All- "American" Girls: in the flesh

Carlee JensenManaging Editor You can see them perched on a cliff in the Hollywood Hills, eyes wide and breasts bared to the city of Los Angeles down below. They lay sprawled seductively on your coffee table or patio furniture, or swing bare-bottomed from low-hanging tree branches. They beckon to you from billboards and magazines, peddling clothes largely absent from the images in which they appear.They are the American Apparel girls — representatives of a clothing company whose sweatshirts, tights and leotards have become the unofficial uniform of Samo’s hipster counterculture.At Samo, a different kind of American Apparel girl walks the halls: the employee. A number of Samo students are employed by American Apparel as sales associates in their local stores.American Apparel’s relationship with its employees is complicated, to say the least. The same company which was praised by “Time” magazine for its sweatshop-free, U.S.-based manufacturing has also been accused — in the United Kingdom’s “The Telegraph,” the media blog “Gawker.com” and in numerous lawsuits over the past several years — of objectifying policies and appearance-based discrimination.What do American Apparel employees at Samo — young women who are immersed in both the company and the youth culture which worships it — have to say on these matters? Reports from current and former employees paint a picture as complicated as any found in “Jane Magazine.”One highly controversial aspect of American Apparel is its hiring procedure. According to Gola Rakhshani, Samo senior and key-holder in American Apparel’s Main Street store, the decision of whether to hire a candidate or not rests primarily on the candidate’s ability to present an “American Apparel look.”Rakhshani said her interview with American Apparel consisted mainly of the district manager taking photographs of her — about 30 photos, she estimated.Former American Apparel employees, senior Lily Monbouquette and sophomore Caroline Huber — both of whom worked for the company last year — claimed to have been hired without an interview. According to Huber, an employee approached the two girls while they were shopping in the store, complimented their clothing and asked if they were interested in working for the store. The employee then took their photographs, and Huber and Monbouquette were contacted with job offers shortly after.According to the company’s website, standard hiring procedure at American Apparel does include an interview; Monbouquette said her hire was the result of a company practice called “recruiting,” which awards cash bonuses to employees who refer new hires to the company.“I did modeling when I was [younger], and it was just like that,” Monbouquette said. “They take your picture, they send it in and if you have the right look, you get hired. At American Apparel, it was exactly the same thing — it was all about looks.”In a 2009 statement to the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail,” American Apparel CEO Dov Charney responded to accusations of appearance-based discrimination saying, “At American Apparel, we strive to hire salespeople who have an enthusiasm for fashion and retail and who themselves have good fashion sense, but this does not necessarily mean they have to be physically attractive.”Though American Apparel claims in the statement that screening its potential employees for style “is a standard practice among fashion-forward retailers,” a June 2010 post in the “New York Magazine” fashion blog said other popular retailers — including American Eagle Outfitters, Anthropolgie, Betsey Johnson and Saks Fifth Avenue — do not photograph their employees or potential hires.“Some people get a little intimidated … but I don’t think it makes that much of a difference in whether we’re hired or not,” Rakhshani’s co-worker a senior at Samo said of the practice. She claims she was told that the photographs were intended to help the company recognize its employees on a “name-face basis.”Rakhshani's co-worker who wished to remain anonymous attributes her lack of concern over the hiring process to the fact that American Apparel employees “don’t all look the same.”“It’s not just a bunch of little white skinny girls. A lot of people have the assumption that stores like that would only hire a certain demographic, but we actually have a pretty diverse demographic,” the Samo senior said. “They don’t hire cliché girls.”If Rakhshani’s instincts are to be trusted, it’s not bra size or BMI that creates an “American Apparel Girl.” She defined the American Apparel look in a more ethereal way.“Natural — they want to see natural,” Rakhshani said.In keeping with Rakhshani’s assessment, a statement on the company’s website addressed to potential hires says, “There should be a firm understanding that our brand image embraces the natural human state including physical imperfections.”American Apparel advertisements frequently feature models — many of whom are sales associates plucked straight from the company’s stores, according to an anonymous salesperson — with unshaven armpits and unkempt hair, their faces bare of makeup.This “au naturel” aesthetic is meticulously maintained in the company’s stores. Employees are discouraged from wearing makeup on the sales floor and, according to Huber, they are often asked to take “natural” to a more extreme level.“[The company] definitely promoted nudity, I think,” Huber said. “They had a mesh line there that was all see-through, and they definitely preferred it if you would wear the see-through top without a bra underneath. They asked many people to make it look as naked as possible.”Though Huber claimed this standard of “nudity” was never forced on employees, other standards of dress and presentation were strictly enforced. According to company memos released on “Gawker” in June 2010, employees are encouraged to refrain from dying or using excessive product in their hair, from cutting bangs or fringe and over-plucking their eyebrows.All an employee’s clothes, including socks or stockings, must be American Apparel brand. The company’s dress code manual, which was released by “Gawker” blogger Hamilton Nolan on the Australian blog “Defamer” in 2010, said shoes should have a “classic, sophisticated, preferably vintage look.”One employee, who requested her name be withheld, remembered seeing co-workers with blisters on their feet from ill-fitting high-heeled shoes, into which they were asked to change when their own shoes were deemed “off-brand” — not compliant with the company’s standard of dress. The employee also claimed she was asked to work in the back room, out of sight of the customers, on days when the management disliked her clothing.American Apparel representatives could not be contacted for comment on these matters. However, an article in the “New York Times” magazine’s fashion blog suggests it is common practice among retailers to promote their company’s desired aesthetic through dress code standards; in the same way McDonald’s employees are required to wear a company uniform, employees must wear the seasonal styles at Abercromie & Fitch, and limit themselves to a specific color palette at Banana Republic.“Everything is about looks,” Monbouquette said. “Everything. I was very vain when I worked there; I spent most of my time while I was working standing in front of the mirrors in the dressing rooms.”Huber and Monbouquette may have had different experiences had they been hired at the company today; reports say company standards have changed in recent months. In response to what Rakhshani called their “unfavorable” image, American Apparel has undergone “branding” — a process of tweaking and tightening standards to make the company appear, in another anonymous co-worker's words, “classier” and “more professional.”“They’re creating this new image of being really preppy,” Rakhshani said. “Everything’s really classy — but it’s really pseudo-classy, because everything is just as short as it used to be, it’s just as provocative as it used to be, it’s just that now it has a collar on it.”Whether or not the clothes themselves have changed, American Apparel has remained first in the hearts of Samo students  as the supplier of knee socks and unitards — and has remained a first choice employer as well.Perhaps this willingness to support the controversial enterprise is indicative of what Rakhshani called “the morality of a 21st century kid” — an openness and permissiveness which remains unfazed in the face of practices which older generations find offensive.Or perhaps it is indicative of the true nature of the company, beneath the seedy rumors. As the anonymous Samo senior said, “It’s a good job for a teenager. I don’t think by any means they treat us badly.”Whatever the reason, it is the support of, as American Apparel calls them, “today’s young trendsetters” that has made the company an empire.cjensen@thesamohi.com