1The Scout
Ivy found me at Little Joy, a dive bar on Sunset Boulevard I discovered on the night the Santa Ana winds arrived. They roared in like a supernatural force, knocking the power out in Echo Park, and I thought it might be spooky to explore my new neighborhood like that, out there in the blackness with the sounds of the swaying palm trees creaking overhead. The night felt electric, it crackled with possibilities. Winds like these just didn’t exist back in Philly.
I’ve always been someone who goes out looking for an experience, which is really how I ended up in LA in the first place. I had spent the last year terminally bored, watching the clock tick backward at the Philadelphia headquarters of UrbanOutfitters.com. When I landed the copywriting job right after my 2003 graduation, I was practically pinching myself—working for a hipster fashion megalith like Urban would be a rocket launch into my brand-new career in fashion, and I’d get an employee discount at my favorite store. I had scored my dream job on my first shot, this career woman stuff was going to be a snap!
But when I arrived on my first day, I was led down a sterile hallway to an empty desk and filed away between two panels of sliding corkboard. Office culture at Urban was as bland as the Lean Cuisines rotating in the microwave, and my boss was a woman so out of fashion her name was Beverly. And I wasn’t exactly writing about haute couture here—I was cataloging a tacky array of offensive novelty gifts—a board game called Ghettopoly, a T-shirt that read, VOTING IS FOR OLD PEOPLE.
How was I going to thrive in this morally corrupt corporate wasteland for the next fifty years? I felt myself growing older by the minute, and I knew right away I had ended up in the wrong office, the wrong job, the wrong life.
When I heard of a friend who had just moved to Los Angeles and was looking for a roommate to split the rent, I saw an escape hatch materializing on the western horizon. I had never been to LA before, but the city wasn’t a total stranger to me. I felt like I knew it already.
That summer of 2004, the Californication of America was in full swing. I watched real-life LA teenagers on Laguna Beach, and actors portraying them on The O.C. LA was Paris and Nicole’s hometown on The Simple Life, and where Vanilla Ice cohabitated with Ron Jeremy on The Surreal Life. It was a glamorous fable of a city—in a state governed by the Terminator—a chaotic fantasyland of opportunity where everyone was young and no one wore biz-cas, and it was calling my name. I immediately started saving my checks.
And now that I was here, with these mysterious winds rattling the windowpane in my pitch-black $800-a-month bedroom, I knew I had made the right decision. Los Angeles was clearly the place for me, and an exciting future awaited me here. I could feel it.
There was only one problem—my finances.
After just a few months of scrounging for random freelance copywriting jobs that never lasted, the five thousand buffer I had saved up back at Urban was gone with the wind, too. The final blow had been the two-thousand down payment I handed over on a Honda stick shift in fiji blue pearl with crank windows, and now I had monthly $250 car payments and insurance to worry about. There was nothing left in my savings to keep me from the harsh reality of returning to Philly, back to my old job at Urban, which Beverly assured would still be waiting for me if I couldn’t make it in LA.
“In case it doesn’t work out,” Beverly said, sympathetically.
I gritted my teeth and smiled politely, but I knew I was never going back to that corporate hellhole. I would do whatever it took to stay in LA.
The night I met Ivy, I was getting desperate.
* * *
I was just about to give up on my walk through the Santa Anas—the wind was warm like bathwater but stung my bare legs with grit—when I saw Little Joy up ahead. It was on the side of Sunset that had been spared by the windstorm and still had electricity, and the bar was a glowing oasis in the inky night.
The tinkle of glasses and murmur of happy voices grew louder the closer I got. A neon arrow pointed cheerily to the entrance—COCKTAILS.
I paused at the door.
I’d never ventured alone into a bar by myself before that night. I was used to roaming with a pack of girls; I didn’t even like eating in the dining hall alone. But that night something—my fear of failing here, my boredom, my loneliness, the crazy winds, maybe?—something was urging me to enter.
I handed over my Pennsylvania ID to the bouncer, who barely glanced at it, and stepped inside. The bar smelled like yesterday’s cigarettes and the floor stuck gummily to my sneakers. There were a couple pool tables in the back, enshrouded in smoke. The Strokes’ “The Modern Age” blasted from the jukebox, and a quick visit to the bathroom to fix my windblown hair revealed stalls full of chatty girls sharing cocaine and Parliaments. It reminded me of a dive back home, and I felt instantly comfortable.
I ordered a can of Tecate—an alien beer to me, but what everyone else was having—and settled at a barstool to try and meld into my surroundings.
It didn’t work. I felt her eyes on me right away.
I turned to see a girl my age staring at me, sunglasses still perched atop her head even though the sun had set hours ago. She was smiling at me like she knew me already, and she had the kind of frizzy, curly hair that I associated with nerdy efficiency, which made me want to trust her. She looked like someone I’d know back home, someone from school. So when she gave me a little wave, I waved back, automatically.
She was sitting at a table with a couple other girls, and she was wearing a gold racerback tank that shone like an aura off her skin and a pair of matching short shorts. It was just basic gym wear at first glance, but something about that matching set looked special to me. It was vaguely vintage, something that would be at home on both a 1970s Olympian and a 1970s porn star, but still seemed new and fresh—it stuck out in the grungy bar that was marked over with tattoos and shredded rocker tees and the whale tails of thongs cresting over the asses of low-rise jeans.
I noticed the other girls sitting with her were wearing the same clean, classic athleisure wear. Brandless, like it belonged on everyone. Where did they even find this stuff? There had been nothing like it at the Galleria.
When the curly-haired one turned her wave into a come-hither, I hopped off my stool and headed over. I was intrigued by these special girls. What did they want with me?
“Hi, I’m Ivy,” she said, holding out a card.
It looked like a business card, but it wasn’t made of quality cardstock. It was just a slip of printer paper, curling at the edges and cut into an uneven rectangle by someone in a hurry. Xeroxed on the front of it was a picture of a girl in a bikini and a pair of striped athletic socks. She was high kicking over a block of text.
American Apparel, it read.
That name—it sounded so familiar. Sort of nebulous in its generalness, almost generic-sounding. Had I heard it somewhere before, or just thought I had?
I took the card from her hand and scanned the rest.
A progressive, provocative retailer and manufacturer of knit T-shirts
Not dominated by logos or politically correct tribalism
Sweatshop free
Great travel opportunities
I flipped the card over.
Come join our team, it said.
Everything began to swim with meaning.
A retailer
A team, an opportunity
A … job!
I looked at Ivy, my heart pounding in my ears. This girl was my savior in hot shorts. How did she know this was just what I needed? It was pure serendipity, and I couldn’t believe how fate had just handed over—
“I was thinking you could model for us,” Ivy said.
Modeling?
I snapped back into reality and felt all my excitement deflate like an old balloon. I had watched three seasons of Top Model by that winter of 2005—Tyra teasing modeling careers on the end of a fishing line, yanking them away if the girls had the wrong teeth or the wrong body or the wrong personality. I was too smart to fall into that sexist trap after four years at Bryn Mawr. And I was a brain, not a beauty, couldn’t she tell? I needed an actual job that would give me a paycheck every week, health insurance, a 401(k).
I tried to explain.
“I’m not a model, I’m a…”
I searched for the right word.
“… a feminist.”
Ivy laughed.
“You can be both, you know,” she said, gesturing to the other girls at the table. They were all staring at me now, and I shifted self-consciously in my Converse.
“This isn’t just a modeling job,” Ivy assured me. “We do it all. You wanna hear about it?”
I sat down at their table. I had nothing to lose.
* * *
Ivy bought me and the girls another round of Tecates and started explaining.
American Apparel had started off simply as a T-shirt company, selling wholesale to anyone who might need a supply of blank tees for their band or business. But these weren’t just any typical T-shirts—they were slim cut, European style. They clung sexily to your body, a stylish departure from the square tees of the 1990s that turned your torso as boxy as a LEGO.
The company couldn’t make them fast enough. Boxes of the tees were flying out of the Factory as quick as they could be manufactured, and now the brand was expanding into retail. The new brick-and-mortar American Apparel stores were starting to race across the country faster than California wildfire. The company was so successful—growing at such breakneck speed—it was having trouble keeping up with itself.
“We have to wear lots of hats here,” Ivy said.
She told me the same girls managing and working in the retail shops were also the same girls back in the headquarters designing the newest styles. And they were also the ones hiring all the new employees and scouting for new locations in cities where the company would be sure to thrive. And so it only made sense that they were also the campaign girls—the models—appearing in all the ads.
“We’re more like spokesmodels,” Ivy said, clarifying. “We’re the face of the company because we’re the ones running it.”
When she put it like that, it didn’t sound too bad. I could get down with being a spokesmodel, as long as it came with a regular paycheck.
This whole egalitarian system was the vision of the company’s founder—a man with a mystical-sounding name.
Dove, Ivy said. Like the bird, maybe?
“He has some crazy ideas,” Ivy said, her pretty face twisting with a smile. But he was committed to a better life for all of his employees, while also committed to turning a profit. Everything produced in the Factory was made by fair-wage workers, garments you could feel good about wearing and selling.
“Not like that Forever 21 fast-fashion garbage, made in sweatshops overseas,” Ivy said, her nose wrinkling in disgust. “He knows you don’t have to stand on people’s necks to make a profit.”
I felt a wave of guilt run through me. I was one of the masses mindlessly buying it. Of course the cheap stuff came at a great cost, I just wasn’t the one paying it.
“American Apparel is different from all the rest because our boss isn’t trying to cheat anyone,” she said.
The girls at the table nodded in agreement.
“He’s still a businessman, of course. Still a capitalist, just doing it ethically.”
Copyright © 2023 by Kate Flannery