Column:

Shopping for a fair manufacturer

There's a seedy personal side to American Apparel's Dov Charney.

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Feb. 26, 2009

Since I was a kid, nothing has given me greater simultaneous joy and a fierce inner moral turmoil than shopping for clothes. This is probably because my mother worked at a United Colors of Benetton while she was pregnant with me, but I digress.

Ever since I first learned about modern sweatshops in junior high, I've always experienced massive amounts of cognitive dissonance when shopping. I still feel a twinge of liberal guilt when a Nike sweatshirt or a pair of Gap jeans appears in the family laundry basket and have wondered how many people who shop at Banana Republic know where the term comes from. When I found out the chief executive of Urban Outfitters gave money to support Proposition 8 in California, I had to tear myself away from the sale rack.

In high school, I found what I thought would be the perfect solution to my garment dilemma. A teacher made me aware of American Apparel, a new clothing company run by an eccentric Canadian businessman named Dov Charney, who paid his employees a living wage and provided them with things like vacation time and health insurance, things I assumed Nike would never even dream of. So, like many other concerned young lefties and self-respecting hipsters, I have a few pieces from AA in my closet (especially band shirts, since a lot of artists I listened to at the time also jumped on the social responsibility bandwagon).

I lived under the optimistic, alluring hum of AA's fluorescent lights for a while. And then, I met Dov Charney.

Well, I've never actually met him, but I saw the ugly side of a man I thought was doing a great service for workers in the garment industry. The side of Dov Charney that told a reporter at The McGill Daily that "Women initiate most domestic violence, yet out of a thousand cases of domestic violence maybe one is involving a man." And this, Charney says, "has made a victim culture out of women." The side that claims he is the victim when his employees sue him for sexual harassment or who, in a now notorious incident, reportedly masturbated in front of a female reporter multiple times. The side that produces (and shoots) allegedly "provocative" ads that do little more than to exploit young models.

Charney is a shining example of this paradox I've noticed with people who do socially responsible things, the paradox being that some (not nearly the majority, but a few) are really not the nicest people, whether it's Charney degrading women or the owners of a soup kitchen in Chicago snapping at volunteers (the latter happened to me once).

Having an enterprise that works for the greater good, whether it be a soup kitchen or a hybrid car manufacturing operation or a supposedly fair-practice clothing company in no way gives you free reign to have terrible interpersonal conduct. If it's a better world we want, socially beneficial acts need to be carried out without the smugness often associated with hybrid owners (so expertly parodied on "South Park") or the delusional self-righteousness of Bono or this inexplicable need to take something in return, such as the treatment Charney inflicts upon his female employees to satisfy some sort of personal sexual need.

And that's not to say there aren't a whole lot of people who do socially responsible things or have ethically sound enterprises and also happen to be good-hearted people. There are. A lot. And I have nothing but admiration for them. The question is not where these people are, but what to do about the Dov Charneys of the world.