American Apparel is still around apparently and in the news again for its softcore ads. In New York, the messages of prominent AA billboards (girls look best in sex positions and dressed in AA’s non-clothes) have been “answered” by graffiti writers. In France, AA’s amateur models are baring their breasts for the ads (zut alors!).

Business magazines, culture-vulture rags, porn-sites have all featured lots of writing about American Apparel and its crazy-pervy founder Dov Charney. The best thing produced on the AA phenomenon, though, was a blazingly authentic blog post written in October by one of the company’s former $9 per hour retail-slaves/branding-models. “Working at AA” she said, “is all it’s coked up to be…”

“I worked at American Apparel specifically because I was trying to glean some insight into this basic theory I had. I don’t remember its specifics anymore, but essentially it revolved around the idea that certain sectors of the American economy had lost so many of their old functions and necessary skills to outsourcing and automation that the workplace was basically reverting people wholesale back to high school, where all that mattered was how hot you were, whether you had such and such pair of cool shoes first, and whether you knew where to get illicit substances…”

Go to the funny-interesting blog site Jezebel for more; it’s full of good stuff like this.