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Spread ‘Em: how American Apparel prefers its women

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Patty Huntington exposes the company’s porn-style approach to women

patti huntingtonPatty Huntington over at Frockwriter wrote this blog  about American Apparel’s favoured positioning of women in its advertising. Of course American Apparel has a long history of making women’s sexual parts the central focus of its marketing approach. But some of my blog readers may not realise that American Apparel’s porn-style representations of women have been shipped to Australia with its first store opening in Melbourne in 2008. We at Collective Shout are adding American Apparel to our ‘Cross ‘Em off your Xmas list’ campaign.  Welcome AA to our (growing) list of sexploitation companies to boycott this Christmas. We hope to bring you just that much closer to bankruptcy.

frockwriter

Apparently even American Apparel’s store mannequins have to spread their legs

aa mannequin 1While in town for the Adelaide Fashion Festival a fortnight ago, frockwriter couldn’t help notice the front window of the American Apparel boutique on Rundle Street, the city’s busiest shopping strip. The display included one squatting store mannequin who was flashing rather a lot of va-jay-jay. Not literally, as she was wearing a pair of micro utility shorts and of course, most store dummies aren’t that anatomically accurate. But anyone walking past the boutique was confronted by the mannequin’s crotch and it did seem a little in-your-face. Not to mention vulgar.

We were curious if perhaps the artful arrangement of slutty store mannequins might be part of the company’s visual merchandising handbook. A couple of calls to two of American Apparel’s three Australian boutiques bore no fruit. The staff were extremely tight-lipped. All they would tell frockwriter was that everything is managed directly from the American Apparel headquarters in Los Angeles.

But is it all that surprising, really?

This is the very same company that has been responsible for the following genre of advertising imagery:

aa three images

And after a quick net search, we managed to find several other examples of similarly suggestively-posed American Apparel store dummies.

This one was photographed inside an American Apparel factory in 2008:aa bending

And this was photographed in one of American Apparel’s New York stores in the same year:

aa bending red socks

Here is an almost identical mannequin – let’s call it American Apparel’s “Bendaa poo Over and Take It Up The Ass” model – in a Toronto store window display in June this year. With the addition of some faeces, courtesy of the G20 protests.

It’s not the first time that American Apparel and its allegedly notoriously touchy feely founder and ceo Dov Charney have found themselves in the poo.

Charney has been the target of numerous sexual harassment lawsuits – although apparently none of them so far successful – and the company has been targeted by numerous consumer boycotts over its “sexist” advertising.

American Apparel is, moreover, currently being sued by its shareholders and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Perhaps sex doesn’t always sell quite as well as they thought.

—

Conceptuallyand aesthetically slutty

It was interesting to see the twitter debate prompted by Huntington’s use of the term ‘slutty’ in this piece. Some took offense, as though she were applying the term to actual women. She wasn’t. Huntington was referring to the AA’s consistently giving women the slutification treatment.

Huntington provided me this postscript:

This post began as a discussion of American Apparel’s promotional imagery, then segued into a mini debate over slut shaming. I used the term “slutty” twice, referring to American Apparel’s “slutty” ad campaigns and store mannequins – once in a tweet to promote the post and once in the copy.

Some people didn’t like it – one party getting quite worked up over the issue on Twitter on Saturday, urging me to choose an alternative because the word is, she noted, so misogynistic. Others, however, did not seem to have a problem. My original tweet “You’ve seen the slutty ads, now it looks like even american apparel’s shop dummies have to spread ‘em” has been retweeted so far 15 times. When I canvassed opinion specifically about the slut shaming issue on Monday, one reader – a 21 year-old gender studies major [@Alyxg] – noted on Twitter, “I don’t think calling AA’s campaigns slutty shames anyone but AA. Their strategy IS conceptually+aesthetically slutty”.

That’s my view too.

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December 1st, 2010  
Tags: Advertising, American Apparel, boycott, collective shout, objectification, Patty Huntington, pornification, Sexualisation, slut, slutification, slutty

4 Responses to “Spread ‘Em: how American Apparel prefers its women”

  1. Joni
    December 1st, 2010 at 11:35 am

    I was really surprised when I saw these advertisements. I’m not familiar with American Apparel and this was the first time I’d seen their advertising. The ads are disgusting and the dummies are grotesque. So happy to see them being boycotted!


  2. Jess
    December 1st, 2010 at 11:36 am

    I don’t know why, but I’m always shocked to see people getting away with this kind of behavior. Everyone always raves on about the world being so “politically correct” … but it’s clear that that is definitely not the case at all.


  3. Louise
    December 1st, 2010 at 12:39 pm

    I completely agree with Patty’s original article. I live in Adelaide, and some time ago, there was the image of a woman’s breasts, nipples just covered by a leotard with a plunging neckline, squashed against a clear glass. This image was then blown up and plastered onto a window on the second floor of the American Apparel window.

    I love Rundle Street, but everytime I saw that picture, I felt slightly nauseous. I couldn’t articulate that feeling when it happened, but now, I understand.

    I was (and am) repulsed by a company that consistently uses pornographic aesthetic to pull customers, perhaps through shock value. I hate that images like this normalise the regular depiction of women (and mannequins) of solely sexual objects in our culture. And I despise that American Apparel have made corporate policies surrounding the voyeuristic dominance of objectified women.

    I’m excited that Collective Shout is adding American Apparel to their boycott list; American Apparel is the first company I ever boycotted, because of their hyper-sexualised advertising.

    I wrote amateurly about my experience with American Apparel here: http://nightingalesrose.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/american-apparel/

    (Melinda I think this was the first time I encountered you and your writings! Hurray!)


  4. Nicole J
    December 2nd, 2010 at 8:12 am

    I’m a bit sad to boycott American Apparel as they supply affordable sweatshop-free kids t-shirts to a couple of designers we love… but not too sad to write to them and ask them to find a new supplier!!

    Less sad about boycotting a company whose high (low?) point of 2010 was running a “best bottom in the world” contest to find a new ‘face’ for their underwear line. Contestants were encouraged to “Send in a close-up photo of your backside wearing American Apparel panties, bodysuits or briefs for consideration” and entries were scored by visitors to the website. Why pay for porn when you can freely visit American Apparel’s gallery of headless, faceless booty, and add your opinion about the quality of the merchandise to boot?

    No surprise either that the Glee cast members in Terry Richardson’s GQ shoot were decked out in American Apparel either.


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