No Overtime at the Boner Factory

Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles by Kate Flannery. Henry Holt and Co., 320 pages. 2023.

To build America’s first vertically integrated textile factory, Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to Great Britain to learn advanced production methods, where visions of knotted orphans made him swear off child labor forever. As Thomas Dublin details in Women at Work, Lowell returned to Massachusetts with a more palatable idea for low-wage workers: young, unmarried women, aged fifteen to twenty-three.

To convince the Congregationalist farmers of New England to send their daughters to the mills, Lowell and his shareholders needed to put them at ease. The Boston Manufacturing Company would thus house the girls, look after their basic needs, try their very best not to maim them, and occupy their idle hands with twelve-hour workdays, six-day work weeks, and compulsory religious services on the Sabbath. To preserve their chastity at night, matrons would watch over the girls as they slept. This relentless effort to keep minds and bodies from sex and strikes had other outcomes. A 1949 book on the New England industrialist scene notes that three U.S. presidents visited, as well as a parade of congressman, who were all entranced by Lowell’s creation:

a planned town, with the mills as a focal point, and dwellings for the operatives nearby, not crowding on one another, but with open spaces, vistas of water and green hills, lawns and flower gardens, a town planned for living with no loss of human dignity.

Had Lowell found a gentler way to extract surplus value? He died before he could find out—in 1817, age forty-two, just three years into his tenure as the first modern American capital-C Capitalist. His experiment produced an assortment of notable women, including a suffragette, a poet, an editor, a sculptor and a labor organizer, as well as The Lowell Offering, America’s first working-class, woman-run literary magazine. Though Lowell became an accidental patron of working-class art and politics, the girls couldn’t quite make it to middle age. Without Lowell’s guiding hand, shareholders could no longer muster much paternal impulse. When the Great Famine sent a glut of Irish labor to the mills, the Boston Manufacturing Company, suddenly freed of any economic pressure to maintain a stable workforce or safe working conditions, closed the schools and the boarding houses and sent the matrons home. Life in Lowell became very different. Within the great body of writing produced there, this 1845 letter from Mary S. Paul to her father in Vermont:

Last Thursday one girl fell down and broke her neck which caused instant death. She was going in or coming out of the mill and slipped down it being very icy. The same day a man was killed by the [railroad] cars. Another had nearly all of his ribs broken. Another was nearly killed by falling down and having a bale of cotton fall on him. Last Tuesday we were paid.

Thomas Jefferson had anticipated that manufacturing would break the social contract and warned fellow members of the ruling class that they would soil themselves if they got too close to the means of production. “I consider the class of artificers as the panders of vice & the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned,” he wrote in 1785. (Slavery was a blind spot.) The first generation of Americans to buy factories instead of people would keep Jefferson’s concerns at the forefront, but by the time the profit motive had deformed their characters as he said it would, they were too rich to care about their immortal souls.

Corporate paternalism should have died with the first girl who broke her neck, but the openly murderous, mustache-twirling tycoons of the first Gilded Age still managed to awe. At the hour of Gordon Gekko, however, the public face of the manufacturing sector was Jack Welch, a malevolent dork in an ill-fitting suit possessed by a singular hatred for job security and remunerative manual labor. As Welch and other manufacturers hustled to move their remaining operations offshore, retail went into a slump.

Reagan obliterated many things, like the regulatory system and the labor movement, for two, thus choking off a generation’s access to a grown-up political vocabulary and a framework for political action. Young people learned to navigate the era’s stunning disappointments by channeling them into mannered rituals that embodied, neutralized, and exorcized their liberal despair. Instead of politics, aesthetics. At colleges and VA halls, in dive bars and basements, Gen X white kids put on rock shows and sold records and T-shirts; capitalism was something some assholes were up to at some distant, sweaty mall.

And right there among the basement youth—behold the father of Gen X capitalism, a true genius of the form! Like those who came two hundred years before him, twenty-first-century America’s first textile baron would require a workforce of unmarried women in their teens and early twenties and would pay them as little as he reasonably could. But where Francis Cabot Lowell had tried to preserve his girls’ virtue, Dov Charney fucked them. He would break history’s crucible in a pair of nut-huggers.

Charney grew up in Quebec. Like Lowell, he attended boarding school in New England; then Tufts, dropping out in 1990. While there, he started a business making wholesale cotton T-shirts for bands without using sweatshop labor.

In 1997, under the name American Apparel, Dov Charney bought a city block in downtown Los Angeles with a warehouse on it and opened a vertically integrated production facility. In interviews, he told reporters he would reinvigorate American manufacturing by paying higher-than-average wages and providing decent working conditions. He promised to treat his laborers with dignity. Auspicious timing: that same year, a report on a Nike factory near Ho Chi Minh City with carcinogenic air implicated Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and Bill Clinton convened a task force of representatives from America’s largest clothing manufacturers to solve the problem of sweatshops.

Americans were surprised to learn that most every consumer good was likely made with the blood of the faceless poor. Charney had spent a decade selling T-shirts to conscience-stricken college students and was able to meet the moment with a product that could transmogrify late capitalist guilt into a sense of self-satisfaction. Toward the end of Bush’s first term, American Apparel built up enough steam to open its first retail stores.

Kate Flannery, author of Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, the first account of life as an American Apparel girl, traveled to Charney’s mill in 2004 at age twenty-three. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she seemingly carried no student debt. But unlike the sons and daughters of the American middle class who had graduated and moved to Los Angeles even just a few years earlier—white flight had only officially reversed in the mid-1990s—Flannery and her cohort lacked several key advantages. The cheap real estate was gone and the Clinton economy with it, as was their parents’ enthusiasm for or ability to purchase investment properties for their offspring to live in for free or rent to their less fortunate pals. The scarcity value of liberal arts grads dropped as more and more kids went to college, and millennials who had hoped to become librarians or lawyers or journalists or college professors once the boomers retired faced rapidly diminishing prospects. What would the ruling class do with this fatberg of disappointed knowledge workers?

Charney drew young, college-educated women to his white-collar labor force using tactics commonly associated with the nonprofit space, pulling at his girls’ heartstrings to justify his wage theft (in Flannery’s case, hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime while making $30,000 a year). The cornerstone of his public image, his treatment of the vulnerable populations on his assembly lines, helped separate warehouse workers from girls by establishing a hierarchy of benefactor and supplicant. Though salaries for corporate jobs at American Apparel put Charney’s knowledge workers nowhere near the middle class, their yearly allocation of middle-class smugness almost made up for it.

Before her job interview, an apparatchik drilled Flannery on the details of American Apparel’s “egalitarian system.” Charney, an “ethical capitalist,” was “committed to a better life for all of his employees, while also committed to turning a profit.” Charney called what he was doing a revolution in fashion, sex, and globalization. “The whole operation appeared to be the veritable melting pot that my public high school had always promised America to be. Racial and cultural diversity fueled the creative nucleus of this brand,” Flannery writes. She was ecstatic at finding a “perfectly progressive job.”

“I hadn’t ever heard anyone speak genuinely of a revolution,” Flannery remembers. “Apart from the time Gloria Steinem came to school to speak and what I’d heard on my parents’ Beatles records, social revolutions seemed to live in the 1960s, resulting in the birth control pill and the Black Panthers.” Move over, Huey P. Newton. As the apparatchik told Flannery, Charney “rides the city buses early in the morning and finds his workers on the way to their awful sweatshop jobs in the garment district, and he brings them here instead. How many CEOs do that?”

Along with the satisfaction associated with helping the less fortunate, American Apparel girls got a steeply discounted supply of the finest consumer thrills 2004 had to offer: not just T-shirts but hoodies and booty shorts and camis and bra tops and bodysuits and disco pants. In Flannery’s estimation, an “emotional osmosis happens with clothes and the people who wear them, so it stands to reason that garments ethically manufactured are a wellspring of good vibes.” She goes on:

These undies were made by skilled laborers, compensated fairly for their efforts instead of being sucked dry by the capitalist parasite. There had to be good karma in buying ethical underwear like that. Maybe you’d spend the year that you wore them having satisfying sex, or at least avoid shitting your pants.

Charney called his warehouse the Factory. In this uniquely debased time and place, the nod to 1960s New York sent Flannery into the realm of Warholian fantasy. As part of the interview process, she donned a romper to take sexy Polaroids on the roof. She thrilled at the “quivering piles” of underwear on the assembly line, yoga routines broadcast over speakers in Spanish, and fliers on the warehouse bulletin board for free English lessons and an on-call masseuse. On another floor, Flannery discovered her future colleagues, most of them beautiful women under the age of twenty-five. This was Charney’s intellectual labor force, the young creatives responsible for taking the American Apparel brand global. To do so, they had invented a marketing persona they called the Classic Girl—a “blank canvas;” “clean, brandless;” “cute, but she’s not trying too hard;” “no beauty queen, but she’s definitely hot. She’s fuckable, you know?”

In the retail stores, Flannery encountered another kind of American Apparel employee: the Dov girl. These were Charney’s “girlfriends that are on the payroll” and “in the ads sometimes;” some of them lived in his mansion. Flannery met Charney for the second time as he was fucking one in a fitting room. As part of her job, Flannery flew around the country finding girls to staff the retail stores and pose for sexy Polaroids to send to the father of Gen X capitalism. “I needed hard workers like the LA girls, not just girls who looked the part. Girls who needed the money and the hours and the health insurance. Girls who were hungry for opportunity. Girls like me,” Flannery writes. She tried to recruit some Mormons who were put off by a photo on American Apparel’s home page of “a girl hovering over Dov’s crotch in blue nylon shorts,” which “told them everything they needed to know about the ethical paradise I tried to hustle them on.”

Charney’s horny ethics are at odds with some feminists too, of course. A journalist visited, and he jerked off in front of her—“eight or so times.” Employees accused him of sexual assault. Flannery recalls an astonishing staff meeting at which Charney dropped his pants and railed against “PC bullshit” in a pair of pink briefs. “We’re changing the culture here, and it’s big work,” he ranted. “There are puritanical forces set to destroy everything we’ve built so far! Don’t let them.”

Although George W. Bush was busy occupying himself with what he called “promoting a culture of life,” Charney was a Clinton-era man who appreciated how sexualized young women strengthen the neoliberal enterprise and reinscribe patriarchy. As the movement crescendoed, Charney flooded Los Angeles with grainy, intimate-seeming billboards of girls in tight, plunging Spandex, or in sweatshirts and underwear, what Flannery describes as “just a real-life girl going about the business of girlhood, not really modeling.” As the ads reminded us, going about the business of girlhood in late capitalism involved staring down an endless parade of boners, no matter what the president was saying.

Where Francis Cabot Lowell had understood puritanical forces as complementary to enterprise, Charney feared their limiting powers on his penis, which he and others recognized as the source of his manufacturing success. Considering Charney’s crotch bulge, Flannery calls it “the driving force propelling all this provocative chaos that was making the company thrive.” From that journalist’s profile in Jane magazine, a quote from a twenty-two-year-old-model who agreed to meet Charney in a hotel:

I’m not like other girls. People were like, “Be careful, he’s a walking erection.” I wanted to know what a “walking erection” is. So I went to his room and he just starts talking about his company, lying on his bed, like an emperor, really at ease.

American Apparel seems to have offered the unreconstructed sexual politics of the casting couch without the possibility of any lasting financial reward. Accepting them gave the girls access to parties and party drugs and Charney associates like Kids director Larry Clark and photographer Terry Richardson. Each man has faced accusations of sexual assault and/or exploitation and had greasy hair, silly whiskers, and stupid glasses.

But how could such an ancient dynamic seem perfectly progressive to a graduate of the Seven Sisters? Could misogyny have been so intrinsic to life in the Bush years that working for a lunatic Priapus seemed preferable to a regular nine-to-five? Did deadstock aviators act as Groucho Marx glasses on the face of boring old misogyny, and were they really glamorous enough to dazzle young women into taking off their clothes? Flannery, for one, does not find Charney attractive, nor does she have sex with him; she knows that a boss who has sex with his female employees is committing acts of sexual exploitation. But Flannery finds traditional notions of sexual exploitation so infantilizing and recherché that she reduces second-wave feminism to just Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, whom she bewilderingly refers to as a “goody-goody.” Without material analysis or understanding, working for a known sex pest can offer a circuitous path to sexual liberation: Flannery starts having sex with the college-aged boys she hires to work in the retail stores.

He may not have exuded sex appeal, but Flannery admits that Charney did possess great personal magnetism. She calls American Apparel a cult and suggests that Charney is a Charles Manson-like figure, making references structural and linguistic to Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and Emma Cline’s The Girls. Although Charney’s circumstances make for a particularly extreme example, they were in no way uncommon, then or now. Stretching across time and industry: a man at the center of and in power over a group of younger, poorer, less powerful women. (This is always especially true in the field of cultural production and those adjacent to it.) As more and more millennials joined the industries Gen X built, disparity grew.

Did Gen X men construct their whole culture around lassoing these waves of younger women into depressing, high-stakes, semi-consensual sex acts? Surely not! But if they had, Charney would get extra credit for his accomplishments in transforming a highly profitable source of cheap intellectual labor into a boundless parade of the aforementioned creepy sex; to people like Charney, this must have really meant something.

Despite a growing number of public charges against him, Charney continued to lead American Apparel after it went public in 2007 (after being acquired by a special-purpose acquisition company for $385 million). Charney’s personal net worth ballooned to $550 million. In a breathless feature story about the deal, the Wall Street Journal described American Apparel as “sexy” and “sassy,” calling Charney its “biggest draw.” A few paragraphs from the bottom: a throwaway line about a “footloose atmosphere” that has “brought on some controversy” which included, at that point, just four sexual harassment lawsuits.

By the time the board finally fired him in 2014, Forbes reported that Charney had collected not only allegations of sexual harassment but also “assault,” “misuse of funds,” “hurling racial and ethnic slurs at staffers,” “rampant innuendo about his ‘playboy’ lifestyle,” as well as rumors that he “paraded around the factory floor in his underwear.” Worst of all, a former employee had come forward with claims that Charney “kept her as his personal ‘sex slave’ for a period of eight months.”

Seven years passed between American Apparel’s IPO and Charney’s dismissal. No one stepped in to curb his ungentlemanly behavior, consumers rewarded it, and the press thought he was fun.

When Francis Cabot Lowell decided to hire women instead of children, his community praised his Protestant virtue and business acumen. “The productiveness of . . . [the textile factories] depends upon one primary and indispensable condition—the existence of an industrious, sober, orderly, and moral class of operatives,” noted a contemporary Unitarian minister. Although Flannery’s account of her time at American Apparel makes it difficult to assess whether her life was any better than that of the Lowell mill girls, it’s clear Charney’s system was no less rigid.

In any case, Charney’s twisted vision of ethical-cum-smutty capitalism came on hard times: in the wake of fast fashion’s rise, American Apparel filed for bankruptcy—twice, in 2015 and again in 2016—before eventually being sold to Gildan for $88 million, which promptly shuttered all retail stores and outsourced production, mostly to Honduras. Unfazed, Charney announced he was starting Los Angeles Apparel, an exact replica of his original brand. They did quite well manufacturing and selling masks at the start of the pandemic, though hundreds of workers were infected. Four died. The form-fitting leotards and disco pants are back.

It’s rumored Charney may soon be appointed the CEO of Yeezy.