American Apparel Clothes Are ‘Made in Downtown L.A.’ Will That Change?

One of American Apparel’s selling points has always been that its T-shirts and other clothes are actually made in America—in a seven-story, salmon-colored factory in downtown Los Angeles to be exact. There are a lot of hypersexualized ads, too, of course, which have received plenty of criticism. But the company’s commitment to manufacturing in the city and paying its workers something close to a living wage was hard to find fault with.

American Apparel founder Dov Charney was responsible for both the ads and the wages. So after he was pushed out by the board of directors, people rightly began to wonder if either would change. Ryan Holiday, the company’s director of marketing, had an answer to the first part: No. “I think that sexuality and evocative imagery, done authentically and honestly, has always been a critical part of the American Apparel aesthetic, and there would be no reason for us to abandon the brand that we’ve built and that our customers love,” he told Adweek.