• Madonna goes all Italian neorealist for spring's Dolce & Gabbana campaign. You'd almost swear these images were by Vittorio de Sica, not Steven Klein. The advertising shots ran as editorial content "previewed" in Italian Vanity Fair. [Swide]

• If you believe TMZ, Elin Nordegren might get back at Tiger in a way that would really hurt: by signing an endorsement deal with Puma. [TMZ]
• Well, that's a twist: Ungaro's C.E.O. is resigning, while Lindsay Lohan will remain with the house that so controversially benefited from her pasty-designing prowess. [WWD]
• Kimora Lee Simmons is not judging America's Next Top Model, not even as a guest, says her rep. [The Cut]
• Saks informed 116 employees at its cosmetics and fragrance counters that the company is eliminating their jobs as soon as the holidays are over. The move comes just weeks after the employees had voted to unionize. Merry Christmas! [NYPost]
• Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy just won the same $50,000 grant as Sapphire, author of Push. [WWD]
• Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady have yet to settle on a name for their week-old baby. Gisele vetoed the one they had picked out two days before giving birth, and they haven't been together long enough since then to really talk about it, says Brady. His only conditions are that it be "a traditional name" and something he can pronounce. [People]
• Zac Posen's collaboration with Target includes an actual gown that can be worn three ways, a tuxedo, and a red leather jacket. The print-heavy capsule collection will get the widest distribution of any Target designer collab yet. [Racked]
• Draw on your clothes lots as a kid? A dress designed by Berber Soepboer and Michiel Schuurman comes with fabric markers so the owner can add color to the eye-catching black and white print. [Daily Mail]
• Advertisements for Olay Definity eye cream featuring Twiggy were the subject of more than 700 public complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority in the U.K., and yesterday, those complaints were upheld. The government watchdog found the heavily retouched advertisement was "misleading." Proctor & Gamble, which owns the Olay brand, voluntarily withdrew the offending ad and replaced it with one they claim has had no post-production in the eye area. [BBC]
• Biba is being revived. Again. [WWD]
• American Apparel is getting into the nail polish business. "We think this nail polish captures what American Apparel is all about — a Made in the USA, high-quality product in a beautiful range of colors. It's a venture of families in manufacturing, from the factory in which the polish is made to the Nail Lacquer logo created by Dov's uncle, the noted graphic designer Israel Charney," says a spokesperson. The 18 shades are named things like "Factory Grey" and "Hassid" and, naturally, "Downtown LA," and they cost $6 a bottle. Expect memos from Dov about appropriate nail and toenail styles imminently, retail drones. [Blackbook]
• Or you could buy this darling new shade of teal, called "Dickweed." [Refinery29]
• Grace Coddington granted a surprisingly revealing interview to the Times of London — and lets slip that she originally proposed Susan Boyle to play the wicked witch in her recent Hansel and Gretel shoot. Anna Wintour nixed the idea and favored Lady Gaga, whom Coddington describes thusly: "She turned up in a white rubber coat, stark naked underneath. No buttons, nothing — and completely you know, shaved." That's right, we just read about Lady Gaga's pubic hair in the pages of a daily paper! Coddington discusses Wintour (they can't fight "like a married couple," Coddington says, because "my marriages haven't been that successful"), front-row fashion week punditry ("I'm not prepared to crush some poor designer who's just spent six months slaving over a collection. I think it's horrible and they all talk about themselves. Plus, the questions are so stupid"), and the car crash that happened in her early 20s ("I remember bleeding all over a policeman and apologising for the mess. I had this driving mirror sticking in my head. I got to the hospital and they started sewing me up. Then someone said, what do you do and I said I'm a model and they said, hang on a minute. They took out all the stitches and made them more fine. Isn't that terrible? Because as a young girl, wouldn't I want the best anyway?"). Coddington admits to favoring British models — Lily Cole, Karen Elson — and says that models these days become successful so early that she sometimes thinks they have "no personality." Then she alludes to working with Karlie Kloss: "I was working with a very successful one the other day and she told me her parents were coming to take her on a trip to the place she loved best. I thought, where's she going — Africa? It was Disney World. And I thought, ‘Good for you. You're still a child'." (Kloss went to Disney World with her parents for her 17th birthday.) Erin O'Connor chimes in to praise Coddington for her work, and for "getting it past the censors." [ToL]
• Lacoste, via a new partnership, is planning to launch high-end handbags and accessories. [WWD]
• Hermès and Gucci each hosted their own name-brand equestrian competitions in the same week. Can you say, "Attempt to appeal to some kind of presumably authentic brand heritage?" [IHT]

Here's the copy of "Dov's Newsletter" the tipster received and passed on to us (click to enlarge):



Writes the tipster:

As an American Apparel employee I am appalled at being told how I have to groom my eyebrows. I am also appalled that this rule seems only for women. I love the idea of "made in USA," but i do not love the idea of being told how to wear my eyebrows by a disgusting creep.

Could this be true? Workplace regulations about appearance are common enough — I once worked at a bakery that specified female employees had to wear bras at all times — and especially rampant in retail. That being said, a company with such a history of sexual harassment should probably be wary of instituting gender-specific rules about personal grooming. So, to recap: lacy bodysuits and shiny nylon disco shorts = fantastic women's workplace attire, but eybrows that don't look like Brooke Shields' = wrong.

Adding insult to the critique is the fact that the eyebrows Charney's newsletter highlights as the wrong ones appear to belong to an American Apparel employee. The cropped photo certainly shows what looks to be an American Apparel store in the background. Modeling for the company's in-house Do's and Don'ts — as a Don't — should be above the pay grade of any $8/hr retail slave.

But mostly, it's just galling to think of taking personal care orders from a guy whose tastes in facial hair betrays heavy influence from these guys:

Says a Sesame Street spokesperson (via an email forwarded to us by a tipster):

As you may know, we are a nonprofit education organization that produces Sesame Street and we license to manufacturing companies the rights to make products using our characters. In this case, our licensee is a manufacturing company called Might Fine and they manufacture a line of Sesame Street shirts which are sold at American Apparel stores.

So this is a sub-licensing deal. Sesame Street licensed its name, and gave access to artwork, to a t-shirt manufacturer — we think the one the company actually means is an outfit called Mighty Fine, which also sells licensed Disney apparel and those "Mustache Brigade" shirts; Big Bird obviously doesn't look too closely at the names on the royalty checks — which then granted a sub-license to American Apparel.

Furthermore:

We do not have a direct relationship with American Apparel and we did not approve the press release that was issued by American Apparel.

Which means that this bit of PR purple prose the t-shirt company gave us at the time is, well, how to put it — a big, fat lie.

Sesame Street, which for nearly half a century has made a mission of educating children in more than 120 countries, approached American Apparel earlier this year with the show's entire catalog of graphics. The two companies immediately connected over the different but passionate ideologies that drive them and set about working together.

Sesame Street didn't "approach" American Apparel at all, and nor was the line the result of an epiphanic realization of mutual accord on the "ideological" front. Perhaps that should be comforting.

Photo illustration by Tracie

Earlier: American Appalling: Dov Charney's Muppet Love

Related: American Apparel and Sesame Street Collaborate on Unique Line of T-Shirts [PRNewswire]
Mighty Fine [Official Site]

• "No one wants to see curvy women," says Karl Lagerfeld, who has struggled with his weight. "You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." [News.com.au]

• Meanwhile, Christian Louboutin gave Barbie a much-needed slimming treatment. The three dolls the designer is releasing will have an all-new morphology, because the shoe man "found her ankles were too fat," reports a spokesperson. [WWD]
• Heidi Klum says becoming a Barbie was "a dream come true." There's a horror movie in that somewhere. [People]
• Tom Cruise says sweet, underminey things to Katie Holmes about her clothes, like, "I think that dress might be wearing you." The only question remaining is: Is he responsible for Suri's clothing choices? [NYDN]
• Trovata and Forever 21 have settled their copyright infringement lawsuit, just days before a second trial was to begin. The terms are confidential. Despite being sued more than 50 times, Forever 21 had never faced a jury prior to the Trovata case; Trovata had sought a multi-million-dollar judgment against Forever 21 for knocking off its shirts, but the first trial in May ended in a mistrial when six jurors sided with Trovata and one sided with Forever 21. [WWD]
• The Daily Mail did a hilarious write-around on Dov Charney, The Sleazy Sexual Predator Behind High Street Store American Apparel. Wait till they realize that the "model" in the lace bodysuit ad they hold up for particular condemnation — "it is the kind of photograph which would send shivers down the spine of anyone with a teenage daughter" — is in fact an actual porn star named Faye Valentine. We can't wait for the blistering, "exclusive" follow-up. [Daily Mail]
• Marc Jacobs: "I think the idea of people being exposed, whether it's stylists who have their reality shows or whatever, is just the way of the world. It's every chef, every stylist, every hairdresser, everybody who's doing plastic surgery. We're in a period where people are entertained by what they consider to be the real lives of people in different professions, etc. And fashion has also reached this kind of proportion like football or sport, you know — a spectator sport." [WWD]
• W magazine is reducing its frequency from 12 to 6 issues per year. This is fueling rumors that Condé Nast might be interested in buying American Elle. [FWD]
• Ugg Australia is releasing a "limited-edition" kids collection as a tie-in for the Where The Wild Things Are movie. Half the proceeds will go to St. Jude's Research Hospital. Which means half will go to making more ugly Uggs. [WWD]
• Levi's is snapping up young(ish), hip(ish) artists of both coasts in the scramble for sales: after having Ryan McGinley shoot its new ad campaign, the company has announced that printmaker extraordinaire Shepard Fairey will have a capsule collection in stores by the end of this month under the label Obey x Levi's. [WWD]
• Turns out that with the move to selling exclusively at J.C. Penney, Liz Claiborne isn't closing the Claiborne by John Bartlett line — it's just firing two-time CFDA-winner John Bartlett less than halfway into his three-year contract. [WWD]
• Meanwhile, the Upper East Side has hatched another fashion label. Two people who really need the money — socialites Gigi Mortimer and Courtney Moss — want us to buy $199 rabbit fur neck warmers and $315 fox fur gloves. Oh, look: Kelly Killoren Bensimon is all over their website! [WWD]
• Women's Wear Daily puts on its thinking cap to investigate this question for the ages: Has fashion lost its mystique? Is it the reality television? Is it the Internet? Is it Marc Jacobs inviting reporters to work out with him? The story quotes an Internet commenter, and Valentino. [WWD]
• Diane von Furstenberg is mounting an exhibition of her life's work in Moscow later this month. It will include garments she designed, artifacts, and portraits of her by artists including Warhol and Horst. [WWD]

To celebrate Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, the august California-based clothier will release a "limited-edition" run of four t-shirt styles featuring line drawings of Jim Henson's beloved characters.

The company opted against merely taking Henson's creative work and using it without permission, then releasing incoherent statements defending the theft on the grounds of aesthetic admiration, all while simultaneously impugning Henson's sexual choices and demanding to see nude photos of his wife in court filings. This is progress! Licensing deals are a lot simpler (and mutually remunerative) than lawsuits.

It's easy to see what American Apparel is getting out of this deal: the company can enhance its brand by piggy-backing on the eternal childhood of the hipster youth, and revitalize its kids' line, in one fell swoop. What Sesame Street stands to gain from associating its wholesome, educational image with a company best known for its very adult advertising, sexual harassment, accounting irregularities, and using non-union labor, is less clear. (All right: money.)

Photo Illustration By The Inimitable Tracie

American Apparel and Sesame Street Collaborate on Unique Line of T-Shirts [PR Newswire]
Breaking: Woody Allen on Alvarado/Sunset [Curbed LA]
Woody Allen in Legal Battle with American Apparel [WCBS]
American Apparel Provides Update on Status of Accounting Evaluation [Reuters]
Wolf In Sheep's Clothing [In These Times]

Earlier:
Dov Charney Co-Opted Woody Allen's Image Out Of Adoration
American Apparel CEO Orders Subordinate To Pleasure Herself: She Services Him With A Lawsuit

• Did L.A. boutique Maxfield drop Victoria Beckham's dVb in favor of Holmes & Yang? Posh's people say Maxfield hasn't ordered the line for three seasons, and the decision had nothing to do with Katie Holmes, who is Posh's friend. [P6]

• Luckily, old bandmate Mel B says she loves Posh's clothing lines. "I'm going out with Geri and Emma while I'm here — and I'll be wearing one of Victoria's dresses," the singer told a crowd in London. [Daily Mail]
• American Apparel is laying off 1,500 workers — more than 10% of its total workforce — because of immigration violations. When ICE raided its factory in downtown L.A. two months ago, 1,600 workers were found to be unauthorized to work in the U.S., and a further 200 were found to have immigration irregularities. Company founder Dov Charney released a statement saying: "Many of you have been with me for so many years, and I just cry when I think that so many people will be leaving the company. It is my belief that immigrants bring prosperity to any economy." This is the latest in a long line of bad news for the company. From being dogged with sexual harassment lawsuits, to the $5 million settlement it had to pay Woody Allen in May after using his image on billboards without authorization, to this week's reprimand from the British Advertising Standards Authority for "sexualising a child," American Apparel can't seem to keep its house in order. [LATimes]
• There are behind-the-scenes shots of Lily Allen working with Karl Lagerfeld on the new Chanel Cocoon bag campaign. [DailyMail]
• We don't doubt that Patrick Demarchelier is planning to shoot 100 top models in Fashion's Night Out t-shirts outside Bryant Park on September 9, but somehow we think someone got confused when noting that "Iman and her daughter Chanel" would be among them. [WWD]
• OMG! Modelfights on Project Runway: Models Of The Catwalk. [P6]
• If you have any interest in beautiful, softly draped leather jackets, deconstructed tee shirts, or vaguely gothic skintight pants — or if you just want to know where that ubiquitous no-closure wraparound sweater, like a high-fashion snuggie ancestor, that everyone from Alice + Olivia to Eileen Fisher has knocked off came from originally — you need to learn about Rick Owens, now. And how his aesthetic is back in a big way just now. [NYTimes]
• Speaking of which, peep Jennifer Connelly in the British InStyle in Rodarte thigh-high boots and Olivier Theyskens' gothic heel-less 8" runway shoes. [Daily Mail]
• Also big for fall, at least in men's wear: Steve McQueen. [WSJ]
  
• There's a rumor going around that Peter Som is set to become the first creative director of Tommy Hilfiger. [WWD]
• Thom Browne is launching two new lower-priced lines for Spring 2010. [WWD]
• Mark your calendars! She by Sheree, apparently some design offspring of a Real Housewife, is coming to Fashion Week. [People]
• Juergen Teller, who shoots all of Marc Jacobs' campaigns, reports that only one set of images has ever caused any particular controversy — and it's not the ones of a then-12-year-old Dakota Fanning, which even the photographer calls "very hard-core." In Fall of 2006, Jacobs chose makeup artist Dick Page and his partner, James Gibbs, to star in the campaign, and Teller shot the couple making out in the woods outside their home. There was a furor: Men's Vogue even refused to run the ads. [The Moment]
• Kenny Chesney says his new clothing line, Blue Chair Bay, is designed to reflect his life off the stage. "I would wear these clothes in Malibu, East Tennessee, where I'm from, or on my boat in St. John," the singer explained at MAGIC, the apparel trade conference that just ended in Las Vegas. Chesney's apparel partners had an airstream full of clothes and purposefully-weatherbeaten blue wicker chairs parked in their booth at the show. [WWD]
• Daisy Lowe's jewelry line with Swarovski is said to feature pieces inspired by the stars, moon, and planets. [Elle UK]
  
• Derek Lam's CEO, Jan Schottlman, denies the anonymous reports published by Page Six that the company is haemorrhaging money. [The Cut]
• Dooney & Bourke are going back to models for their campaigns after seasons of using actresses. Hayden Panettiere is getting thrown over for Maggie Rizer. [WWD]
• Georgia May Jagger, in her new denim ad: "Hudson jeans. Soft...and blue. And very tight." Descriptive! [TDB]
• Richard Chai is doing a line with Keds. Chai's sneakers, which are canvas and leather in white, grey and black, have silver zippers between the rows of eyelets. They hit stores in January of next year, and pricing information isn't yet available. [WWD]
• Someone painted an entire Spanish Colonial-style bungalow in Louis Vuitton's signature logo print. So long as Britney Spears doesn't use it as the set for her next video, we imagine these folks in Mexicali might be safe from LVMH's lawyers. [BoingBoing via hazmeelchingadofavor]

You totally would be conned into paying $19 for a bow tie made of whatever was lying around the factory, a bow tie you might wear once, to Barcade, and then feel faintly embarrassed of for the many years it stubbornly subsequently persists in the midden of your closet, like all garments do in inverse proportion to their wearability/cuteness, according to the frustrating law of the sartorial universe that also dictates that your favorite T-shirt always be dirty, after being mesmerized by full-frontal not-even-trying-to-hide double-trouble nipple ad action, wouldn't you? Hypnotized by the naked lady, you'd buy what she was wearing? No? Okay then. New strategy.

Unisex Bow Tie [American Apparel Store]

• Kate Moss has signed on with Virgin Books to pen a presumably un-virginal "no holds barred" autobiography. Says publisher Sir Richard Branson, "It's going to make an exciting read." [Telegraph]

• Jack McCollough, the Proenza Schouler designer allegedly head-butted by Kiefer Sutherland at the Met, isn't pointing fingers. Sort of. A statement from his camp: "Anyone who knows Jack McCollough knows that he would not hurt a fly. All we can say at this point is that he was the victim of a vicious, violent, unprovoked assault and that the matter is in the hands of the authorities." Please cue 24 joke. [ElleUK]
• A detente in the fabled War of the Nebbishes? Quoth Dov Charney, "I have deep respect for Mr. Allen, who is a source of inspiration to me." Oddly enough, Woody didn't release a similar statement of mutual admiration for Charney's jersey bodysuits [WWD]
• Charney then referenced Larry Flynt. [Gothamist]
• Tell us: would you listen to "Diesel Radio?" Would you admit it if you did? [ElleUK]
• So is the Met Costume Institute's "Model as Muse" exhibit worth the hype? Judging by what Cathy Horyn says, we're...not sure. "You're tempted to snap into one of those incredible bump-and-grind poses suggested by tiny amounts of Spandex and squeal, "Hey, girlfriend!"" [NYT]
• Some - including Mo'Nique - feel Michelle Obama is saving retail fashion. Retail fashion has not gotten the memo. [Time]
• Bucking the trend, L'Oreal's sales rose incrementally in the last quarter; because everyone's shopping drugstore? [WWD]
• And Hermes is up, too! Cross your fingers. [WWD]
• 16-year-old Katie Fogarty, of runway-fall fame, takes a philosophical attitude: "Oh whatever brightens people's days." [Teen Vogue via New York]
• Dig it: Levi's is launching the "Give Them Hope Now" campaign to raise money for New York's Harvey Milk School, the high school dedicated to LGBT and questioning students. [AdAge]
• On a completely unrelated note, Marshalls' attempt to appeal to the kids seems to appeal to no one. "A 35-year-old cross-dressing man named Liam Sullivan portrays Kelly, a shy 17-year-old girl. Kelly, a popular YouTube character, is first shown at home greeting her visiting grandma (also played by Sullivan, natch)." Then they go to Marshall's and there's a musical number involving a mime and some maraca-shaking. [BrandFreak]
• Oddly enough, Tim Gunn was not the only reality fashionisto on Capital Hill this week: Nigel Barker also betook his fine self to D.C. to film scenes for a pediatric AIDS documentary, raising the city's handsomeness quotient by 48%. [Politico]
• Agyness Deyn is hawking mineral water. This is, apparently, highly prestigious. [The Sun]
• Erykah Badu has designed a label for a special bottle of Kiehl's body lotion involving "a trippy swirl of Afro curls, butterflies and ferns." Proceeds go to the Waterkeeper Alliance. [Dallas News]
• Timberland is branching into women's footwear, introducing 12 styles of shoe. [WWD]
• Also snubbing the economy, Derek Lam opened a ritzy new store in SoHo yesterday; both Rihanna and Wintour showed. [The Fashion Informer]
• Stella McCartney and Net-a-Porter have entered into a "mutually exclusive" online sales relationship. Get those eBay-trained trigger fingers ready! [FabSugar]
• Isaac Mizrahi has crafted a (pretty cute) cocktail dress from USA Todays. USA Today likes this. [USA Today]
• Meanwhile, here's Isaac on The -it's-not-a-Project-Runway-ripoff-we-swear, The Fashion Show: "As a judge, I am looking first for integrity. I can't tell yet about niches that people will fit into, but we have to train them to think properly and then think about the marketplace aspect. The difference with our show from other shows is that we have an audience that votes every week and they say some brutal things." [Yahoo]
• Cat fight! Gucci's suing Guess?, claiming the denim chain's "G" is a knockoff of the luggage chain's "G." Or as they'd have it, 'slavishly replicating' their designs. [News.co.au]
• Stephanie Seymour's divorce from "polo-playing husband" Peter Brant is rough. Quoth the supermodel, "It's OK. I'm sleeping in the maid's quarters...I'm doing the best I can to keep things amicable. I want to be the bigger person. But it's tough. He's playing very dirty with me." Or so says a "friend." [NY Post]
• Damien Hirst's Levi's - the fabled "most expensive jeans in the world" - are, how you say, hideosity personified, also look like you could make them at home if you've hung onto your splatter-art machine from the 80's. [InventorSpot]

Allen is suing American Apparel for putting his picture on billboards in Los Angeles and New York City's Lower East Side back in 2007.

Image via Curbed LA

The image, a still from Annie Hall (from the scene where Allen, eating dinner with Annie's family in character as Alvy Singer, imagines himself through Annie's very Gentile grandmother's eyes — or, maybe, it's some combination of how he imagines the grandma sees him, and how he imagines himself at that moment). The Yiddish text, which, along with that prominent American Apparel logo, overlays the still, translates to "the holy rebbe."

The company didn't have the director's permission to associate his likeness with its brand, and now Allen wants $10 million in compensation.

So far, American Apparel's legal team, led by lawyer Stuart Slotnick, has focused its efforts entirely on attacking Allen's image. Slotnick said the director "devalued his reputation by becoming involved with his lover Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom he later married," and that therefore, his image on some billboards oughtn't be worth anything close to $10 million. Slotnick also requested, during the discovery period, the nude photos of Previn, taken by Allen, that Mia Farrow found when she discovered Allen had been sleeping with her daughter.

But! "Dov (and everyone else at the company) LOVES Woody Allen," says memorandum-writer "Iris", who is undoubtedly Iris Alonzo, a company creative director and Dov's assistant. Alonzo has modeled for the brand; there was a photo of Dov kissing her in reporter Claudine Ko's infamous Jane article (that was the one where Ko described Dov masturbating in front of her), and the only picture on Alonzo's profile on the company website looks like exactly what it is: her ass with a red handprint on it.

Back in 2005, Alonzo claimed in an American Apparel ad to be busy reading The Collapse Of The Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom by Philip K. Howard. Which must have been as formative as it was informative, for now, she wishes to share her insight into the real nature of the company's sticky situation with Allen.

"Some of you may know," Alonzo writes in the memo, "that the billboards with Woody Allen's picture, and the text 'Our Spiritual Leader' (that's what the Hebrew [sic] letters said) were intended to be a social statement and not an ad. We making [sic] a comparison between Woody Allen and Dov and the scene in Annie Hall where Alvi [sic] is judged by his girlfriend's grandmother. At the time, many people consumed [sic] with the sexual harassment lawsuits that we were facing, and through that experience, we saw firsthand what media scandal feels like and how quickly the truth gets lost."

The memo goes on to say the billboard "was in no way intended to sell clothing," and that the statements made by Slotnick, the company's lawyer, about Allen's compromised reputation "aren't inaccurate" (although Alonzo seems to mean to say that they are inaccurate, since she takes pains to point out Charney's deep and abiding respect for the director and his work — "For the 5 years that I've worked here, I can't tell you how many times I've been made to watch Annie Hall or Zelig or Hannah and Her Sisters again because Dov wanted me to see something amazing just 'one more time.' "). Alonzo also denies Slotnick tried to get the nude photos of Previn: "We did not request the nude photos of Soon Pi [sic] (Woody's wife) and I'm sorry if any of you were under that impression."

The memo wraps up, "for everyone not directly involved, I hope you can trust that we will adhere to the ethical principles that this company believes in." (Alonzo may display an almost touching innocence of conventional English spelling, punctuation and grammar, but she has a certain knack for comedy.)

So there we have it: American Apparel's grand counter-argument is a denial that gigantic billboards with the company's logo (and extensive use of the Allen billboard image online) do not constitute advertising, and that the lawyer in their employ doesn't actually speak for them. And what was supposed to be American Apparel's commentary on "how quickly the truth gets lost" when salacious sex cases make the headlines (by the way, Iris, those vintage 2007 sexual harassment lawsuits? Plenty are still ongoing!) ended up with the company trying those very smear tactics against Allen, because of salacious sex allegations. Which isn't just "ironic", it's actually ironic, if you think about it.

The case goes to court on May 18.

American Apparel LOVES Woody Allen, Internal Memo Explains All [Gothamist]

Related: Breaking: Woody Allen on Alvarado/Sunset [Curbed LA]
Woody Allen In Legal Battle With American Apparel [WCBS]
Iris [American Apparel]
Meet Your New Boss [From Jane, via OneAngryGirl, PDF]
American Apparel Plays Hide The Quarter [The Spunker]

On the one hand: Almost everything AA touches has a hint of sleaze. The sexy/sexist ads, the clothes designed to make you look like a fat hooker, the "tribal" patterns, the company's creepy creator & CEO.

But on the other hand, motherhood is a weird subject. We live in a culture in which giving birth means a woman turns into a "mom" and wears "mom jeans" and is always a perfect bastion of morality. She's not supposed to wear short skirts or go clubbing (coughDinaLohancough) or rock a spandex jumpsuit or purple knee-high socks. Right?



So is it kind of cool to see "trendy" images of motherhood, or do these AA ads reek of the stench of exploitation we come to expect from American Apparel and its spokesbottoms?

American Apparel: Expecting Looks [Official Site]

Earlier: American Apparel Ads: Sexy Or Sexist?
American Apparel Will Make You Look Like A Fat Hooker
What's The Difference Between Inspiration & Insult?
Dov Charney May Be More Of A Scumbag Than Anyone Realized
A Letter To American Apparel's Latest Spokesbottom, "Kristen"

• A match made...somewhere. Miss USA contestants will be sporting barely-there bikinis from the Jessica Simpson collection. [NYDN]
• The nebbish-weight cage match between Woody and Dov continues, as Allen decries the jersey-meister's "rep-tarnish" tactics. [NYP]

• Moschino pulls new marketing director. [WWD]
• Quoth Amber Valletta: "As much as I love fashion and as much as it has supported me, I see how extreme and extravagant it is." Her line will, presumably, be both cautious and frugal? [Fashionista]
• "We have so much in common," says Charlotte Ronson of bff-collaborator Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss. Well...you're both super-rich and make girly clothes...[WWD]
• Eileen Fisher's cracking down on department store's deep discounting by renting out her own space on their floors. Your mom will pay full price for that linen sack and like it! [WSJ]
• Speaking of protecting one's neck: Seven jeans is suing Oleg Cassini and InDesign Apparel for trademark and copyright infringement due to overly similar ass embellishment. [CityFile]
• A new, Catherine Deneuve-endorsed handbag line is made by, and benefits, female Lebanese prisoners. The bags are embroidered with inspirational Arabic phrases. [BBC]
• Word is, Kimora is getting into maternity. The evidence? "A black T-shirt bearing the Baby Phat logo with an arrow pointing to her bump." All we're saying is, you then waive the right to get pissed if random strangers touch your belly.[WWD]
• When Models Tweet: "IN London Shooting a MAJOR SURPRISE COVER!!!!Its top secret can't give it away!!" [Fashionologie]
• Aww! Groovy purple-lovin' cool chick Anna Sui is receiving this year's CFDA Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. Stevie Nicks is, allegedly, stoked.[WWD]
• We like Ike! (Mizrahi.) "I am really a slob. It takes a lot of effort for me to look this put together. If I had my way, I would sit on the couch all day and eat ice cream and go to pieces with my dogs because that is the ultimate luxury to sit and watch TV with one's dogs." [Factio via New York]
• Jay-Z's Rocawear pop-shop 18-wheeler (subtle!) is hitting New York. And, presumably, causing gridlock. [Racked]
• We can't vouch for Nanette Lepore's literary tastes, but if they're anything like her tastes in suits? Give her pick - Idanna Pucci's new book Brazza in Congo: A Life and Legacy - a spin. [The Daily Beast]
• Struggling M&S brings back professional eccentric and designer Zandra Rhodes. [Daily Mail]
• What would Jason Wu tell Michelle Obama? "Thank you for changing my life. But more than me, they've really brought optimism to the country, which is really great." [USA Today]
• Want to see an appalling bathing suit? [VogueUK]

• Hark, watchers of the court of Karl Lagerfeld: doubleplustop prettyboy Brad Koenig is out. Model Baptiste Giabiconi is in. This is just like when Louis XV replaced Madame de Pompadour with Marie-Louise O'Murphy! [The Cut]

• Police in Berlin have been told not to wear clothes by the labels Fred Perry, Ben Sherman, ACAB, Alpha Industries, Consdaple, Lonsdale, Pit Bull, Outlaw, Troublemaker, and Thor Steinar while on duty. The reason? Higher-ups consider these brands to be popular among right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis, and understandably, German authorities are at pains to be dissociated from such ideologies. The labels involved — with the exception of Thor Steinar, which apparently embraces neo-Nazi-ism — are concerned because being put on the official neo-Nazi uniform list makes for terrible press. (Some of the companies have taken particular care to distance themselves from extremist political views and tried to restrict their sales outlets to combat the right-wing perception.) The police union also objected to the ban, because they think it could harm undercover officers' ability to blend in with the groups they are infiltrating. [WWD]
• Those fish pedicures? Not legal in 14 states. The downsized fish in one New Hampshire salon now swim around a decorative tank, eating fish food "or each other if they get too hungry." Why did we think having live fish chew the dead flesh off our toes was a good idea, again? (Remember when Diane Sawyer did it?) [WSJ]
• Diane von Furstenberg is keen, in her role as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, to clarify the purpose of New York fashion week, and distinguish between trade events and consumer events. She's interested in seeing more consumer shows. As for her own line, no men's wear and no children's wear is in the cards. [WWD]
• Kate Moss is supposedly coming to New York on April 1 or the supposed opening of the first American Top Shop. We've had our Top Shopping hearts broken by these exact wolf cries before, so, we're not getting our hopes up. [P6]
• Robin Givhan, fashion critic for the Washington Post, is not cheered by the thought of a return to the time when everyone's ass was in acid wash. On the 80s revival theme prevalent this season — perhaps most notably in Marc Jacobs' collection — Givhan says, "I think that it's just a lack of imagination whenever so many people latch on to something like that ... And I think I would feel differently if I thought it was sort of lovingly being done well and with a certain panache. But I don't think the world needs MC Hammer pants ever, ever again. Michael Jackson is back and he wants his clothes ... I mean, acid-wash jeans, hello? Hasn't everyone had some horrible run in with acid-wash jeans?" [The Cut]
• French daily Le Monde has launched a new style magazine — kinda like the New York Times' T. Why do we say that? Partly because it's called M. Audrey Marnay is on the cover, and there's a neat Matthias Vriens editorial inside. [Fashionologie]
• DSW, the discount shoe retailer, lost $7.5 million last quarter. [WSJ]
• Selling briskly by comparison is anything to do with that sparkly vampire abstinence movie. [WWD]
• Dov Charney, founder and CEO of American Apparel, bought $2.67 million worth of shares in his own company. It boosted the stock price, which hit a low of $1.26 on March 10, just before a crucial refinancing deal saved the company from bankruptcy, to $3.38. Charney had made personal loans to American Apparel before, but never made a large direct purchase of company stock. [WSJ]
• Clarins is hoping to boost sales by opening mini-salons, and targeting Hispanic customers, within department stores in the U.S. Maybe they could try putting some women of color in their beauty campaigns? [WSJ]
• A raft of business executives and fashion operatives, including John Varvatos, Stephen I. Sadove, and Wal-Mart chief merchandising officer John Fleming will speak at this year's Global Retailing Conference at the University of Arizona's Lundgren Center. This is of course assuming they don't decide to just hold each other and weep. [WWD]

According to Ryan Holiday, an American Apparel PR rep whose name sounded strangely familiar,

The report cards are real. One is actually up on DovCharney.com. The rest are hanging in a photo display in the factory. Someone probably scanned them and sent them to Jossip. It can't be more likely that someone dusted off a typewriter and made four fake report cards from 1987 than the fact that maybe Dov is a nice person.

We'll reserve judgment on whether it's true that Charney is actually a nice person (or not) — but Holiday is correct that one of the report cards in question, for Ethics, with teacher James P. Dalton-Thompson in the Fall of 1986, is indeed up at the American Apparel founder's personal website.

Barring the prospect that this is a bit of corporate whitewashing — and it does remain awfully convenient that Charney should suddenly be revealed as a "mo-ped" riding, local-newspaper-reporting, obsessively hard-working Canadian boy genius, when his company has had such bad press lately — there is one conclusion that is inescapable:

Dov Charney's Choate Rosemary Hall Ethics teacher mis-spelled the name of John Stuart "Mills."

Day tuition at the Connecticut prep school for the year 2009-10 cost $33,030, not including boarding costs and fees.

Earlier: American Apparel Founder Got A B+ In Ethics

Related: Dov Charney — Schooling [Dovcharney.com]
American Apparel's Internal "Bankrupt" E-mails [Gawker]
Choate Rosemary Hall Tuition And Fees [Choate]

Jossip has posted what purport to be report cards from one Dov Charney's time at Choate Rosemary Hall, the Connecticut preparatory boarding school that Charney attended for just one year before reportedly being expelled. (Supposed reason: "He pooped in his cereal to frame another kid for doing it." Whatever you make of that.)

Maybe that incident was what the dean was referring to when he wrote in Spring of 1987 - the American Apparel founder's final semester - "Through all the crazy moments that I went through with Dov, he has somehow managed to endear himself to me, and my life will never be the same."

"His style is and will be controversial": John Ford, Choate Dean of Students, what a gift for prescient understatement you have!

Apparently, his interest in ethics was such that he regularly called his teacher at home to ask questions about things covered in class.

Also a harbinger of things to come: the young Charney wrote a term paper on reciprocal free trade between the U.S. and Canada for his history class.

As cute as it is to imagine the idea of Dov Charney, schoolboy t-shirt mini-mogul, riding around campus on his moped and always burning with desire to discuss the finer points of J.S. Mill (as opposed to burning with desire to sleep with his cokiest girl employees), I have to wonder if these documents are real. It's awfully convenient for such a uniformly positive picture to emerge.

It strikes me as a tremendous coincidence that all of Charney's teachers would find him so charmingly precocious, with his work on the hard-driving reportorial staff of the central Connecticut Record-Journal (which was a "credit to himself and Choate" — History teacher John H. Connelly) and his endless enthusiasm for parsing the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian positions on interpreting the constitution. Something about a teacher (Connelly, again) mentioning that Charney's "shrewd" observations always drew the admiration of his classmates raises my bullshit meter.

If these are his report cards, then late-teens Charney was clearly that charmingly/annoyingly smart guy with the big mouth who always did the reading, and then background reading, and some background on the background, just so he could ask the kind of questions you would never have thought of. Which, if true, would make it seem like an even greater shame that he's now reduced to masturbating in front of female journalists, defending endless sexual harassment lawsuits, and narrowly avoiding bankruptcy after his kudzu-like retail expansion. Seventeen-year-old Dov, if we are to take these documents at face value, actually sounds like a decent guy. Which somehow would make it all the sadder.

Dov Charney Was Such A Good Kid...What Happened? [Jossip]

Earlier: Dov Charney May Be More Of A Scumbag That Anyone Realized

Related: American Apparel's Plans For Recession Success: More Sex, Please

American Apparel's Internal "Bankrupt" E-mails [Gawker]

Chictopia, a fashion social networking site whose genius idea is that users can upload pictures of their outfits for other users to comment on so everyone can feel comfortably supported in her precious online fashion-maven status, is now hosting sets of American Apparel ads featuring their three top-rated members wearing the company's designs, as well as its vintage line, California Select. Chictopia is one of those places where the internet telescopes and distends to the extent that being on Chictopia for other people to comment on and rate becomes prima facie evidence of supposed fashion expertise, which supposed fashion expertise becomes a reason to be on Chictopia for other people to comment on and rate. The entire vain and mindless feedback loop was aptly (though unwittingly) summed up by Mashable, which noted newly minted American Apparel model, Chictopia girl Karla "is a beautiful stylista actively pursuing her passion via Chictopia and creative expression on her own blog." Actively pursuing, people!

And just as blogging and uploading self-taken pics of your original hipster creations is an ersatz kind of fashion activity, posing for American Apparel is an ersatz kind of modeling.

The company's hipster girl-next-door aesthetic was fine and good, and its claim to never airbrush its advertising is refreshing, if true. For a while, American Apparel's ads seemed kind of like the company's wares: basic, cute, cheeky, cool. There was none of the aspirationalism of mainstream fashion, and that was nice. American Apparel, a purveyor of dependable cotton garments that don't change much from season to season, didn't position itself as a fashion brand and wasn't taken as one. The whole point was that they didn't have to sell us on their products with lavish, fantastical ads with otherworldly imagery, because the clothes were good, the clothes were needed, and the clothes were inexpensive.

But then their ads started getting sexier and sexier, the female bodies in them became perkier, less blemished, and thinner, and they were shot in ever more compromising positions (not so the dudes, unfortunately) and all around the company set about becoming exactly the same kind of aspirational pseudo-fashion mall brand as anything else. The "real people" thing became a vestige of the old way of doing things that had the advantage of also cutting costs. (When you aren't actually, but look like you could be, a professional with an agency to negotiate your rates, it's easier to be hoodwinked into thinking that $50/hour for a national campaign involving billboards, online, and print ads, is a good deal. It's not.)

I suppose picking the coolest girls in the internet class to model for them — and then write adoring posts about how OMG cool it was to become a real model!!! — is the natural apotheosis of this trend.

The press release excerpted by Chictopia reads:

[This campaign] rebels the notion that fashion is dominated by models held to unobtainable body standards. Chictopia’s tools give girls with no access to agents or expensive makeup and clothes the ability to segue into modeling for a major fashion company within just a few months. American Apparel, who is well known for refusing to use airbrushing in their advertisements, and Chictopia are showing that traditional media beauty standards are obsolete and inefficient.

Leaving aside the fact that "rebel" is not a transitive verb, I object mightily to the notion that American Apparel is selling the experience of becoming one of their online banner girls as "modeling for a major fashion company." (And...they expect us to believe their models are neither airbrushed, nor wear make up? Come on.) It's unethical to paint this experience as some kind of entrée into fashion modeling. It's just another chance to get your kit off for Dov Charney, only now to even do that, you're expected to be an internet Somebody who can write a gushy post about it.

Around the end of last month, new ads in a raunchier but similar vein started appearing as exclusive content on outré blogs like The Reverse Cowgirl and Debauchette. Featuring porn stars Sasha Grey and Charlotte Stokely — American Apparel apparently learned girls who can be paid to take their clothes off, and more, are more pliant than hipsters, and has sneaked porn stars such as the pseudonymous "Jillian" (Faye Valentine) into its ads for over six months now — the ads beg the usual boring 'Has American Apparel gone too far?' question.

But frankly, I'm less worried by the ads — porn is great; the idea that we ought to emulate porn stars in our daily lives is easily dismissed — than I am by the glowing posts that Debauchette and Susannah Breslin, the author of The Reverse Cowgirl, felt motivated to write. "I’m looking forward to seeing the new AA ad for my site. They’ve got me very intrigued about the next one," squealed Debauchette. "If you haven't noticed it already, I've got a new American Apparel ad up on the site," points out Breslin, helpfully. (I almost missed the topless girl in a pleather miniskirt and combat boots disrobing in Flash animation, actually.) Both bloggers seek to justify including the advertising as a kind of political point; Debauchette writes about her dislike of "North American nipplephobia" and the hypocrisy of a national culture that teaches young women to display their sexuality (Britney Spears) but is disturbed when they practice it (abstinence-only sex education). (I'm not sure how Sasha Grey's pubic hair combats the latter without adding to the objectionable commodifying quality of the former, but whatever!) Breslin points out the ads were conceived by a woman. (This woman, Kyung Chung, in fact.) If they're going to get so defensive, why take the ads? Is it the blurring of (presumably independent) editorial content with paid advertising? The commodification of women's sexuality? The involvement of a company whose founder is famous for his predatory behavior towards female employees and reporters? (Says Debauchette: "I think sexual harassment is wrong. I also think it’s complicated.") I hope the ads paid Breslin and Debauchette — and Chictopia, for that matter — handsomely for the credibility hit writing posts that look an awful lot like advertorial must entail. The advertiser in question being notoriously cheap, however, I somehow doubt that.

Chictopia <3s American Apparel [Chictopia]
My New American Apparel Ad [Updated] [The Reverse Cowgirl]
Notes [Debauchette]

Earlier: American Apparel's Plans For The Recession: More Sex, Please
"I Went Home, Grabbed Some Spraypaint, Took The Train Back And Waited Until 4am To Climb The Scaffolding."

• Scarlett Johanson is the new face of D&G cosmetics. A face that looks mightily like Marilyn Monroe. [Popcrunch]

• In other news from the infinite space that is the overlap of the "celebrity" and "fashion" Venn diagram, Penelope and Monica Cruz's fourth collection for Mango is out, and they star in the campaign. Looking hot as per usual. [Thelifefiles]
• Portia de Rossi — who "tries to wear leather as little as possible" — is going to do a vegan shoe line, although it's not known which brand she will collaborate with. Let's hope it goes over a little better than Natalie Portman for Te Casan. [FabSugar]
• Oh, consider my heart warmed. Fashion people took a break from menswear week to watch David Beckham's AC Milan game on Saturday evening. The gaggle of designers and editors watched from a private box — of course — but were refreshingly not too cool to cheer "Beckham! Beckham! Amore! Amore!" [WWD]
• Sunday night in Milan, Miuccia Prada addressed the recession just prior to her menswear show. The political science Ph.D. said: "I’m really pleased that we’ve always worked much more on the product than on the brand and I think this pays back. Crisis always pushes you to do better." [WWD]
• In a video, The Street rates Victoria's Secret, and fellow Limited Brand company Bath & Body Works, a stock not to invest in. December sales didn't hit the mark, and analysts are cutting their return estimates for the chain. "When I don't have a lot of money, I like to go and make a small purchase to cheer me up," says one presenter. "But when that small purchase is a bra for $50, a lot of women aren't doing that anymore," replies the other. I will say I rejoiced at the savings when I finally stopped wearing bras altogether. [The Street]
• Roberto Cavalli has admitted the rumors are true: he is in talks to sell a 15-20% stake in his company to a private equity group. [WWD]
• For his part, John Varvatos has no cause for concern — yet. His same-store sales are up across the board, led by footwear (that lucrative deal with Converse must keep his spirits up) and diffusion line Star USA, which is up almost 40%. He's showing in Milan for the first time since 2003, and intends to make the move permanent. [Portfolio]
• Sephora is experimenting with a pilot program that allows shoppers to access reviews of products via their mobile phones. [AdAge]
• In more news of the unstoppable 90s supes, Helena Christensen — Nylon co-founder, photographer, and all-round sexy-ass Dane — is to be the "ambassador" for a limited-edition Tommy Hilfiger bag, to benefit breast cancer. It's unclear what her ambassadorial duties will entail. [Hindustan Times]
• Guess who else is back: Romeo Gigli. Despite having lost the rights to his own name, the designer will show his new label, Ipse Idem, at Paris menswear week. [IHT]
• A British model named David Gandy — that's this guy, possibly NSFW, thank me in the comments — is going to start writing for a yet-to-be-named politics and fashion magazine. He'll be sticking to covering style and "motoring" while political contributors will include London mayor Boris Johnson. [WWD]
• Are Dov Charney and his PR team spending hours online posting to newsgroups, buying Google Ads, and sock-puppeting domain names to smear the L.A. lawyer involved in most of the company's current lawsuits? Unauthenticated company e-mails point to yes. And the top search result for Kieth Fink, the J.D. in question, is now a site called "The Keith Fink Files: Keith Fink: The Worst Lawyer in Los Angeles," which points to definitely. [NY Post]
• When Harvey Weinstein gives Marchesa co-founder Georgina Chapman the gift she picks out, she has the good sense to "act surprised." Oh, love. [Telegraph]

Relatively speaking, a 3% increase in same-store sales for the month of December 2008 isn't terrible only in the sense that it's not actually a decline — such as that experienced by the retail sector as a whole, where same-store sales shrank 0.9%, and by individual competitors like Abercrombie & Fitch and the Gap, whose December sales were down by over 20% on 2007's numbers. But let's not forget it's also not stunning. The previous year, American Apparel managed to raise December same-store sales by 37%, which makes 3% look flat. And it's simply not true that chain stores are uniformly blighted: Aeropostale and the Buckle's same-store sales rose 12% and 13.5% for December. If there's anyone "bucking the trend," it's those players, not Dov Charney, whose stock price is trading right now at $2.06, off a 52-week high of $13.25. (Or, I suppose, up from a 52-week low of $1.55, depending on how you look at it.)

For once, the company's financial situation is in the news, instead of its sexual sexy sexing ad campaigns or the sexifying sexual harassing antics of its founder. (Not that either of those things are likely to change — the company considers the former a key to its future growth, and maintains a $20 million insurance policy just in case the latter should happen to recur.) The American Apparel bottom line is the subject of a good, long, detailed story in Women's Wear Daily; reading it, I was reminded of Warren Buffett's quote about only finding out who's been swimming naked when the tide goes out.

American Apparel's early financial wackiness — a CEO who was prone to spending lavishly on inessentials like apartments and vibrators for favored underlings, a hamfisted, starry-eyed approach to expansion that saw 260 stores open in just a few years (for one of those years, 2005, the company did not actually find the time to replace the CFO who died of a [coincidental?] heart attack, preferring to delegate bookkeeping to young staffers), and a factory that, once it was properly managed, increased daily production from 32,000 pieces to 250,000 pieces without adding staff, all financed by a phenomenal debt load — meant that when the company went public, it could not do so via a traditional initial public offering. Instead, it was quietly bought by a shell company, Endeavour Acquisitions, run by a vaguely dodgy D.C. businessman and a financier from New Zealand, who took the company public while avoiding the scrutiny and regulatory oversight of an IPO. It was a way of buying time; things weren't going to change overnight — on the eve of the deal, a true to form Charney told a Wall Street Journal reporter the company's eventual choice for its new CFO was "a complete loser" and a real stickler for details — but the idea was American Apparel would slowly get its house in order. Then the economy as we know it more or less ended, and now WWD reports their balance sheet looks like this:

As of Sept. 30, the company had a total of $111.6 million in debt and $13.9 million in cash.

Leverage, thy name is Dov.

But the mere fact that the company's sales are not decreasing is enough to garner some praise in the current market. It has had to refinance with its two major creditors — Bank of America, which provides $75 million in revolving credit, and a private firm called SOF Investments, which loaned Charney $51 million — and agree to tougher terms including penalty fees, downgrading its credit facility by 200 basis points, and a commitment to limit capital expenditures to less than $17.8 million in 2009. (Which, for American Apparel, which likes to open stores by the baker's dozen, is some extraordinary thrift.) Technically, if it can't refinance with SOF Investments again by March 21, Bank of America's entire loan obligations will come due immediately, and, not to put too fine a point on it, if that happens there is no way they could pay up. But this is viewed as an unlikely prospect, because, in the words of retail analyst Todd Slater, "American Apparel is more valuable to them as a going concern than a bankrupt one."

If this sounds familiar to you, it might be because according to the Wall Street Journal, in 2005 — the year the chain opened 65 stores despite not having a CFO — then-primary lender U.S. Bank urged the company to seek additional financing. Unable to do so, American Apparel defaulted on its loan agreements. Because that was back when you could get a home loan with no income, no job, and no assets from a mortgage officer who was on meth, the loans were renegotiated and a new private investor was found (albeit one whose audit of the company, oopsie, uncovered American Apparel's reported growth figures for the year were off by 30%). Would the current credit market be so forgiving if the worst should happen again? I think we all know the answer to that.

American Apparel is a survivor, for now. But I don't understand why the reaction to WWD's story has been uniformly positive: 3% growth, a share price in the crapper, and tough credit terms that led one analyst to downgrade 2009 earnings per share estimate by 9 cents aren't exactly the marks of a paragon of financial health, even in this economy of lowered expectations. American Apparel more or less admits to running raunchy ad campaigns to distract customers from their admirable but irritatingly wholesome sweatshop-free American-made production; the company even pushed out employees it considered "WTO" and "so '99" in 2005 and 2006. Perhaps their sex-drenched image similarly distracts some financial reporters from maintaining perspective on the basics.

The Complicated World Of American Apparel [WWD]

Related: American Apparel Bares All [WSJ]
Ledecky's Black Check Is No Blank Slate [Washington Post]
Bucking The Trend [National Post]
Retail Winners And Losers [The Street]

Earlier: Working At American Apparel Is Not All It's Coked Up To Be