PORN PUSHERS OR YOUTH PROPHETS?
Sweatshop-free fans get their panties in a knot over American Apparel's gritty ad come-ons
By Adria Vasil, WWW.NOWTORONTO.COM

Me and Dov go way back. Ever since the days when I ran my own one-woman sweatshop, scrawling grrl-power slogans onto clothes in my dark basement kitchen, I've bought T-shirts off the guy. OK, not him personally, but his company, American Apparel. But his face would pop up in my mail-order catalogue every now and then.

Our relationship was all smiles and rainbows for a long time. I bought boxfuls of his girly Ts, and his people assured me their workers made more than any other sewers in L.A., got free daycare, nearly free insurance coverage and free in-house massages. My back hurt; I was jealous. But we were happy.

That was before the company's massive modern white storefronts started infiltrating the trendiest streets on the globe and ads declaring it sweatshop-free began dominating the back pages of alt weeklies across the continent.

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