you do. This wipes out Dov Charney's 42% stake in the company, which is held as collateral by Standard General, losing him $20 million. Keep your dick in your pants. So it goes. Under Paula, American Apparel Tones down its marketing, it runs an ad on the back page of Vice Magazine, where the company first achieved notice, depicting fully dressed, smiling, female employees, identified by their names and start dated the company. The copy reads, what? You seem so skeptical. I just read it. The copy reads, women have always been in charge at American Apparel. In fact, women make up 55% of our global workforce. Parentheses. Sorry, guys. And an even higher

percentage of our leadership and executive roles. This structure is incredibly, and unfortunately, rare in the corporate world. So some cool revisionist history from the notoriously pro-woman American Apparel, for sure. And I really, I gotta say, I really hate the little parenthetical. Sorry, guys. Like, again, keep your parenthetical in your pants. Ad copy. American Apparel may be hyping its woman run bona fides now, but if Dov has his way, it won't be woman run, or at least Paula run for long. He leads his cadre of fiercely loyal factory workers in protesting outside the factory for his return. You knew I was signposting them for a reason. Yeah, the loyalty. And the senoras put their

whole ass into it because they love Dov and they love those on-site massages, but it's no good. Dov's challenge is defeated in court. The American dream, at least this one, is over for him. Meanwhile, the beat goes on for AA. Various shenanigans occur. Paula Schneider exits. We file for a second bankruptcy. Finally, in 2017, Canadian garment giant Gildan Activewear purchases American Apparel for $88 million, a rough dismount for a company once skyrocketing towards a billion dollar valuation. Gildan already has its own textile factories operational in Honduras, so it starts giving web consumers a choice. Quote, shoppers can choose between two nearly identical versions of eight of American Apparel's signature

basics, such as hoodies and t-shirts. Presented side by side, one version is made in the U.S., and the other is made outside the U.S. Shoppers can pick which origin they prefer, but there's a catch. The U.S.-made products are anywhere from about 17% to 26% more expensive. You will be shocked to hear that the American-made options, once the cornerstone of American Apparel's mission statement, have quietly disappeared from its website. An end of an era, truly. But not so for Dove Charney, too married to the spotlight and to high-quality American-made t-shirts to bow out now. Dove starts a new label, Los Angeles Apparel. It is functionally a clone of his former

Project American Apparel, though updated for a new generation. $100,000 of the seed funding comes from garment workers from the old factory. Oh, no, $100,000? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Dove feels satisfied by the new business, even as he accrues $9,000 a day in interest on his debt due to the terms of his deal with Standard General. Oh, fuck. I don't know the specifics of it because, as we've established before, what M. Hedge fund, but it sounds like he got the wrong end of the stick on that deal. Yeah, that's wrong. In 2020, LA Apparel makes headlines when it commits to making free face masks to help the community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Okay. But they all feature Dove's dick on them. Is that it? So you have to wear it with his dick there because it's

like subversive and funny? It's a niche product. The LA Apparel factory is forced to temporarily shut down when 300 workers contract COVID and four die. Oh my God. Four people die? Oh. As of 2023, Los Angeles Apparel has a few retail stores in LA, while American Apparel, formerly a brick and mortar juggernaut, keeps its margins slim by staying online only. A few years back, Dove Charny participated in a documentary about his and his company's rise and fall. He lamented the possibility of the Dock reaching a wide audience and dragging up old misdeeds from a pre-MeToo time. He needn't have worried. Big Radwolf premiered in 2020 on the infamously doomed bite-sized TV app, Quibi. Oh yeah, Quibi. But that's a Made in America corporate disaster

for another day. The end. American Apparel. You forgot about them, but they're still here. I feel like that website that's up that you like you can go to and buy, it really feels like it's one guy in a warehouse and it's just filled with all the back stock from the bankrupted American Apparel and he just pulls it and puts it in a bag and sends it to you and it's like so many hipster dreams. It's lost its spark of life. This was, for whatever you want to say about it, at its peak. This was a very vibrant and influential brand. Totally. Totally. It was very cool. I was totally pulled in. The mystique that the brand tried to cultivate feels very false and retrospect, which is a shame because it was very aspirational and it worked on me. I wanted to go to those

parties and I'm very annoyed with myself for that now. That's what keeps happening to me in this story is like, I'm annoyed with my former self. Because this is right when we were meeting. This is right when we were going to our undergraduate of college together. Yeah, when I would spend hours putting together my outfit to wear to workshop because it had to be just so. You did not to workshop? Yes. Oh yes. Oh no, really? It didn't look like it. I guess it made bad good. I feel like you just biked in. Am I crazy? Yeah, but I would have like changed my leggings 10 times before biking in. Really? I know that was. Those American apparel leggings. Yeah. You needed that perfect pair of American apparel leggings to look really hip to your shitty, not even your friends. The

shitty people from your creative writing workshop who you barely knew or the other person who worked behind the counter at the art store with you or whoever the Judy funny in your life was who you were trying to impress. Yeah, which was funny because I would like get dressed up and then bike for an hour and be just like sweaty and gross and eating a salad. I live in an old yogurt tub. Like, I don't know. See, this is the Josie I remember. Now you're talking my language. Oh man. What in particular annoys me is that my mom was right when she was like, it's all just bunch of t-shirts, honey. I don't get it. Oh no. And I'd be like, mom, they don't have any labels and they're all made in America and and they're sustainable. Some of them have like organic

cotton if you pay more for that. I can't just have a green one, you know, blue one and a red one because it's like the coolest shirt I own, but I can't just wear the green shirt every day because then people will think I only own one thing for American apparel. Yeah. And then mom would be like, but I thought the whole thing was that they don't have labels so people don't know where it's from. And it's like, yeah, but yeah, but yeah, mom, leave me alone. My mom was fucking right and I hate that. I really hate that. I hate that. Terrible news. Terrible news. I hate to see it. The emperor truly had no clothes the entire time. Yeah. Yeah. Just t-shirts and they were too expensive. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com

or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure. Bittersweetinfamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.com or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for my linfamous series were an article entitled I Gave Birth with Dolphins written by Debbie King, published on the website On Woman's Own, published September 22nd, 1999. I looked at an article from Newsweek entitled Dolphin Assisted Childbirth is a Bad Idea,

written by Jessica Ferger, published September 6th, 2015. I watched a documentary made by Katie Piper, entitled The Most Extreme Births, hosted by Origin on YouTube. And lastly, for my Farahog segment, The Bits That Were True, I listened to Reply All Podcast number 149, published October 10, 2019. The episode was entitled 30 to 40 Farahogs. The sources that I used for this episode were Meet Your New Boss by Claudine Cofer-Jane in June, July 2004, and its follow-up, Extended Play also by Claudine Cofer-Jane in the October 2005 issue. I read The Bench Bunch by Gillian Reagan, August 7th, 2007, in The Observer. Former employees use Dov Charny for Sexual Assault by Anna North for Jezebel, published March 10th, 2011. Dov Charny's Sketchy Scandalous History by Anna North for Jezebel,

published March 10th, 2011. American Apparel Exact calls $250 million sex harassment suit extortion by Russell Goldman, March 9th, 2011 in ABC News. Meet Terry Richardson, the world's most fucked-up fashion photographer by Jenna Sowers for Jezebel, March 16th, 2010. American Apparel, the rise-fallen rebirth of an all-American business in the fashion law August 20th, 2017. Whatever happened to American Apparel by the Glossy team January 11th, 2021 in Glossy? American Apparel's rebrand says a lot about life after bankruptcy by Eliza Brooks, September 25th, 2018 in Vox. Goodbye American Apparel by Chris Chaffin for Brooklyn Magazine January 19th, 2017. I watch Big Rad Wolf on Quibi. That is now available on the Roku channel. Thank you to our

monthly subscriber John Mountain for keeping us afloat. Bitter Sweden for Me is a part of the 604 podcast network. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. The song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. There really was a lot of drug use and there was always reference to cooler times. The really good times at American Apparel were a couple years ago. That's what everybody would say, but years would pass and they would still say that. But it's a period piece for sure. Yeah. And I think the time I was there, it was like the cocaine years in the music biopic where things are going south. Everyone's looking a bit sweaty about 30 pounds heavier. Yeah, exactly. And they're like trying

out the hair metal thing and it's not working out. No one was taking the vice magazines anymore. And it was like, oh, what do we do with that? And people just put comments on the pictures of the models and be like, isn't it kind of weird that they're underage? And you'd be like, it is actually. Anyway, that's 5720.