There Is Life After American Apparel



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Iris Alonzo had a long career at American Apparel until last year. Credit Jake Michaels for The New York Times

Iris Alonzo was reflecting, with mock regret, on the success of the deep V-neck T-shirt she helped create for American Apparel years ago.

“I single-handedly destroyed West Hollywood,” she said. “You’d roll up to La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevard and there’d be a guy with a shaved chest and his shirt pulled down to his belly button. ‘Oh, my God. What have we done?’”

Ms. Alonzo, at 37 perhaps the most influential former senior creative director you have never heard of, was sitting in a friend’s apartment just off Central Park West, talking about her decadelong career with the brand that turned the T-shirt ad into an R-rated experience, before filing for bankruptcy last year.

“The first jeans we ever came out with were these high-waisted jeans,” she said. “That was my thing. The tube socks with three stripes. The disco pant. For better or worse, the deep V-neck.”

That all ended in early 2015. But now, after years in the shadow of her former boss, American Apparel’s founder and former chief executive, Dov Charney, an outspoken champion of garment manufacturing in the United States who was accused of sexual harassment, Ms. Alonzo is back. This time she has crowdsourcing and teamwork on her mind.

Indeed, her new endeavor, a clothing and lifestyle-goods company, is called Everybody. Started in November 2015 with Carolina Crespo, 38, another American Apparel alum (she was director of graphics and kids’), the brand has an unusual business model: Instead of designer-as-dictator, the women choose guest collaborators who come up with products.

Ms. Alonzo, who comes across as both laid-back and intensely focused, was prompted to explore the idea, she said, by the countless times someone discovered that she worked for a clothing brand and said, “You know what you should make?”

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Ms. Alonzo, far left, with her business partner, Carolina Crespo, at the studio of their company, Everybody, in Los Angeles. Credit Jake Michaels for The New York Times

It wasn’t the only lesson from what could have been a very painful experience. Ms. Alonzo was dismissed from American Apparel twice: in 2014, after Mr. Charney was forced out, and then, after being brought back months later, was fired again last year after the company hired a new management team.

And she had to overcome the stigma of working at a company that publicly is considered disorderly at best and at worst allegedly hostile to its work force.

“I started thinking about what I could take away from those 11 years and 11 days,” she said. “I went back to all the things that inspired me.”

That list includes old issues of Colors magazine, the artist and designer Nathalie du Pasquier, printed matter of any kind, supporting garment workers, sewing and the work of Tibor Kalman, a graphic designer who died in 1999. Ms. Alonzo is a polymath who graduated from high school early and spent ages 16 to 24 enrolling at community colleges around Los Angeles, learning and dabbling without earning a degree.

During this time, she also interned for Nylon magazine, worked at an agency that represented photographers and was the creative director for the Freshjive Propagandist, a publication put out by the streetwear label Freshjive.

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The company will have guest collaborators, not all of whom are professional designers. Credit Jake Michaels for The New York Times

Then came American Apparel, and 80-hour weeks with no vacations. Still, it all made Ms. Alonzo wonder: “Why do the ideas have to come from a designer? I know a lot of people — they’re writers or they’re architects or they’re kids. But they have their own style, their own passions.”

One of those people, for example, is Jean Pigozzi, the businessman, art collector and global bon vivant who is one of the first round of Everybody collaborators.

Ms. Alonzo met and befriended Mr. Pigozzi while working for American Apparel and asked him to come up with a product for the new company. The 6-foot-4 Mr. Pigozzi scribbled a design for an eight-foot body pillow, shaped like a snake that has swallowed a house. Ms. Alonzo and Ms. Crespo then applied their manufacturing know-how and fine-tuned the Hungry Snake Pillow to bring it to market.

As at American Apparel, there is a focus at Everybody on local workers, and the founders say they are committed to reducing their ecological impact. One of the label’s core items is a white T-shirt offhandedly called the “trash tee” because it’s made from 100 percent recycled cotton from a mill in South Carolina, an industry first, Ms. Alonzo said.

Still, Everybody, unlike her former employer, is a start-up on a shoestring budget. Only four items are currently available, ranging in price from $25 for the T-shirts to $250 for the pillow, and they’re being sold only through the website Everybody.world.

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An eight-foot pillow depicting a snake that has swallowed a house was designed by one of the company’s collaborators, Jean Pigozzi. Credit Jake Michaels for The New York Times

At the moment, collaborators are the brand’s currency. Other early “designers” include the artists Mae Elvis Kaufman and Kalen Hollomon (they’re making a unisex workman’s jacket); the author and illustrator Dallas Clayton (poem postcards); and the sometimes chef, sometimes musician, sometimes Japanese culture writer Kiki Kudo (a collection of little black dresses).

If that list sounds like a New York-Los Angeles cool kids’ club not in keeping with the brand’s name, Ms. Alonzo is quick to point to Prakash Gokalchand.

“He’s a 74-year-old guy — I see him every day playing chess in the park in front of my house,” said Ms. Alonzo, referring to MacArthur Park, west of downtown Los Angeles.

She admired his “classic unassuming style,” she said, and after approaching him, discovered that Mr. Gokalchand had very specific ideas for a long-sleeve shirt whose sleeves roll easily and sweatpants made from extremely soft material.

If the clothes are a hit with consumers, Mr. Gokalchand, like all of Everybody’s designers, will find himself with a small windfall, since contributors receive 10 percent of each sale. Once again, the revenue-sharing idea came out of Ms. Alonzo’s time at American Apparel.

“I thought, ‘God, if I had a dollar for every disco pant we sold,’” she said with a laugh.

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