Cynical picture emerges in 'splasher' mystery

By David Segal

updated 1:15 p.m. ET March 10, 2007

NEW YORK - For months, a minor mystery has beguiled the hipsters of this city: Who is splashing paint on New York's highest-profile graffiti?

Late last year, someone with nerve, time and a taste for vivid colors began to deface walls where stars of the semi-underground world of graffiti have left their handiwork. The aftermath always looks the same: a piece of "street art," as it's called by fans, covered in gobs of haphazardly tossed paint, with a pretentious manifesto pasted nearby. "Avant-Garde: Advance Scouts for Capital" reads the headline. Most the copy is mumbo jumbo like this: "A fetishized action of banality, your work is a trough for the gallery owners and critics."

Who would deface graffiti, of all things? And what is "fetishized action" anyway? Nobody has caught the Splasher, as he or she has come to be known, leaving room for abundant speculation on local blogs and, more recently, in stories in New York magazine and the New York Times.

But now a suspect has emerged: American Apparel.

Yes, the Los Angeles-based clothing chain that sells slim-fitting "baby rib crop" T-shirts to 22-year-olds. To date, the company has been known primarily for its hasty expansion -- there are two stores in the D.C. area and more than 140 other locations in the United States and elsewhere -- and for the saucy, amateur-porn style of its advertising. That, plus the exploits of the company's founder, Dov Charney, the randy 38-year-old chief executive who boasts about his romps with employees and has been sued for sexual harassment. (According to a spokeswoman for the company, Cynthia Semon, one suit was dismissed, one was settled and one is pending.)

The cloud of suspicion settled above American Apparel because a new version of the Splasher manifesto popped up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, apparently on Sunday night. The text and font were identical to the original, but there was a key difference: An ad for American Apparel was stripped across the bottom. "Try this!" the copy reads, next to a guy in a pair of American Apparel green underwear and tube socks.

At first glance, this appears to be a freshly pasted-up manifesto, along with an American Apparel ad, both splashed with bright blue paint. But here's the twist: There are a bunch of these new manifestos, and each one is splashed in exactly the same pattern, and with exactly the same shade of blue. In other words, the image you see at the beginning of this story is a color photocopy -- manifesto, ad and fake splatter, all on one page.

You getting the picture?

Then you know it's time for a phone call to American Apparel.

'Nothing to do with us'
"I can tell you this didn't come from us," says Semon. "We make ads that are provocative, but we don't splash paint on graffiti."

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Semon then says she'll call the company's advertising department, just to double-check. Ten minutes later, the phone rings.

"They laughed," she says. "This has nothing to do with us. The company loves art. Dov's mother is an artist. We've got photographs all over our factory," which is in downtown Los Angeles.

So, any theories at all?

"I think someone is trying to implicate us," she says.

Aha! It's not American Apparel, it's an enemy of American Apparel. A setup, if you will. Perhaps someone less than satisfied with its $18 forest/gold fine jersey ringer tank with contrast binding and generous armhole openings, hmmmm? Or the disgruntled owner of a $30 nylon tricot men's swim brief, front lined with durable stitching all around, plus water-wicking Helenca lining.

Or it could be any of the locals who groused when American Apparel opened a store two years ago in Williamsburg. We're talking about the capital of boho cool, a place that's always been hostile to retail chains of any kind.

"That store just seemed to open up one day out of the blue, and there were plenty of people who weren't happy about it," says Billy Campion, a rocker who performs under the name Vic Thrill. "I wouldn't put it past someone around here to frame the place."

The inelegantly titled "I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin" blog discovered and photographed the new AA-infused manifestos on Sunday night and posted those photos Monday, along with some idle guesses about what it all means. Theory No. 1: It's been American Apparel from the get-go, no matter what they say.

"Naturally, they'll deny everything -- after all, graffiti in all forms is still technically a crime, isn't it," the blogger wrote. Or it could be someone is splashing the Splasher, as a blogger with the Village Voice hypothesized on Tuesday. A way to say, "You've got all the street cred of a semi-naked bozo in an American Apparel ad." Or words to that effect.

Then again, it could be that American Apparel wasn't the Splasher from the beginning but now is trying to leap on the Splasher bandwagon with a little guerrilla marketing. Maybe the company pasted up a bunch of manifestos that incorporate AA ads, hoping that it would turn up on blogs (as it did), then be amplified in newspapers by nitwit reporters (gulp).

Close inspection
This required closer inspection. A couple of the ad-festoes were examined up close Monday afternoon on North Sixth Street in Brooklyn. It was clear that these are digital photos, not originals. (They look kind of grainy, for one thing.) These particular examples were on a wall one block from that aforementioned American Apparel store. So it seemed like a good idea to head inside the place and accuse the employees of graffiti splashing.

Oh, like they cared. Staffers in this place greet every customer, it seems, with a look that could only be described as "get it yourself," and reporters are treated no differently. The store manager was Pete Ruppert, a young man sporting a bunch of colorful tattoos, including one that read "Be Your Own Boss," next to an image of a handgun. He said he had not heard of any Splasher-American Apparel connection. Really, cross his heart and hope to die. He then agreed to take a walk and look at the faux splatterings on that North Sixth Street wall.

"That's Glen," said Ruppert, as he studied the evidence. "I went to school with him."

For a moment, it seemed like he was saying, "Glen did this," but it turned out he was referring to the dude in the green undies. Okay, Mr. Ruppert, you know a male model. But any idea whether AA is actually behind this paste-up?

He shook his head, on which rested a Detroit Tigers cap, tipped sideways for a hint of hip-hop flava. "If this had anything to do with our advertising, I'd know about it," he said.

Case unclosed, it seems. Which might be better than the alternative. American Apparel shills, in the street, with color photocopies and paste-- frankly, this urban game of Clue deserves a better ending than that.

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