Adieu, American Apparel…Again

This is like the Groundhog Day of fashion retail reporting: every day American Apparel continues its slow, slow descent into retail hell, where it will join formerly notable brands like Gimbel’s and Juicy Couture.

There’s a perception that fashion moves at a relentless pace, which is absolutely true: every season (of which there are now…seven, I think, spread out among New York, London, Milan, and Paris, and that doesn’t even include smaller cities that host their own inexplicable runway shows, but I digress) there’s some new young hot thing setting the entire industry ablaze and we’re expected to throw out everything we own and recreate the opening number from Funny Face. But there’s a parallel fashion industry where trends move glacially, and morale is propped up by completely imaginary concepts like “no press is bad press” and “millennial shopping patterns.”

These companies simply do not sell enough merchandise to justify running their businesses. They remain open by virtue of loans and crossed fingers. Abercrombie & Fitch is another example of this; analysts have been predicting that chain’s demise for years. Both Abercrombie and American Apparel share certain terrible characteristics, like the demonstrated abuse of their retail employees, out-of-control CEOs ousted or harnessed by long-suffering board members, and an aesthetic the rest of the world has long since outgrown. For lack of a better term, they are boring!! Boring to watch, boring to think about.

They shoot horses, don’t they? What about mall stores that have long outlived their value or relevancy?