13 March: "Worried abt American Apparel"

This post is about alienated labor. In a subtle yet pointed performance of misdirection, Carles both reveals and disguises the underlying labor issues surrounding clothing manufacturer American Apparel. In the last analysis, American Apparel extracts surplus labor from its proletarian workforce and typically distracts its customers from this basic fact with commoditized sex and lascivious marketing come-ons. Naturally, Carles takes notice of an ad that strays from this formula.

I’m kinda worried about Am Appy. I saw this advertisement, and it wasn’t a traditional ad of a ‘hot girl’ showing off her perfect alternative figure. Instead, the advertisement was meant to highlight what a great company Am Appy is bc they hire unskilled ppl, make them skilled, and then pay them above-market wages + give them a chance to wear Am Appy clothes at work + learn English +etc.

In other words, when the company does foreground its labor practices, it is to cower in the cowl of relativism and point out how much worse the exploitation performed by other clothes manufacturers are. The irony here, and Carles' incisive point, is that American Apparel's enlightened labor practices consist of converting exploited and marginalized immigrant workers into fashion-conscious consumerist stooges who are no better off in real terms.

Carles then purposely belabors the consumer-retail end of American Apparel's business to illustrate how our preoccupations with self-fashioning and the meaningless, arbitrary cycles of fashion itself render us ignorant and apathetic about the vagaries of the contingent business cycle, its effects on the proletariat, and the ongoing immiseration it causes. "Kinda sad that I didn’t know there was a ‘financial crisis’ going on behind the scenes of Am Appy," Carles explains sardonically. "Not sure how businesses work, though, so maybe ‘mergers and acquisitions’ are . Feel like ’such a consumer’ sometimes."

Consumers, despite their fruitless efforts to differentiate themselves and realize their corporate-issue individuality, end up being less significant ontological entities than the corporations themselves, whose perpetuation they have unwittingly come to serve. Carles, in a damning epigram, captures this inversion concisely: "I wonder if businesses wish they could ‘live 4evr’ kinda like how ppl wish they could live 4evr." Unlimited by the mortality of any one of its constituent members, corporations can do more than dream of forever; individual consumers must merely consume furiously in an effort to forget it.