Friday is Venus Day

Katrina Onstad has a piece in the Globe and Mail today celebrating the apparent death of American Apparel. The reason for this is a little too obvious; American Apparel profited from sale of slutwear.

The company combined sleazy marketing of slutty clothes with a claim of ethical business practices. And that really rubs people like Onstad the wrong way. It's an odd thing for ethical business practices are exactly what Onstad wants from business. Like a child, however, Onstad imagines that good things will go together as if handsome princes would always be good and ugly hunch-backed kings would always be evil. When a company with ethical business practices floods the market with exactly the sorts of clothes that Onstad wishes young women wouldn't wear, it upsets her entire sense of moral order.

But her sense of moral order should be upset if you ask me because Katrina Onstad's sense of moral order is highly unrealistic and childish. You can either take my word for that or go look up some of what she has written.

Let's have a look at her article though and note two things.

The first thing is that young women chose to buy this stuff. It wasn't forced on them and they didn't lack choice. I live near a university campus and I have seen lots of American Apparel clothing on the young women who go to university. They wear this stuff even when it obviously isn't warm enough and are just chomping at the bit to peel off their warm outer clothes on warm fall or spring afternoon. It will hit 19 degrees this afternoon (that's about 66 Fahrenheit) and the same girls who walked onto campus this morning with sweaters and jackets will walk off this afternoon wearing skimpy tops with maximum breast exposure even though it won't actually be that warm.

This is the issue that Onstad just doesn't want to face: that girls and women are  just as prone to evil and stupidity as boys and men are. Given the freedom to buy what they want and the economic means to do so, young women promptly dashed out and bought slutty clothing because young women love the sexual attention it gets them. Onstad, a woman in her late 30s doesn't like this which is perfectly reasonable. I wouldn't like it either if I were her. But if I were a hot 19 year old girl with a firm, beautiful body I might equally reasonably wonder what's wrong with getting a little sexual attention.

The second thing to note is related to the first and that is Onstad's economic illiteracy. Here is how she sets up the issue in her opening paragraphs.

A Polaroid of a dead-eyed young woman in undies and tube socks on a dirty tousled bed isn’t usually an emblem of social justice. The peace dove doesn’t get photographed like that.

Yet for nearly a decade, American Apparel has merged such DIY-porn images in its ads with an anti-sweatshop, corporate-responsibility ethos. Luckily for those whose exploding heads cannot contain this much contradiction, American Apparel may be dying.

And for the rest of the article, Onstad focuses on the declining market appeal of slutwear. The problem, of course is that American Apparel is far from the only company selling this stuff. Old Navy, American Eagle, Lululemon, to name only a few, have all done pretty well out of it too. These and other companies that capitalized on the boom in slutwear will reposition themselves to whatever new trend comes along when that new trend comes along. It is only American Apparel that cannot negotiate the move.

And here we have a dog that doesn't bark. Onstad doesn't consider even for a second whether American Apparel's financial problems might be a function of the thing she likes as opposed to what she doesn't like. That is, she doesn't ask whether it is precisely their insistence on doing the work here in North America where labour is more expensive and not in foreign "sweat shops" that caused them to suffer. And that is significant because the people who do this sort of analysis for a living all think that and not the product or marketing is probably the root of the company's financial difficulties.

And it also doesn't occur to Onstad that corporate responsibility  and the slutty image are not, as she describes it, a head-exploding contradiction but part of the same marketing strategy. Because urban young women respond to both these things. It's not a  contradiction at all and right in line with everything that gets sold to the kind of young woman who lives in the city and doesn't like to think too deeply about the contradictions in her life. The young woman who takes up Yoga as much because it allows her to wear Lululemon pants as anything else; who likes the easy spirituality of Yoga and the easy morality of vegetarianism and the easy politics of "corporate social responsibility" and the easy "freedom" that comes from dressing like a slut without having to think through the complicated issues relating to any of these things.