When shots of teenagers in hot-shorts hit billboards, a lot of people (including me) labeled American Apparel ads as amateur, soft-core porn. The reason is that, amateur or not, porn looks crappier than its Hollywood counterpart because it cuts straight to the point. American Apparel ads, they also cut straight to the point.
You see, AA is just as cavalier as any other hip label that uses sex to sell clothing. They’ve just done away with the airbrushed, under-fed coat-hangers that have been preying on teenaged insecurity for the last decade.
The thing is that it’s the norm to use sex to sell clothing, and without it, no one will take AA seriously. They’d be just another Hanes or Fruit of a Loom. So, instead, they’ve cut out the Botox and bulls**t, and use their employees to show us just how sexy plain old t-shirts can be. Besides, the minimalist approach to marketing kind of fits with they’re whole plain-cotton-t shtick.
The reason the ads have been so controversial is because they’re so effective. These people aren’t models that would never look at you twice. They’re people that you might actually have a chance with if you ever meet them, and you just might meet them the next time you walked into your local American Apparel store.
American Apparel isn’t selling the idea that if you wore their clothes you’d be sexy, they’re selling the idea that you already are sexy, and so are their employees, and maybe the next time you’re perusing the racks in their store, you too just might get discovered. And that’s a bit more democratic than the elitist, haute-couture bullshit that was coming out of Paris and Milan.
They’re not just selling sex, they’re selling celebrity. This is Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes, and it works so well because saying Last night, I did body-shots off of Dora from that American Apparel ad than it is to say Dude, I boned Katie Holmes. It also sounds a lot more believable.
The only thing that American Apparel ads have in common with porn is their low production quality. The fact of the matter is that North American teens do dress provocatively, and they look good when they do, so if you’re drawing parallels between AA ads and snuff-porn, that says more about you than it does about them.