{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing\u2019s his baby by any rights. Never met the guy but in LA I lived down the street from...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/91262371138/", "html": "

I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing\u2019s his baby by any rights. Never met the guy but in LA I lived down the street from the original store and there were always a bunch of Echo Park fucks who worked with him down at the factory.

If not, hell, hope he comes up here and starts Cascadian Apparel, between the \u201clocally made with skilled labor at good wages\u201d, \u201chipster as fuck\u201d, \u201cchill casual work culture where everyone has sex with each other\u201d, and \u201cvaguely Canadianish\u201d tones that place was more Portland than LA all along.

Keep in mind that his management style was always to circumvent the Peter Principle by taking people he found interesting, promoting them and putting them in charge of things but then busting them back down or out the door if they didn\u2019t prove competent at it, so the real underlying beef you hear from all these girls filing complaints was that they thought they were sleeping their way to the top only to discover the boss was still judging them on actual job performance.

If you\u2019re young like Tumblr young you might not realize that the t-shirt as everyday clothing staple didn\u2019t exist until the 1990s and was before that more a novelty souvenir item. Some of the credit goes to the beachwear upscaling of \u201880s Miami fashion, but the two big forces behind that development were American Apparel on the wholesale/manufacturing side and Hot Topic on the retail side.

Like, Hot Topic is legitimately more important to the development of American fashion than any and all New York designers, grok that.

Their original angle was being the place you could buy band t-shirts. Like back in maybe \u201996 when I was getting the classic Garbage \u201cHollywood Star\u201d shirt (which I can\u2019t even find a picture of on Google, fuck I\u2019m getting old), our mall didn\u2019t have a Hot Topic yet so since I hadn\u2019t been to an actual concert on that tour to hit up the merch table I had to order from one of the cheap newsprint resellers\u2019 catalogs I picked up at the local record store.

Every so often there\u2019s some post going around Tumblr where some artist is breathlessly reporting that Hot Topic (or Urban Outfitters, sometimes) is selling some product with their art on it, like, without paying or even asking, like ha ha ha Hot Topic has always sold bootleg shit, bands were complaining about this from day one. (The t-shirt industry has never been all that picky about IP, check out the \u201cbootleg Bart\u201d tag.)

If someone makes enough fuss they might pull the product but hey, cost of doing business, it\u2019s basically not worth it to pursue legal action because in any case you wouldn\u2019t be suing the deep-pocketed Hot Topic, Inc. but the fly-by-night company they ordered from. (Just like if someone did a bootleg run of your book you\u2019d be going after the printer, not the bookstores it appeared in.)

Honestly that distinction wouldn\u2019t be an insuperable problem with enough political capital to throw at the issue, but while Hollywood studios contribute enough to trade balance, jobs numbers, and most importantly lobbyist salaries to get pampered on this shit, Deviantart users don\u2019t really have the pull to get the OC Do Not Trace Act of 2014 out of committee.

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