The Name Sounds Familiar

Somehow, the name Dov Charney sounds familiar:-

Dov Charney proudly refers to himself as a "Jewish hustler." But he is quite possibly the most unorthodox Jew in the history of the shmatte business.

A complicated, charismatic and occasionally controversial figure — he is currently facing a sexual harassment suit — Charney is so acutely in tune with the cultural moment that he is somehow able to use the plain blank T-shirts that he sells to convey potent messages concerning contemporary sex and politics.

Charney, who is 37, originally made a name for himself as a designer and wholesaler of artisanal T-shirts made from softer, more finely knitted cotton than the commercial standard and cut for a snug, body-accentuating fit. (Alex Kuczynski, the Critical Shopper columnist for The New York Times, has written that they are "as close to the Platonic ideal of T-shirt as you can get.") In the past few years, however, he has become a peculiar sort of retail king.

In the summer of 2003, when Charney rented a storefront gallery in Echo Park for an exhibit of photographs taken by his friend Luca Pizzaroni, it only occurred to him as an afterthought to offer some T-shirts for sale as well. The next day, when he discovered that he had rung up $1,500 in sales, he began signing more leases in hip neighborhoods in other cities. As of January, Charney had established more than 110 American Apparel stores in Los Angeles, New York, Montreal, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Seoul, Tokyo and Tel Aviv, with plans to open another 40 by year's end. Sales of American Apparel goods in 2005 totaled approximately $250 million, and the company's L.A. factory, which now employs more than 3,500 people and turns out more than 9,000 separate items, is the single largest garment factory in the United States.

The first-movers of culture, whom Charney refers to as Young Metropolitan Adults, have embraced an aggressively sexualized world, a continuum that includes the hip, subversive and degenerate aesthetic of Charney's friends at Vice magazine, Web sites like Suicide Girls and photographers like Terry Richardson, more stupidly raunchy phenomena like the "Girls Gone Wild" video series or Paris Hilton and, increasingly, the actual intersection of pornography with mainstream entertainment. In this context, the adjective "pervy," a word that often appears in accounts of Charney, is itself a perverse sign of approbation.

I said it sounds familiar, not that I'm perverse.

So, maybe he didn't go to the same Yeshiva as I (but he could have).

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UPDATE

Nope, I didn't know him:-

Charney was raised in Montreal by artsy parents: his father, Morris, an architect, and his mother, Sylvia Safdie, a painter and sculptor (and also the sister of Canada's renowned architect, Moshe Safde) raised him in an environment that encouraged creativity and social activism. Childhood friends say that growing up Dov was hyperactive and attention-hungry.