These surely are the end days.
A woman’s clothing company is going full commando.
The company, American Apparel, has decided to display mannequins with pubic hair in its storefront windows.
Danica Ceballos reports for the New York Observer, Jan. 16, 2014, that American Apparel CEO Dov Charney gave the okay to the store on East Houston St. in New York’s Lower East Side to showcase mannequins in see-through lingerie, sporting luxuriant patches of black public hair.
District Visual Manager Dee Myles says the store thinks of pubic hair as “beautiful and sexy” and brings “rawness and newness to a holiday thought of as a romantic Hallmark holiday … by exploiting the lust of Valentine’s Day.”
More than being “sexy,” the Los Angeles based company throws a gloss of political rationalization to its mannequins going commando, maintaining that the pubic hair will encourage passersby to question why society has set standards for beauty and why we are so shocked when these rules are broken.
As if the store’s 6 ft tall, rail-thin mannequins don’t set unreal “standards for beauty” for women.
American Apparel is no stranger to controversey. In October, the company released a t-shirt that featured a line drawing of a menstruating vagina. The designer of the t-shirt, Petra Collins, gave this elaborate rationalization for the t-shirt:
“Grown women are taught to repress their postpubescent body or hide it. When you start puberty and you start growing hair you’re taught to shave it, because no one’s supposed to see it. With your period, it’s something that you conceal—no one’s supposed to know. It’s almost pedophilic—and I don’t want to throw that word around. But this feminine ideology we have, of the woman being a prepubescent girl, is how we’re taught to change our bodies.”
I will not promote the store or the t-shirt by posting an image of the obscene and disgusting t-shirt. If you want to see it, click here.
I’ve never bought anything from American Apparel; I’ve never even set foot in one. But I now have a real reason to boycott this company.
~Eowyn