During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dov Charney repurposed his South Central Los Angeles factory to produce cloth masks and medical gowns, presenting the operation as an urgently needed domestic source of personal protective equipment. The company said it intended to manufacture as many as 300,000 masks and 50,000 gowns each week. Public-health officials, however, ordered the facility closed in 2020 after citing what they described as flagrant violations of mandatory infection-control orders. Before the shutdown, approximately 300 workers were infected and four employees died. The episode became especially damaging because Charney had portrayed U.S.-based manufacturing as a more ethical alternative to dangerous overseas garment production, while his own factory was accused of failing to protect its predominantly immigrant workforce during a lethal workplace outbreak. The closure exposed the gap between patriotic domestic-manufacturing rhetoric and actual labor protections, and revived scrutiny of Charney's earlier claims that global fashion operated through 'slave labor' and 'death trap manufacturing.'
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2020s
The Los Angeles Apparel COVID-19 Outbreak That Killed Four Workers
Los Angeles Apparel and Dov Charney / 2020s
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dov Charney repurposed his South Central Los Angeles factory to produce cloth masks and medical gowns, presenting the operation as an urgently needed domestic source of personal protective equipment. The company said it intended to manufacture as many as 300,000 masks and 50,000 gowns each week. Public-health officials, however, ordered the facility closed in 2020 after citing what they described as flagrant violations of mandatory infection-control orders. Before the shutdown, approximately 300 workers were infected and four employees died. The episode became especially damaging because Charney had portrayed U.S.-based manufacturing as a more ethical alternative to dangerous overseas garment production, while his own factory was accused of failing to protect its predominantly immigrant workforce during a lethal workplace outbreak. The closure exposed the gap between patriotic domestic-manufacturing rhetoric and actual labor protections, and revived scrutiny of Charney's earlier claims that global fashion operated through 'slave labor' and 'death trap manufacturing.'
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