American Apparel to Close All 110 Stores

Photo via iStock/Oliver Hoffmann

Bastion of normcore American Apparel announced it will close all 110 of its stores following its sale to Canada’s Gildan Activewear as part of a bankruptcy auction.

That includes the California-based retailer’s two Massachusetts locations on Newbury Street in Boston and on Brattle Street in Cambridge. All 110 stores are expected to close in April.

American Apparel twice filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and 2016. Last week, a Delaware court approved its $88 million sale to Gildan, who paid an additional $15 million for its inventory. Both the company’s labor practicies, as well as numerous sexual harassment violations against its controversial former chief executive Dov Charney, marred the latter half of American Apparel’s 19-year existence.

Charney, a Montreal native, founded America Apparel in his Tufts University dorm room in 1989.

“The best thing about Tufts was that I was able to run American Apparel out of my dorm room. I remember when NYNEX had to install extra lines in my dorm, and the phone workers were perplexed as to what I was doing,” Charney wrote in an autobiographical piece for Business Insider in 2014. “As far a I know, I was the first student at Tufts to have a cellular phone, which cost me approximately $3,000 CAD at the time. I never went to any parties while at school, and focused most of my free time towards the urban environment in Cambridge and Boston. I was a total loner.”