You never quite know where you stand with these Trainwreck documentaries. You’ve got the ones that are explicitly about very serious events, like a deadly crush at a mismanaged Travis Scott concert, but you’ve also got ones that are looking back in hindsight with a comedic eye. The Cult of American Apparel is somewhere in the middle, at least for most of its runtime, but its final five minutes are devastating, and all the more so because you don’t quite expect it.
This is obviously intentional. Sally Rose Griffiths directs the documentary as a relatively straightforward chronicle of the rise and fall of American Apparel and its eccentric CEO Dov Charney, from the perspectives of former employees. None of them seems especially traumatised. Several point out that while there was an element of madness involved in working for the brand during its heyday, there were good times, too. Charney might have been a lot to deal with, but they never saw him do anything that would jive with the litany of sexual harassment claims that were later filed against him.
But it’s all a ruse. It’s mentioned early on that Charney made employees sign contracts that would subsequently prohibit them from taking legal action against him, but it’s smartly brushed aside after that. You don’t realise what a deeply weird thing that is until a post-script explains that Charney has never been charged with anything, and that all the lawsuits filed against him had to, on the strength of those contracts, be settled privately or enter arbitration. The contracts were clearly drawn up to protect a man who had every intention of abusing his employees.
And then the stinger. Snippets of those private testimonies entered the public domain. They see the light of day for the first time in Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel, voiced by actors. And they’re horrifying. They’re significantly worse than any of the other accusations made throughout the rest of the film. It’s a genius deployment of hidden horror that gives this otherwise enjoyable but fairly standard documentary a distinct last-minute necessity. And the grace note is a grimly ironic reveal that not only did Charney never have to answer for these allegations, but his career wasn’t particularly adversely affected either. He went on to found another clothing brand, Los Angeles Apparel, which provides clothing for Kanye West’s Yeezy.
Until this point The Cult of American Apparel paints a stark but almost cartoonish picture of the brand’s formation (hiring people off the street based almost exclusively on what they looked like), growth (raunchy advertising and the USP of Stateside manufacturing, albeit largely by illegal immigrant workers), and inevitable downward spiral. The gradual escalation into something resembling a sex cult was more of an open secret than a behind-closed-doors conspiracy, with most employees at the time considering Charney sleeping with his staff and his staff all sleeping with each other as an inevitable cost of doing business in an agile, hip fashion industry.
But Charney’s increasingly erratic behaviour became less and less tolerable as time went on, and eventually even the American Apparel diehards whose entire lives were bundled up in the company began to abandon what was quite clearly a sinking ship. Someone says early on that they loved every second of being at the company, until they didn’t, which tends to be the way of things.
This would be another story of unchecked individual power leading to inevitable catastrophe, similar in that way to Netflix’s Titan: The OceanGate Disaster, but those last-minute allegations give voice to a much darker story, one in which power doesn’t just excuse acting like a bit of a dick but also behaving in an overtly criminal manner without any repercussion. What was a reasonably knockabout documentary leaves a deeply unsettling taste in the audience’s mouth. We, too, were lured in by American Apparel’s party-hard shenanigans, with no idea of what was really going on behind closed doors.