Los Angeles Apparel: from scandal to revival
The man pushed out of his own company took nine years to open two floors on Broadway. Here is how.
Billboards with women in swimsuits stand at the edge of working-class Los Angeles. Not on Sunset Boulevard, where the luxury campaigns hang — deliberately off to the side. That is how Los Angeles Apparel advertises, and it describes the whole strategy fairly well.
The brand now holds two floors at 480 Broadway in New York's Soho: 25,000 square feet in the space Topshop used to occupy. They started carefully, on a one-year lease from KPG Funds. Last March they signed for ten years.
To see why that is news, go back to 2014, when Dov Charney left American Apparel, the company he founded, amid allegations of harassment and a harsh management style. A year later it went bankrupt. Charney denied the most serious claims and several cases were settled out of court, but the reputational damage stuck.
In 2016 he started again, quietly. The formula was unchanged: logo-free basics, production inside Los Angeles, honest prices. Some of the machinery even came from the old factory floor.
The road was not smooth. In summer 2020 the factories closed: according to The New York Times, more than 300 workers were infected and four died. In 2023 Charney took over Yeezy after Kanye West's split from Adidas, producing the line in his own plants.
Neither stopped the growth. Annual revenue is estimated at 50 to 100 million dollars. What holds customers is not advertising but cloth: an extra-thick cotton for heavy tees and hoodies that survives seasons where fast fashion loses shape in a month.