I remember walking around GangNam, in Seoul, where I passed a fashion store. The store and the exhibited clothes appealed, so I walked in for a closer look. I liked there shirts. They used a surprisingly comfortable material, which just felt good. But there it was, a shocking slogan: Made in Downtown LA, Organic. Gosh, another anti-globalization environmentalist. No, I can't support this company. I left the store feeling a bit sorry for the missed shirt.

Half a year later, today. I'm reading about this guy, Dov Charney, who runs a global fashion company focusing on the needs of the young, well-travelled crowd that he calls the “world-metropolitan culture”. While reading I figured this company called American Apparel, is the one I visited in Seoul.

From The Economist:
DOV CHARNEY courts controversy. The 37-year-old founder and chief executive of American Apparel, the largest T-shirt manufacturer in America, has been called a brilliant businessman, an amateur pornographer, a Jewish hustler and a man with a social mission. He is admired for single-handedly creating one of America's most successful fashion retailers, for devising his company's sexually suggestive approach to advertising and for treating his workers much better than his rivals. He is also envied, loathed and criticised for all of these things.
Read the entire Face Value.

This article and an interview by Charlie Rose showed me that Mr Charney is a likeable person, indeed a capitalist and very much pro-globalisation. The Economist calls him The Hustler. An aggressively enterprising person. A go-getter.

I guess I can return to GangNam and buy that Shirt without a guilty conscience.

PS.: I wanted to show a picture of Mr Charney. But American Apparel has a beautiful Photo Collections where I stumbled over a picture of Ji-Sung, an employee from the Seoul store, which I liked better.

Labels: Asia, Economics