American Apparel (AMEX: APP) is a clothing manufacturer in the United States.[3] 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 cotton knitwear such as T-shirts and underwear, but in recent years it has expanded—to include leggings, leotards, tank tops, vintage clothing, dresses, pants, denim, nail polish, bedding and accessories for men, women, children, babies and dogs.
Hamilton Nolan — We've told you about American Apparel's photo-based hiring standards, its anti-uglies internal policies, and its "natural" employee grooming standards. Yesterday, the company issued a statement defending itself. Well then. Time for AA employees to spill some dirt for you.
All of the following are taken from emails we received from current and former American Apparel employees during the past week. Yesterday, American Apparel said in its statement that "American Apparel does not hire or retain applicants based on 'beauty.'...The company legitimately reviews current photographs of job applications and employees to consider their sense of style and the way in which they present themselves." Now, some employee perspective on that policy:
These [biases] based on attractiveness are 100% accurate. Throughout my years there, I was repeatedly forced to deal with unprofessional, and unqualified corporate employees. There's no way that these 19 year old girls had the foggiest idea how to manage entire districts of retail stores. I was always confused as to why these was always some overly-sexualized young woman on the arm of every male employee with a job at the factory. Why did they need "assistants"?...
At the time of hiring someone new, it's true, they had to be good looking. My manager didn't like the policy, but enforced it. The only girls that were not totally emaciated were forced to work back-stock. So as not to disgust the customers with their average sized hips. God forbid. Photographs had to be taken. We were told how to dress, down to how we weren't to wear makeup.
If Dov had it his way, every employee at AA would be barely legal, emaciated, and wearing a lace tank-thong with high heels...Horrible man. Horrible company. Horrible quality of clothing. Horrible everything.
When last we chronicled our adventures working retail, a boring high school job at an Indiana Hollister store culminated in a stockroom orgy. So you can imagine what it's like working at American Apparel. Or maybe you can't! Anyway, because the chain has once again been in the news for, once again, objectifying young women and crap, I decided to finally come forth with my tale of how I, like so many other embittered twentysomethings, worked at American Apparel once. And lived to tell the tale.
I thought cocaine was kind of scandalous when I started working at American Apparel. And so I naturally found it kind of scandalous that a major coke dealer actually served as a kind of informal HR chief for many of the American Apparel stores in New York. He happened to be this guy I knew from a completely different set of circumstances in a completely different city, and he had gotten into the business at, like, 13, so unlike your coke dealer or your best cokehead friend's coke dealer this was a guy who actually knew, like, how to use weapons.
The dealer had what I thought at the time was an ingenious setup: he lived down the street from the American Apparel store in the Lower East Side and would find hipster cokehead girls jobs at the chain's various outlets and then, in turn, find clients among the other employees, which worked really well until everyone got so coked-out they had to blow it up their asses and a girl stole $14,000 from the till and everyone sort of left town after that.
Hamilton Nolan — We've told you about American Apparel's photo-based hiring standards, its anti-uglies internal policies, and its "natural" employee grooming standards. Yesterday, the company issued a statement defending itself. Well then. Time for AA employees to spill some dirt for you.
All of the following are taken from emails we received from current and former American Apparel employees during the past week. Yesterday, American Apparel said in its statement that "American Apparel does not hire or retain applicants based on 'beauty.'...The company legitimately reviews current photographs of job applications and employees to consider their sense of style and the way in which they present themselves." Now, some employee perspective on that policy:
These [biases] based on attractiveness are 100% accurate. Throughout my years there, I was repeatedly forced to deal with unprofessional, and unqualified corporate employees. There's no way that these 19 year old girls had the foggiest idea how to manage entire districts of retail stores. I was always confused as to why these was always some overly-sexualized young woman on the arm of every male employee with a job at the factory. Why did they need "assistants"?...
At the time of hiring someone new, it's true, they had to be good looking. My manager didn't like the policy, but enforced it. The only girls that were not totally emaciated were forced to work back-stock. So as not to disgust the customers with their average sized hips. God forbid. Photographs had to be taken. We were told how to dress, down to how we weren't to wear makeup.
If Dov had it his way, every employee at AA would be barely legal, emaciated, and wearing a lace tank-thong with high heels...Horrible man. Horrible company. Horrible quality of clothing. Horrible everything.
When last we chronicled our adventures working retail, a boring high school job at an Indiana Hollister store culminated in a stockroom orgy. So you can imagine what it's like working at American Apparel. Or maybe you can't! Anyway, because the chain has once again been in the news for, once again, objectifying young women and crap, I decided to finally come forth with my tale of how I, like so many other embittered twentysomethings, worked at American Apparel once. And lived to tell the tale.
I thought cocaine was kind of scandalous when I started working at American Apparel. And so I naturally found it kind of scandalous that a major coke dealer actually served as a kind of informal HR chief for many of the American Apparel stores in New York. He happened to be this guy I knew from a completely different set of circumstances in a completely different city, and he had gotten into the business at, like, 13, so unlike your coke dealer or your best cokehead friend's coke dealer this was a guy who actually knew, like, how to use weapons.
The dealer had what I thought at the time was an ingenious setup: he lived down the street from the American Apparel store in the Lower East Side and would find hipster cokehead girls jobs at the chain's various outlets and then, in turn, find clients among the other employees, which worked really well until everyone got so coked-out they had to blow it up their asses and a girl stole $14,000 from the till and everyone sort of left town after that.
Last edited: