Study up. There will be a Dov Charney sex scandal quiz. www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=10861

Los Angeles- Is it any wonder that the fashion and porn industries are in bed together? Both push the envelope of acceptability. Both like to cause a sensation. And both sell sex.

Ever since Madonna made porn chic in her Sex coffee-table book, and photographer Bruce Weber shot a series of ads for Calvin Klein featuring glazed youth in a shag-and-ply rec room as if they were auditioning for an amateur sex film, porn’s cheesy aesthetic has, in the kind of ironic juxtaposition that style types love, emerged as the height of fashion (it’s so out, it’s in; so hideous, it’s fabulous!). Low-rent porn is now collected as a kitsch art form, used as “inspiration” for fashion ad campaigns and hung in hip boutiques and galleries.

Does anybody have a problem with that? Well, after reading bizarre tales of Dov Charney, the manically flamboyant 36-year-old Montreal-born CEO and founder of American Apparel, who has been slapped with two sexual-harassment suits by former employees, I’ve decided that I do.

By all reports, Charney styles himself as a horny mack daddy. He drives a white Lincoln Grand Marquis, likes to snap grainy pictures of “real” models in states of undress for his ads and sports, in the manner of his obvious muse, the porno-chic fashion photographer Terry Richardson, fat seventies sideburns, oversized yellow-tinted aviator sunglasses and a swinger’s handlebar ‘stache. “I think I was born a hustler,” the mogul of the $250-million (U.S.) company bragged to The New York Times.

Charney’s American Apparel brand has been touted as an “alternative Gap” for young urban hipsters. The merchandise — tiny fitted tees and thong underwear — is marketed as “logo-free” and “sweatshop-free.” Its stores are situated in offbeat neighbourhoods such as Williamsburg and Brooklyn in New York, and Queen Street West in Toronto. Their walls are decorated with images from vintage porn mags — the perfect come-on to his target market, who read the combo of socially responsible and sexually open as shorthand for cool.

For Charney, however, porno-chic is not merely an aesthetic. In a profile for the July, 2004, issue of Jane magazine, titled Meet Your New Boss, writer Claudine Ko reported that, in the month-long period she tailed Charney, the CEO and a female employee put on a “show” for her, and that Charney openly masturbated in her presence on approximately eight separate occasions. “Masturbation in front of women is underrated,” Charney explained. His foxy personal assistant Iris, who described herself as his “bitch,” piped up: “I think it’s really healthy . . . it’s got to be great for business.”

Charney has never been secretive about his sex life. He has posed naked for a gay men’s magazine, he likes to interview potential employees in his underwear and he freely admits that he has had numerous (consensual) sexual liaisons with his employees.

Judging from his behaviour, and his many statements about sexual freedom, Charney sees himself as a crusader in hypocritical, puritan America. Lucky for him, this message resonates with his twentysomething audience. But not everybody is up with the program.

According to The New York Times, in the lawsuits filed this month, the former employees say that the atmosphere at American Apparel was “intolerable” and “intimidating” and that they were subjected to “egregious” sexual comments and behaviour. One of the women, Heather Pithie, says that Charney gave her and a co-worker vibrators, saying “it’s great during sex,” and that she was terrified of being alone with him. None of the plaintiffs allege that they were sexually assaulted or forced into having sex.

Andrew Kaplan, Charney’s lawyer, responded by saying, “What they’re trying to do is use Mr. Charney’s openness about his sexuality as a weapon against him.”

The fashion industry’s response has been predictably jaded. Ilse Metchek, the executive director of the California Trade Association, shrugged off the plaintiff’s allegations, telling the Times, “If you’re seasick, don’t join the navy.”

Meanwhile, much of the news media continues to cast Charney as the unjustly castigated arbiter of cool. “It’s just a simple white tank,” wrote Chantal Eustace of her American Apparel purchase in the youth-oriented Dose daily magazine this week, “. . . [But] it’s part of an openly sexual man’s socially conscious company, crafted in a downtown Los Angeles factory by workers whose wages start at $13 an hour. . . . Love it or leave it, the whole thing is undeniably cool.”

Letting the boss off for being a horny old bastard is old-school, but Charney’s version of harassment is a modern phenomenon.

Fashion, it seems, has its own methods of instilling fear and intimidating. By aligning with porn, Charney and his American Apparel have managed to pull the 100-per-cent cotton over the eyes of a generation of young women raised to imagine any form of sexual modesty as uncool.

In the old days, the dirty-minded boss played on his young victims’ shame and sexual inexperience. Today, all the boss has to do is maintain the dangerous fiction that has wide acceptance among a post-ironic generation of hipsters: There is no such thing as sexually inappropriate behaviour, and porn, and all it represents, isn’t crass and vulgar, but hip.

Woe to those who dare to find it otherwise. Fashion has thrown the gauntlet, and those who are grossed out just aren’t cool enough.