I hope Dov gets American Apparel back, thing’s 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 “locally made with skilled labor at good wages”, “hipster as fuck”, “chill casual work culture where everyone has sex with each other”, and “vaguely Canadianish” 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’t 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’re young like Tumblr young you might not realize that the t-shirt as everyday clothing staple didn’t exist until the 1990s and was before that more a novelty souvenir item. Some of the credit goes to the beachwear upscaling of ‘80s 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 ’96 when I was getting the classic Garbage “Hollywood Star” shirt (which I can’t even find a picture of on Google, fuck I’m getting old), our mall didn’t have a Hot Topic yet so since I hadn’t 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’ catalogs I picked up at the local record store.

Every so often there’s 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 “bootleg Bart” tag.)

If someone makes enough fuss they might pull the product but hey, cost of doing business, it’s basically not worth it to pursue legal action because in any case you wouldn’t 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’d be going after the printer, not the bookstores it appeared in.)

Honestly that distinction wouldn’t 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’t really have the pull to get the OC Do Not Trace Act of 2014 out of committee.