Los Angeles Apparel — from scandal to revival

On the approach to the industrial districts of Los Angeles stand billboards of female silhouettes in swimwear. Not on Sunset Boulevard, where the luxury campaigns hang — deliberately away from it. That is how Los Angeles Apparel advertises itself, and it describes the whole strategy fairly precisely: do it where it is not done, and not the way it is done.

The brand now has two floors at 480 Broadway in New York’s SoHo — 25,000 square feet in a space previously occupied by Topshop. It started cautiously, with a one-year lease from KPG Funds. In March last year it signed a ten-year contract.

To understand why this is news, you have to go back to 2014. That was when Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, left the company amid allegations of harassment and a brutal management style. A year later American Apparel went bankrupt. Charney denied the most serious allegations and some cases were settled out of court — but it cost him his reputation.

In 2016 he began again, with almost no publicity. The formula stayed the same: logo-free basics, production inside Los Angeles, honest prices. Even some of the machinery moved over from the old factory. Today that means workshops in the southern part of downtown and a factory store at 812 East 59th Street, where shoppers are let in right alongside production.

The road was not a smooth one. In the summer of 2020 the factories closed: according to The New York Times, more than 300 employees were infected and four died. In 2023 Charney took charge of Yeezy after Kanye West’s split with Adidas — and cut the line at his own facilities.

Neither stopped the growth. Annual revenue is estimated at $50m to $100m. The customer is held not by advertising but by fabric: the house’s extra-heavy cotton, used for weighty T-shirts and hoodies, survives several seasons where mass-market pieces stretch out within a month. And the leotard in the range is a direct quotation from American Apparel — only now without American Apparel.