Selling Clothes With Softcore Porn

Many companies use sexual images to sell their products. Walk into Abercrombie and Fitch, and you’ll be bombarded with images of men with six-pack abs wearing incredibly low-rise jeans. Fashion magazines are full of ads featuring beautiful models passionately embracing attractive men. But these ads are nowhere near as suggestive and downright creepy as American Apparel ads.

                A typical American Apparel ad has a woman wearing little clothing in various sexually suggestive positions. Many of the models are just girls that Dov Charney, the CEO who does most of the photography himself, picks up off the street. This is especially disturbing when you take into account all the times the Charney has been accused of sexual harassment and even rape by his female employees.

                The ads I’ve included here are relatively tame compared to many of the company's others, but they still give off amateur-porn vibes. The photos in both of these ads look like they were taken while the model was having sex with the photographer; they are poorly lit and don’t look like they’ve been staged. What are they supposed to be selling? The girl on the left is wearing a white tank top, but the focus is definitely not on the clothes. In the ad on the right, what the model is wearing is a complete mystery. In fact, Dov Charney’s face is more visible than the clothing. The true purpose of these ads is probably shock value—by having controversial ads, American Apparel gets people talking about the company and remembering their name.

                The one positive aspect of American Apparel ads is that they aren’t retouched, so the women in them actually look like normal people, which is a refreshing change from the airbrushed photos in almost every other ad. Photoshopped images in magazines make so many people feel like they aren’t good enough because they don’t meet the impossible standards of beauty put forth by the media. Women in American Apparel ads have scars, stretch marks, body hair, and other “imperfections,” which I really like. However, due to their general creepiness, these ads still certainly don’t make me want to go to American Apparel.