This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s Aug. 25 newsletter.
American Apparel was the final resting place for my ego death in the early 2010s. My ass was truly humbled with every shopping trip that forced me to go up at least three sizes to fit into a skirt that was still objectively way too tight, but I was in no position to leave defeated and take the L.
That was part of the strange chokehold American Apparel had on teens and twenty-somethings during what we now call the indie sleaze era. The brand sold a very specific kind of cool: edgy, raunchy and just inaccessible enough to be alluring. At the time, a lot of what made American Apparel feel transgressive was precisely what made it appealing. Looking back, though, some of the things we accepted as part of the aesthetic — the hypersexualized ads, unforgiving sizing and bizarre workplace culture — land very differently. American Apparel founder Dov Charney was eventually fired amid allegations of misconduct and faced multiple sexual-harassment lawsuits.
Illustrator Christina Lee spent her senior year of high school working at the Valley Fair Mall location in Santa Clara, California, from 2009 until she left for college in 2010. She coveted the job as a teenager. Sixteen years later, she’s looking back at what it was actually like to be a teen girl working for one of the era’s most controversial brands — and she made an entire comic book about it, aptly called ‘I Used to Work at American Apparel.’
Before Christina reads her comic at Gutter, a Brooklyn-based comics reading and animation show, at Nook on Sept. 3, I caught up with her to chat more about the comic and how it all came together.
What about your time at American Apparel compelled you to create a comic about it?
Everything was unique to me about working at American Apparel because it was my first part-time job. In fact, I made my first comics when I was 17 years old, and one of them was a 3-panel strip about working at this crazy store.
What compelled me to revisit this subject 16 years later was a desire to reexamine, with new hindsight, the “indie sleaze” subculture that was important to me as a teenager and in my early twenties. I’ve noticed older people being nostalgic for and younger people being enamored with the 2000s, and I wanted to honestly show what it was like to be a young woman in this era; the good, the bad, and the ugly.
What's one moment from working there that still sticks with you?
There are honestly too many moments to choose from, and you will need to read the entire comic for the whole list, but all these moments coalesce into this realization that when you work for an institution, you start to represent [that] institution’s values, even if they may be at odds with your own beliefs. I was a teenage sales associate receiving customer feedback about how American Apparel’s advertising was demeaning to women or how their product sizing was not inclusive of different body types, and these confrontations produced major dissonance to my 16-year-old self: When looking, why did people see the brand instead of seeing me?
Illustration by Christina Lee
How did you personally respond to those customer comments in the moment, as a teenager representing the brand?
I remember apologizing and shelving those incidents to the back of my mind. We had not yet developed a collective consciousness that these customer interactions were related to real issues, but the fact that I still remember these incidents almost 20 years later shows that my teenage self knew that something was fundamentally off.
What surprised you most in revisiting this era with 16 years of hindsight? Did anything you remembered fondly look different to you now, or vice versa?
I think what surprises me the most about this era is my blind optimism: Obama was elected when I was a high school junior, so despite this [era’s] transgressions, there's a bit of a halo effect in all things from this time. From 2008-2016, it did feel like we were making huge strides towards a better world; funny to see how far we've fallen off from this progress.
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American Apparel had some pretty strict rules about what employees could wear. What was the most outrageous rule you had to follow?
I thought the No Ear Gauges rule was pretty egregious given how ubiquitous they were in the 2000s “hipster” subculture… Maybe Dov [Charney, American Apparel founder] was trying to find ways to push people out of the company en masse, sort of like how return-to-work mandates functioned at corporations a year or two ago. American Apparel HQ even offered to pay for employees’ surgeries if they decided to stitch their plugs up.
Illustration by Christina Lee
In hindsight, would you have decided to work there, knowing everything you know now about the culture and environment?
Today, at my current age and with what I know, definitely not. But I coveted working at American Apparel all throughout high school, so it felt like a huge accomplishment to get a job there (even though my application was a photograph to a 40-year-old man). Also, I was at the lowest rung as a part-time sales associate, so I luckily never bore witness to the worst of it.
American Apparel, despite its shortcomings, gave me a sense of belonging that I did not get at my jock-y high school. I worked with some really great people who I bonded with over a shared taste in movies and music, which in today’s day and age of infinite options, is much more difficult to do than it was back then. One of my coworkers gave me a handwritten list of movies to watch before I die that I still cherish today.
Can you share more details about your upcoming appearance at Nook? When can people purchase the printed version of the comic?
I will be reading the comic in full at Gutter, a Brooklyn-based comics reading and animation show, at Nook on Sept. 3. I’ll be selling the comic as a zine at SPX, a Maryland-based indie comics fair, Sept. 12-13. In the meantime, Wig Shop, an online book distributor, will be selling the zine through their web store. Keep an eye out for the product listing to go live on their website in the next week or so.