Kate Flannery's memoir goes inside American Apparel’s LA Factory in the mid-aughts.
The Factory sat back from Alameda Street, hidden from the road by a chain-link fence woven with orange bougainvillea. I drove right past the entrance—the unassuming opening in the hedge was easy to overlook—and I had to turn back around to find it. I double-checked my MapQuest print- out and slipped the card Ivy gave me back into my wallet. This was the place. Once I saw it for the first time, I’d never miss it again.
I recognized the look right away—the smile of a teenage girl up to no good. I could practically hear the lukewarm Zima bottles clanking in her backpack, the flick of the lighter igniting a swiped Capri from mom’s purse.this girl, or at least I had been recently. There was something so honest about the shots—just a real-life girl going about the business of girlhood, not reallyIt was so simple, but it worked. I couldn’t stop looking at her. “That’s Natalie,” a voice said.
What I noticed right away was that the whole operation appeared to be the veritable melting pot that my public high school had always promised America to be. Racial and cultural diversity fueled the creative nucleus of this brand—there were no old white guys in button-downs, not a single Boomer to be found. No one looked to be above the age of twenty-five, and I quickly clocked that the majority of the employees were young women.
We stepped onto the fourth floor, a bright open space filled with windows and light, humming with sewing machines. Dozens of garment workers worked side by side in smooth choreography to create quivering piles of kelly-green men’s underwear, which were quickly stacked up at the end of the assembly line. A new pair came into the world every ninety seconds.
“That’s Dov,” Ivy explained, but she didn’t need to. I already knew this man had to be the ethical capitalist she’d told me about at Little Joy. And it seemed like everything she said about him“He rides the city buses early in the morning and finds his workers on the way to their awful sweatshop jobs in the garment district, and he brings them here instead. How many CEOs do that?” Ivy said.
But Ivy used the word “revolution” freely, setting it loose so that it was a real, live thing running around, and I was ready to revolt. Something radical was happening at this Factory, and I needed to be a part of it.“Let’s take some shots on the roof,” Ivy said, a digital camera in one hand and mine in the other.
“Oh, big whoop,” she said, laughing. “Hard work is what will get you noticed here, not some piece of paper your parents paid for.” It was an exciting, inciting monologue I would come to know well, one I would soon memorize myself, one that was aptly nicknamed The Hustle, and one I could deliver with the passion of a hellfire minister at the drop of a hat. The first time I heard it was that day at the Factory, and I believed every word.We had swung by Roz’s desk to pick up a black velour romper with crisscross straps, a brand-new sample that hadn’t hit the stores yet, and it needed to be shot today.
“Shit, wait. How do I turn this flash off ? Hold on a sec,” she muttered, her brow furrowed with concentration.Ivy’s camera started snapping away.
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