Admittedly, it was once cool. There was a sexy subculture out there, and wearing a candy-colored sweatshirt with white accents was like a secret password at a Prohibition-era speakeasy. But maybe it’s time to say goodbye to your leotards and over-the-bang latex headbands. After all, if you don’t do it, Am Appy CEO Dov Charney will drop your ass before you know what’s hit you.
Charney is a lothario. A dirty, bearded, perverse lothario. Which is why he made the perfect poster boy for a brand that oozed sex appeal. But lately, that brand has been hemorrhaging money. Dov’s solution? Make it a sexy Gap. He recently told the Village Voice that hipsterdom is dead. No one wants that title anymore, he claims. Now it’s all about pleats and linen and dirty martinis with your prudish cousins in the Hamptons. Nevermind the fact that American Apparel as a company is so poor that their salesgirls might be forced to wear the new conservative line to waitress that Hamptons party.
To be fair, maybe the prep is the next hipster evolution. The jump towards sweater vests and polos might not be that hard to make.
BY: Mercedes Rodriguez
Wait, so what’s the reason not to buy clothes from AA?
I saw the recent controversy surronding the company as a complete denouncement of the type of lifestyle that made them once successful. I could be very wrong, their move to sex up prep style could be spot-on. However financially succesful it could be, I don’t personally see the reason that we should support the unraveling of a company whose CEO seems to disdain the type of individuals who buy the clothes his business produces.
I don’t know – those “classic” guys still look rather hipstery to me – like an ironic preppy. Either way Dov Charney is a twit. Any CEO who distributes emails on how his female salesgirls should pluck their eyebrows is asking for people to boycott his shit just on principle alone.
Wasn’t wearing Lacoste-the ironic prep styling the way hipsters dressed through the 90′s up until the royal tennenbaums came out and “exposed” the style to the mainstream? It is just a trend in fashion, as always happens and the fact that he senses that is no crime, just simply riding (or forging) the wave of taste. If our culture was about tradition and keeping a style associated with a people for generations then sure, it would be subversive of him. However we are in a disposable culture. Aesthetics are just responses to trend. Being a hipster is just “liking it before it was cool”.
I’ve been dressing that way since I was a little kid. I’m 28 now. I also dress punk, grunge, woodsman and all sorts of other styles. What’s your point Mercedes? It seems like you didn’t finish your article.