Trainwreck | Part 2

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take an even closer look at the Netflix documentary series Trainwreck. You go to a concert to have fun. I never thought that I would see death. Today we're talking to Georgia Casper, Carrie Leah, and Hannah Poulter. There are times when things don't go to plan, and there are times when they fail so spectacularly that it's a train wreck. Like when an iconoclast fashion designer set a new standard for ethical business practices, all while subjecting his workers to abuse and sexual predation.

0:54And I answered the phone and he didn't say anything other than just, I hate you. He just said it. He's just like, I hate you. I fucking hate you. And then he just hung up.

1:03Rebecca Lavoie:Or when Houston concertgoers built a spectacular main stage, not realizing its design would lead to a crowd surge, killing 10 and injuring hundreds. Both the police and organizers have said they didn't want to trigger crowd panic by stopping abruptly. But people were dying. The Netflix series Trainwreck looks at the scandals, disasters, and plain old screw-ups that captivated the world. This season covers the rise and fall of a fashion empire in the cult of American apparel. And it explores the mistakes that led to a fatal concert performance in the Astroworld tragedy. We hear from experts, journalists, and those who lived through it to explore not only what happened, but why.

1:56Rebecca Lavoie:Later in the show, we'll talk to Carrie Lea and Hannah Poulter about the Astroworld tragedy. But first, we're talking to the producer of The Cult of American Apparel, Georgia Casper. Georgia, welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thank you so much. Great to be here. Your film is The Cult of American Apparel. What made this company like a cult? Well, it's interesting because I think there seems to be a lot of hallmarks of a cult. I think, you know, it was led by a really charismatic leader. And I think, you know, what I saw when talking with our contributors, they really built their identity into their work.

2:33And I think that's quite common in cults. And I think their professional and personal lives seemed kind of intertwined within that, which again seems to be another hallmark of cults. So it was actually people who were working at the company that gave that to us. They kept saying it was like working at a cult. It just felt like an apt title for us.

2:53Rebecca Lavoie:I remember seeing American Apparel in the mall. And I'm wondering, in terms of the business model, what made it different than, say, J.Crew or The Gap? I mean, it's really hard to overstate just how groundbreaking, actually, American Apparel was for its time. So, you know, we need to remember this was the early 2000s. Everything was made in America, which just simply wasn't really happening. You know, unfortunately, we know a lot of fashion companies ship their labor out to countries where labor is much cheaper and American Apparel wasn't doing that. It was making all of their clothes in the factory in Los Angeles with garment workers who were treated really well.

3:33They were paid above minimum wage and had fantastic benefits. And also that was really wrapped up in its sexy advertising as well, the sexy package that it had. Its advertising was really provocative for its time. You know, I think we're used to seeing different types of models in adverts these days. But back then, it was airbrushed, very manicured, only a very certain, often Eurocentric type of beauty was being given a platform. And American Apparel was doing the opposite of that. It made a lot of women especially feel like anyone could be beautiful. So it just was really, really groundbreaking for its time.

4:10Very different to what was out there.

4:12Rebecca Lavoie:And to me, these ads are like how a lot of ads look now. So in a way, they were the pioneer for this, right? Totally. I think it's funny because I often see a lot of adverts now that it's hard to not imagine that they were inspired by, you know, the imagery that American Apparel was putting out there. The advertisements were basically softcore porn. There's a sexual element of fashion that's inescapable. So like to then start saying, let's get scared about sex. It just doesn't add up. Again, we're talking 20 years ago where everything, you know, Photoshop was rife and everything was just super manicured in the advertisements.

4:50And, you know, for the first time in American Apparel, we were also seeing, you know, bushy eyebrows and unplugged eyebrows and, you know, sometimes razor burn in underwear adverts and things like that. It's really hard to overstate how different that was to everything at the time.

5:04Rebecca Lavoie:Dove Charney seemed to be pushing this new business ethos about vertical integration and radical transparency. aside from being a different kind of business model he wanted to be seen as a different kind of CEO right it would seem that way I think you know nowadays we're quite used to CEOs being you know synonymous with their own company you know when we think of Tesla you think of Elon Musk and they're very present CEOs in the press whereas I think at the time you know I can't speak for other companies but what I can imagine is that for other clothing brands the CEO is often this person, this anonymous person that you don't get any face-to-face interaction with.

5:45Whereas what I was hearing about Dove at American Apparel was that he was there. He would freely give out his number to anybody and say, call me. That doesn't happen at many companies. He was really front-facing and his image and him was tied with American Apparel. I don't think you could have American Apparel without Dove Charney. You couldn't have Dove Charney without American to power in some ways.

6:06Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk about their hiring practice? What were they looking for in candidates for these jobs? I think they were looking for a coolness. They definitely were hiring freaks and geeks, you know. I mean, it felt like the weirdo club. And actually, one of the slogans was, if you see someone shoplifting, let them know we're hiring. I think it wasn't necessarily a specific look that, you know, I know we've heard about other clothing brands where it might be you have to be very aesthetically conventionally attractive. I think for American Apparel, what I was hearing is that they just had to have an edge or something to them and just something about them that was quite different within a certain cool hipster mode, I suppose.

6:53Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. As the company became more successful, Dove leaned further into his persona. He purchased this historic hilltop mansion and literally left the door open. If you were to walk into that door, what would you see? What would it be like? I mean, I suppose I wouldn't really be able to comment on that because I wasn't there. But what I hear from people that were there, and I think it's something that we speak a little bit about in the film, was that it was almost like an office away from the office. You know, there was a lot of young people working there. But it also struck me that it had a almost like a Playboy Mansion vibe.

7:29Rebecca Lavoie:Like he wasn't modeling himself after Ralph Lauren. He was modeling himself after somebody who had all these young people around him all the time. It would seem that way. And there are just like girls everywhere, you know, making breakfast and like walking his dog. And I don't know, like a little, I don't want to say Playboy Mansion. I guess it was like the Playboy Mansion, but for hipsters. You know, I don't know Dove personally. I can't speak to what he was trying to achieve with that. But it sounds like from everything I've heard about him was that he was someone that really there wasn't maybe much of a boundary between his own personal and professional life.

8:07So it would seem to make sense that he would want to extend that to that inner circle at his own company, too, and invite those people in literally to his home because I think he saw American Apparel as his home. So there wasn't much of a boundary in between those things. In the documentary, we hear about the so-called Dove Girls.

8:27Rebecca Lavoie:Who were they? I think it depends who you ask, to be honest. It was something, it was a term that I heard often. It was like, oh, she's a Dove Girl. And the thing our contributors speak a bit about in the film was, what is a Dove Girl? And it seems to be a girl who had some type of dynamic with Dove. And it's hard to know exactly what that is, because I'm sure it was individual per person. but it was someone who had a relationship with Dove who seemed to have power in some way because of that. You were kind of afraid of the Dove girls if they were around. They're this kind of like hit squad. You know, at my desk there'd be some girl that would show up with a micro-mess shirt and nothing underneath and tell me something that I needed to do and it would sort of be like, excuse me, who are you?

9:17It's like, well, Dove says you have to do this. They seem to have authority over the people in the stores and what have you. So I think they weren't always the most popular people within that company.

9:29Rebecca Lavoie:It actually also reminds me of the cult model, right? I think about Keith Raniere, who has his insiders. And in Wild Wild Country, we see that he's insiders. And so that seems to, again, be modeling this cult dynamic. At one point, we hear Dove speaking to this idea of whether it's OK for the boss to sleep with his employees. And he says, The heart wants what the heart wants. Did this raise red flags for anyone? I think it's a really interesting area, to be honest, because I think that for a lot of people, yeah, they're consenting adults. And I think that was something he puts forward in his arguments about that, that consenting adults, why not?

10:07It's a very sexy company. So it just feels natural that that was going to bleed into the culture of the company. But at the same time, I think others would argue that there's a clear power imbalance there. And, you know, I think that's just something that's quite interesting to put forward to people. How OK is that? And I think now there's a lot more conversations around that post Me Too movement. But I think certainly back then there wasn't necessarily in the 2000s about this power imbalance and consent and really the nuances of that.

10:39Rebecca Lavoie:One of the things I love about your documentary is that you show, you don't tell. And we learned that Dove wasn't merely demanding of his employees. He was actually abusive. And we see the video from inside the office, all these examples of these videos. I'm going to make you work the hours. He does not work. He would yell, if you can't take this, then just fucking leave right now. Hopefully by the end of the night we'll quit or we'll fucking submit. Okay? Quit or submit. We're going to play a game on it. would you mind characterizing what was going on in the office a little bit? Because we do see these, you know, kind of intense confrontations where he'll go after one employee and the other employees around will just sort of be, you know, continuing to work with these like wide-eyed looks on their faces.

11:26Totally. I mean, that's something I noticed when I was watching the footage is, you know, again, I can't speak truly because I wasn't there. But what struck me when watching some of these videos was it just seemed like normalized behavior and some of the shouting and the loudness and those types of confrontations because like you say a lot of the people around them don't seem to react it just seemed like every day. I couldn't help but think about how young

11:53Rebecca Lavoie:all of these employees were they weren't just inexperienced in the fashion industry they were inexperienced at working and I'm wondering if you know they thought this is what a corporate workplace is supposed to be like. So I found myself wondering, and I don't know if you wondered about this, if there were a senior management team of 40-somethings, 50-somethings instead of 20-somethings, could the atmosphere have been different? Almost certainly, yeah. I've personally been in situations where, you know, when I was in the infancy of my career, those years are really formative, I think, when you enter the workplace.

12:25For many people, it was their first and only experience at that time with the workplace. They might have started on the shop floor being, you know, 17, 18, something like that, and rose through the ranks very quickly. And if that's your only template for how a workplace is run and you have nothing to compare it to, then it's natural that you're not really going to question too many things. And especially in such a cool company, I think working at American Apparel is something that was really envied. So you're not necessarily going to question things in the way that perhaps a 40 year old, 50 year old person who's got a wide range of experience at different companies would add to that mix and maybe raise their hand and say, hey, this isn't cool or this doesn't happen this way or it shouldn't happen this way and have the confidence and the experience to say that.

13:16Rebecca Lavoie:One of the things that also struck me was that you have interviews with employees who were kind of outsiders. You know, there was this philosophy of somebody shoplifts from the store, hire them. Was the fact that, you know, these are young people who weren't corporate types to begin with. Did that play into this? Because that's also, again, is a kind of cult, like take people from the margins and bring them in. For sure. I think, again, what a lot of our contributors say in the film is that for whatever reason felt othered in whatever other situations. And, you know, you have this really cool brand that everyone loves.

13:52You know, again, it's like the fastest retail expansion, I think, ever. And they're validating you and saying, hey, you're cool enough to be here. And I think that experience, you know, a lot of people say it's really validating. It gives them an identity where perhaps they didn't have a strong one before or it was one that they didn't necessarily like before. And again, like you say, it adds to the cult experience of that. It's a bringing together of people who might not be accepted necessarily in other groups.

14:22Rebecca Lavoie:American Apparel had been this kind of charmed company. They weathered the recession better than competitors. But then there was an immigration crackdown that cut Dove's workforce and the first allegations of misconduct came out. What did that do to the business and what did that do to Dove personally? Well, what I can say it did for the business is that to lose half of your workforce, especially at a time where you've perhaps just expanded to even more stores. So those stores need more T-shirts, they need more disco pants, they need more, you know, stock. And even if the demand is there for consumers, but you can't provide that stock for that demand, then that's effectively a lost sale.

15:04So I can only imagine, you know, again, I don't know Dove personally, and we didn't get to talk to him as part of this documentary. But I can only imagine that it was an incredibly frustrating time, especially off the back of a recession where everyone is feeling the pinch.

15:20Rebecca Lavoie:We hear that many of the employees were given a copy of the book, The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, who wound up on the American Apparel Board. Many said they never bothered to read it at first, but then you had them read it on camera. Did that answer some questions for them about their experiences or raise more questions about their experiences? As you say, I think it answered some questions and I think it raised some questions in both equal parts. Give your new disciples rituals to perform. Ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause.

15:53Play into people's need to believe and create a cult-like following. I think it was really interesting watching their reactions in real time going through that book because it was like seeing in their own faces, like the wall falls slightly from their eyes a little bit where I think it must, I can only imagine for them a really interesting experience and kind of answered a lot of questions about their time at American Apparel.

16:21Rebecca Lavoie:It's certainly an interesting choice to put a cult manual next to t-shirts in a store. It is. And I think it's one of the things, you know, the same company also sold Magic Wand vibrators. So again, it just speaks to how different American Apparel was at that time. I don't imagine I'll see that at H &M anytime soon, but I could be wrong. Another thing employees did was they had to sign these very powerful waivers of their right to sue the company. And that eventually led to proceedings behind closed doors, but you were able to obtain some of the testimony from the plaintiffs. What did you learn when you saw that?

16:59You know, I was really shocked and saddened by what I was reading. Tried to take photos and then instantly attacked me, forcing me to perform sexual acts. He demanded I show him my breasts. And when I said no, he became more aggressive and violent. He took me to the bedroom, got on top of me. You know, I was horrified, to be honest, to read what I was reading. And of course, Dove denies all of these allegations. But it's just to read in black and white some of these testimonies was really horrifying.

17:32Rebecca Lavoie:At what point did the board finally decide that the company was better off without Dove Charney? I think it was years later. It was about 2014. It was after these allegations came to light, actually, in the public domain through a court case, which of course we get into in the film a little bit. And, you know, their reasoning is that while there had been rumors about Dov Charney's behavior, they would argue this is one of the moments of proof for those rumors, I suppose. And they decided that they have to act on it when they did. Dov Charney has denied any wrongdoing, and he's currently CEO of Yeezy, Kanye West's fashion brand.

18:14Rebecca Lavoie:Unlike many in the Me Too era, he has not quietly left the stage, which makes me wonder what accountability looks like. But what do you think about that? In some ways, I'm surprised that he's still out in the fashion world, but in other ways, I'm not. I think what I kept hearing about Dov Chani was that he was genuinely incredibly passionate about t-shirts, what I would hear is that he just really had such an extensive knowledge and could talk to you for hours about thread count and quality and, you know, the rest of that. And I think when you have that passion, he sounds to me like someone who wouldn't be able to walk away.

18:55And he's always been, you know, even American Apparel, it's very going against the grain of how other things are done. So in many ways, it's not surprising to me for him to continue in the fashion industry.

19:06Rebecca Lavoie:Well, the film is Trainwreck, the cult of American apparel. Georgia Jasper, thank you so much for telling me all about it. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

19:19Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by Carrie Leah and Hannah Poulter. Thank you for joining me on You Can't Make This Up. Thanks for having us. Thank you. So your film is the Astroworld tragedy, which focuses on the deaths at a Houston music festival. The headliner and organizer was hip hop artist Travis Scott. Can you talk about what Travis Scott means to the city of Houston? Carrie? I think to answer that question, you'd really want to speak to the people of Houston, which is what we tried to do as a team. And the people that our team spoke to really talked about what an inspiration that he was. He was someone who was like them.

19:53He was someone who was a local boy done good and a real, you know, an artist that had gone out and kind of conquered music and conquered lots of other things as well. So someone that most of our contributors that had attended the concert, he was someone that they really, really looked up to.

20:10Rebecca Lavoie:Hannah, this was the first Astroworld Festival after COVID and lockdowns. How did that play into the vibe of the crowd returning to this festival? I think the young people were hugely excited to be there. There had been two previous Astroworlds and they'd been really successful. They'd been really exciting shows. And a lot of the sort of Houston young people loved to be there. It was a great vibe. And so post-COVID, all they wanted to do, I think like any of us, you know, is be out with your friends at live music, experiencing it for real again. So, you know, that just created a huge buzz for it.