The Higher You Climb

The mannequins stared from the windows of American Apparel's flagship store. Their porcelain faces frozen in expressions of manufactured rebellion. Inside, Dov Charney paced between racks of his company's signature basics, his empire now stretched across 250 stores worldwide.

"Everything about the brand is about sex and youth and energy," he told Inc. Magazine in 2005.

In hindsight, the warning signs were there, coded in plain sight. A CEO who built his brand identity around "sex and youth" might have been telling us exactly who he was all along.

The company's advertisements pushed boundaries deliberately. Models barely out of their teens posed in provocative positions. Their youth was weaponized into marketing gold. Charney positioned himself as the visionary behind this aesthetic revolution, the CEO who dared to challenge fashion's boring conventions.

But behind the scenes, former employees described a nightmare. Allegations emerged of a workplace where the line between creative vision and exploitation was blurred. Where power dynamics twisted into something darker. Where the man who preached liberation allegedly created his own prison of control.