American Apparel: From Sheep, For Sheep

I'm so tired of looking into the sunken, emaciated, drug-ravaged faces of the suicide girl wet T-shirt models in the stupid American Apparel ads. I'm even more tired of American Apparel and the idiots who buy clothes there. And there must be a lot of those idiots, because those fuckers are franchising faster than Starbucks on a triple latte.

A lot of shit about this world confuses me. I am constantly confronted with situations I simply cannot understand. But the fact that people will pay outrageous prices for BLANK, SOLID COLORED CLOTHING WITH NO IDENTIFYING BRAND OR LOGO is simply fucking beyond me. I mean, you can buy those same undershirts at Wal-Mart for $6 a 3-pack, and no one will ever know the difference. So why, WHY would one choose to spend all that extra money to purchase what is ostensibly the same article of clothing from a minimalistic-designed store manned by jaded pseudo-hipsters pretending that their band is going to take off and they're not going to work in retail every day for the rest of their lives until they die?

Oh, I know. The clothes are "sweatshop free", made in America. Not just America, either - Downtown LA. That's where the cool, socially responsible shit is all going down. That's great, really it is. Be sure to pat yourselves on the back while enjoying all your Hong Kong manufactured electronics, and strolling around in your Underpaid Malaysian Child-crafted Nike Dunks, you fucking morons.

If only you dopes could figure out a way to get Vice Magazine injected directly into your consciousness, life would be so much easier, wouldn't it? Because we all know how cool Terry Richardson's grainy drug addict Polariods are, capturing how cool it is to wallow around crack den hotel rooms, jumping on the bed until the buzz wears off, then nodding off in the bathtub while your buddy goes out to score. Yeah, dude. Awesome.

American Apparel's only redeeming value is that its very existence is pure, unassailable proof that, with the right graphic design and layout of an advertisement, people can literally be convinced to buy anything, no matter how profoundly ridiculous the product or service might be. It almost feels like some kind of inside joke experiment.

"Dude, I bet I can actually get people to pay three times as much for cheap, easy-to-manufacture clothing while simultaneously convincing them that what they're purchasing is non-mainstream and indie."

Brand free my ass.