American Apparel Controversy

American Apparel has been known for having advertisements that are sexually explicit, using tactics like nudity to sell their lingerie, spandex, and leotards. Many times you see girls who are topless or pant less on their website selling different clothing items. Clearly, American Apparel focuses on sex appeal to lure in more customers. But the question is, does this form of marketing objectify women?

Absolutely.

Never should a woman feel the need to buy a piece of clothing for sex appeal for a man. The way American Apparel is marketing their clothes is as if the only reason why customers should buy their clothing items is because you will look “sexy” to attract the opposite gender. Women looking through their website will believe that looking like the model and acting like the model will be the only way to feel beautiful. If models look half naked, what does that say about our perspective on beauty? That the only way to look beautiful is to flaunt your body? Not only are women believing that being beautiful is to be paper thin and 6 feet tall, but to also wear almost nothing? Our society needs to erase both concepts.

This not only is falsifying what beautiful means to society, its completely degrading to women. If you compare the pictures of males modeling American Apparel clothes and women modeling American Apparel clothes, you can see that they are vastly different. Males modeling their clothes stand straight and you just see the clothes they are wearing. The women modeling their clothes are posing in some provocative way and usually just wear that clothing item.

I’m not saying American Apparel is a bad store and sells ugly clothing items; I actually love some of their pieces. But the problem is that they aren’t selling it the right way. Never should an advertisement degrade women into sex objects. Never should an advertisement tell women that being provocative is the only way to be beautiful. The clothes should sell themselves without the sex appeal with it.