Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Dov

Daring Fireball points to this Core77 venn diagram of American Apparel’s brand. I offer up an abandoned post regarding the same issue. Not really worth reading but I hate wasting my time:

Dov Charney covers the whole Woody Allen lawsuit by trying to explain away the billboards as being “designed to inspire dialogue”. Fair enough if you disregard the fact that the dialogue would only serve Dov Charney’s interests and a conversation that’s that one sided isn’t really a dialogue.

There was a time when AA was a brand that you could be proud of. A brand that had a built in human element that the consumer could be proud to support. Buy AA products and you’re helping us help this marginalized group by providing a living wage. It would be difficult for any person to not get behind that ideal. AA even promotes immigration reform through its Legalize LA campaign. These are all worthy and commendable actions though from a consumers point of view, the public face of these issues has vanished.

Over the course of time, AA has gone from an extremely stark Swiss inspired form of advertising to something that is borderline/entirely pornographic. So much so in fact that AA has featured real porn stars in their ads. This in itself is really a non-issue. What it does though is present AA in a light that is less than flattering and more than embarrassing. It drags American Apparel away from what you’ve been led to believe are the core values of the brand and puts the consumer in the position of either defending, ignoring, or abandoning these values. Add to that the fact that it’s cheap.

American Apparel has pushed itself into the domain of beer advertising where the pitch is “buy our product and you will get laid”. You aren’t selling great taste, you’re selling beer goggles. The same can be said for AA. As Charney states:

The billboards were designed to inspire dialogue. They were certainly never intended to sell clothes. (And they didn’t. We recently hired a market-research company to determine the commercial impact, if any, of the billboards; they found they had no impact on anyone’s decision to shop at our stores.) This was not the first time we used a billboard for something other than to promote our products. Before and since we’ve used them to express social messages—including, for example, our support of immigration reform.

Given the history, this sentiment doesn’t ring true. It might be safer to say that AA is in the business of selling shock or being confrontational. As overheard on Twitter:

I love the reinvention of AA as experimental art project. Maybe that’s what Dov was going for with all the sexual harassment too.

Experimental art project indeed. AA’s advertising has increasingly entered the realm of 2nd year art school project. Some young kid, fresh with confidence and inspired by the changing direction of his peers, takes pictures of his penis and prepares a carefully worded defense: “I wanted to look at sexuality and our place in this world of animals. Why is this shocking? Aren’t we all just animals in our nature? Where do we find the divide?” The result isn’t shocking or inspiring, it’s embarrassing.