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hello everybody and welcome back to infamous, a Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media podcast.

I'm Vanessa Gregoriatis, and I am here with Natalie again this week, and we have a wonderful

guest named Amy Merrick, a journalism professor at DePaul

University in Chicago and a freelance writer who wrote a fascinating article about American

Apparel and Dove Charnie, which yes, that is what we are talking about today. For those people

who were full adults or teenagers who did a lot of shopping in the 2000s,

there's no way you did not know American apparel. Natalie wore a lot of it. She's going to talk about

that. But before we start, I do want to read a little bit of an article from the New York Times, from 2004, which describes the owner of American Apparel in the terms really that he wanted to be known.

And things careened wildly out of control after that.

There is a new documentary out that is under the rubric train wreck,

if you want to search for that, all about American Apparel. And it's really, really good.

You might have noticed you don't go to American Apparel store anymore. And there is a reason for that.

And so if you didn't know the whole scandal behind it, you're going to learn it today. But again, as I said, let's start from the beginning. So the owner of American Apparel, his name was Dove Charnie. He told the New York Times in 2004, I think I was born a hustler. I like the hustle. I like selling a product that people love. It's nice when a girl

tries on a bra or a tie-died t-shirt. And it's, ooh, I love it. He says, affecting an ecstatic moan.

So basically, from the beginning, he was like, I'm selling sex and I am just doing this and you should all be into it.

He's this sort of, you know, mudden chops look like this sort of Garmento, 1970s pornographer,

...