#120. The cult of American Apparel

Happy birthday, America!

Jul 04, 2025

Is there anyone among us who didn’t shop at American Apparel in the first decade of the 2000s? In college, I waltzed into an American Apparel store several times a year, running my greedy fingers across the racks of rainbow-colored basics. I’m not sure I ever left without making a purchase – you can always use another plain tank top for roughly twenty bucks. So when I saw Netflix released an American Apparel documentary called Trainwreck this week (very patriotic timing!), I sprinted to watch it.

“He was selling this ‘Made in America,’ sweatshop-free thing, and I thought it was great. Like there was more to it than just being cool. It was also, like… meaningful.” – Carson (former American Apparel employee)

Happy birthday, America. Land of the free and home of the brave or whatever. American Apparel – every millennial’s favorite American-made clothing brand before we handed the torch to Reformation – went bankrupt ten years ago mostly because creeper CEO Dov Charney had been sexually harassing his employees. He’s charismatic, energetic, and undoubtedly a creative visionary. His former employees describe him as a cult leader. All of Dov’s beloved stores closed for good in 2017.

Trainwreck is less than an hour long and definitely worth your time if you, like me, once loved American Apparel, especially if you’re not feeling particularly patriotic at the moment. (There are definitely some parallels between Dov and he who shall not be named at the helm of the U.S. government.)

The documentary got me thinking a lot about American manufacturing, especially since it’s the 4th of July today, in 2025, the Year of The Tarriff and The Great AI Scare. Trump’s tariffs haven’t done much for the average person yet except piss people off – discussing news of yet another round of layoffs has become commonplace in conversations I’m having with people in a lot of different industries right now, and I’m hearing the word “recession” being whispered louder and louder every week. The point of the tarriffs is to make foreign goods more expensive so we buy more American made products and bring factory jobs back to the U.S., but so far it’s not working. According to a lot of research I’ve done this week, it never will, in large part because Americans don’t actually want these jobs (or they’re not qualified to do them).

According to the New York Times:

The pool of blue-collar workers who are able and willing to perform tasks on a factory floor in the United States is shrinking. As baby boomers retire, few young people are lining up to take their place. About 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — a shortfall that will surely grow if companies are forced to rely less on manufacturing overseas and build more factories in the United States, experts say.

How is it that 80% of Americans say we’d be better off with more domestic manufacturing jobs, but only 25% want one themselves?

A classic solution to apparent worker shortages: offer higher pay. That would probably convince workers to invest in acquiring coveted skills and enter the manufacturing workforce.
But the higher pay that Americans demand to work in manufacturing is one of the big reasons that many manufacturers left America in the first place. And so this wage issue raises the question of whether many manufacturers, particularly labor-intensive ones, can be profitable and globally competitive in the United States.

I read so many articles this week researching this question: Why don’t Americans want manufacturing jobs? (Even if the pay is decent?)

Here’s one reason:

“We spent three generations telling everybody that if they didn’t go to college, they are a loser,” [Ron Hetrick, an economist] said. “Now we are paying for it. We still need people to use their hands.”
College graduates often do not have the right skills to be successful on a factory floor.

But none of the articles I read seemed willing to dig deeper into the mess. To actually answer the question from the perspective of someone who’s done the job. So naturally, I turned to Reddit:

Dov Charney may be a lunatic, but he was also right about one thing. In Trainwreck, an interviewer asks Dov what the key to success is, and he responds with just one word: “Passion.” And when someone is passionate about something, they’re more likely to endure bad working conditions or low pay.

I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. This essay isn’t really about making iPhones in the U.S., it’s about – say it with me! – American women who aren’t passionate about the idea of becoming mothers not wanting the factory jobs our government is trying to persuade us to take. Think about this for a hot second as it applies to motherhood:

But while Americans might love the idea of more factory jobs, most don't actually want to work in one.

Isn’t it creepy and gross and uncomfortable to think of millennial and Gen Z women as the only qualified factory workers right now who can make new humans??? Oren Cass, an economist, said he’s skeptical whenever employers complain of worker shortages. I’m going to replace a few words in something he said to NPR about manufacturing jobs to put this in perspective:

I have less than zero sympathy for [people in the U.S. government] who go around complaining about labor shortages,” Cass says. He jokes that he has a side hustle running an "incredibly innovative" [baby factory]. "It employs [millennial and Gen Z women with established careers they care about] at [$0] an hour to [make more babies to benefit the U.S. economy]. I have 500,000 job openings, and I have not been able to fill [most] of them.

Or how about NPR’s examination of trucking (Kelly’s Version):

[Pronatalists] have complained of a "worker shortage" for decades, yet relatively low wages and challenging work conditions are clearly a huge factor behind that industry's workforce woes. Addressing those issues would probably go a long way to dealing with their “shortage."

So many of us don’t want a manufacturing job – making products, or humans – in America because the pay is bad and the working conditions are crappy. Can you blame us?

Happy birthday, America. If our country is currently being led by someone who reminds me enitirely too much of Dov Charney, here’s hoping we do a better job than American Apparel did of not letting an unhinged cult leader run everything into the ground.

“It’s incredibly frustrating, because it’s something that for whatever reason, in society, we’ve kind of just let that type of person continue.” – Carson

Part of the irony, perhaps, is that Dov Charney is Canadian

“Motherhood Should Come With a Warning Label” by Jessica Grose for NYT Opinion

This article is accompanied by a video of mothers talking about their experiences (specifically how parenting has set them back financially) that made me tear up so, you know, avoid watching maybe if that’s not your vibe this weekend:

Over the 15 years that I have been covering parenting — all but two of which I have also been a parent myself — I find that I get more and more pushback for the idea that raising children is a community responsibility. Some people scoff at the idea that parents should ever complain about the financial stress of raising children in the United States, where our social safety nets are some of the flimsiest in the developed world. Pretty consistently, I get responses that boil down to: If you can’t afford kids, that’s on you. You chose to have them. But I think that’s both unempathetic, and shortsighted. Unempathetic for obvious reasons, including that children are human beings; they shouldn’t be a luxury good.

“Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker

This is another essay-as-book-review, but it’s by Jia Tolentino which means it’s worth reading even without any intention of picking up either book she’s discussing here. There’s a well-placed Fifty Shades of Grey reference, in conjunction with a statistic that nearly took my head off my neck: “In a recent college-campus survey, nearly two-thirds of women said they’d been choked during sex, and forty per cent of those said that it had happened for the first time when they were between the ages of twelve and seventeen.”

All of this makes for a stunning cultural whipsaw. On phones, there’s bukkake and dick pics and hookup apps and arcane sexual sub-identities; in the world shaped by conservative grownups, sex is invisible or forbidden unless it’s between a married heterosexual couple, ideally one that’s procreating.

“The Body Positivity Movement is Over” by Annie Joy Williams for The Atlantic

I am famously not on TikTok so I had no idea what “SkinnyTok” was until last week, but this piece is really interesting for a million different reasons. Admittedly, I am skinny and have always been that way. I have also never suffered from an eating disorder, but I realize the line is easy to cross (I almost crossed it the year I turned 24, though, so I understand what it looks like to get right up to the line). The political notes in this essay are interesting and really made my brain spin; especially regarding how the left is so inclusive we’re actually exclusive, including in this sense, even though there are plenty of progressive women who are embarrassed by how much they do actually want to be skinny:

[Liv] Schmidt’s appeal does cross party lines, though. When I polled a politically diverse group of my own friends, my most conservative friends loved SkinnyTok. A number of my progressive friends did too; they just felt like they shouldn’t say so out loud.

Show Don’t Tell is my first Curtis Sittenfeld! 🥹 I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read one of her books – I loved her Curtis vs. AI article in the New York Times last year and became an immediate fan. She also lives in Minneapolis, so it’s thrilling to know I might potentially run into her in the grocery store someday. Show Don’t Tell is a delightful book of short stories you will probably like if you are above the age of 30 and liberal. My favorite stories were “Show Don’t Tell,” “The Marriage Clock,” and “The Richest Babysitter in the World” (which is absolutely about Jeff Bezos).

I included this miracle product in my June ins/outs list but realized I need to tell everyone because it really does work and may have changed my life a little bit. Both my mom and I tried this on a night we drank a lot of red wine together and neither of us woke up with even a whisper of a headache. Expensive but worth it!! Godspeed to everyone who is drinking this weekend.

lewky___

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Also, I woke up yesterday morning to a WSJ article my mom sent me called “CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs” so then I had to self-soothe with videos from my new favorite internet creator (his “terrible Tinder conversations turned into weird pop songs” Reels make me laugh so hard I literally start crying) and then I found out he makes his videos with Adobe Express (which apparently uses Generative AI) and then I wanted to die. Like, where do we draw the line with this??? He’s a music producer IRL and he’s not taking away anyone’s job, is he? (IS HE?!???) It’s a slippery slope and on principle I hate it. I also haven’t laughed this hard all year. Come tell me what you think in the comments.

#120. The cult of American Apparel

Happy birthday, America!

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