The American Way in L.A.

In one sense, it's not what American Apparel does so much as HOW it does it that has drawn the spotlight to this downtown L.A. garment manufacturer and retailer. Despite a cutthroat garment industry known for cheap overseas labor and insufferable working conditions as the only way to remain competitive, American Apparel makes a profit while maintaining a US manufacturing plant, paying generous wages ($12.50 to $18 per hour, according to a company press release) and offering health care benefits to its workers in an industry known more for health hazards than health care. Its web site declares "Made in Downtown L.A.--Sweatshop free," and the firm's founder, Canadian native Dov Charney, calls his company socially conscious and proud of it. Charney qualifies as quirky by most standards, having posed bare-bottomed with his back to the camera for the aforementioned ad. In recent photos Charney, whose company is considered the epitome of hip and stylish, sports a moustache that connects with lamb-chop sideburns in a look that was last considered hip in about 1860. His company's web site cites Charney's "socially responsible initiatives" that have included affordable health care for employees and their families, immigration support, free English classes and computer instruction, subsidized lunches and bus passes. When the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority went on strike a few years ago, Charney's company launched an Employee Bicycle Program that offered free bikes and cycling accoutrements for any worker who wanted them. In cycling of another sort, the company says it re-cycles more than a million pounds of fiber scraps annually.

American Apparel has generated its latest round of press attention through its part in an unusual deal in Houston in which the L.A. retailer will be the beneficiary of a $150,000 grant from a group called the Houston Downtown Management District, a business improvement district, or BID. Like many BIDs that have formed in the past dozen years or so that range from the Times Square Alliance in New York to L.A.'s Hollywood Entertainment District, the Houston Downtown Management District aims to improve a specific business neighborhood through programs funded by mostly voluntary assessments paid by property owners in the district. The $150,000 grant that will benefit American Apparel is part of $1 million in grants that the Houston group has budgeted to bring retailers into its BID.

The $150,000 will not go to American Apparel, however. The Houston BID has awarded the $150,000 to another Southern California firm, KBS Realty Advisors of Newport Beach, which owns the building at 1111 Main St. in Houston where American Apparel will leasing 4,300 sf for a new retail store. The $150,000 will go for tenant improvements for American Apparel's space in the Main Street building, which was built in 1951 and which KBS bought in 1998. American Apparel hasn't announced when it will open the Houston store, but it will likely be in the space by the end of this year. If any other retailer moved in, it would probably attract little notice, but American Apparel draws notice because it has a way of attracting attention to itself. In explaining its reasons for paying higher wages than many garment makers, for example, the company says, "Exploitative labor tactics are not only inhumane, but are far less effective than using technology and innovation to advance business." That's a jarring sort of language that rarely appears in corporate press releases. But the language also implies that American Apparel isn't just being different for the sake of being different, it's being different for the sake of both probity and profit.