In the zany days before Christmas 2004, the spanking new American Apparel shop on Toronto’s Queen Street West was the scene of a shopping frenzy of twentysomethings with ’tude. The hundreds of baby Ts and tanks, in myriad colours but with no visible logos (pimping brands is so 1999!), are props in the all-white, gallery-style loft space decorated with porny-looking 1970s-style snapshots. The shop, part of a massively popular international chain of “sweatshop-free” clothing stores founded by Montrealer Dov Charney, is on the “wrong” side of Spadina. It’s a deliberate corporate choice to suck up some street cred with American Apparel’s key customers, the young folk keen to make a statement with a plain T-shirt (and, not incidentally, because rent is dramatically cheaper there).

The mission statement for the company – to produce quality and stylish merchandise using Los Angeles-based manufacturing staff who make a “living wage” – is proudly displayed everywhere. The staffers, all young, slouchy and wearing gangsta hats, are bizarrely positive. Miguel Pacheco and Ben Pullia just can’t get enough Dov. “You want to sell this stuff,” says Pullia. “We have fun,” adds Pacheco, “and you know there are no skeletons in the closet.”

No skeletons? Not even the mutton-chopped, groovy dude Charney, never one to hide his light under a bushel, would make that claim. Lately, Charney has started to talk business first, idealism second – smart move because the youth who are so zealous about “ethical” style today will tire of the tune if it doesn’t change tomorrow.

“I do believe, in the long term, in social conscience,” Charney says over the phone, pausing to chat up a worker at his factory, with a lot of “Yeah!” and “Yo!” going on in the background. “But do I have doubts? I rely on an immigrant labour pool,” he admits of his US$13 an hour work force. “Does that further global migration?” Then he speaks a refreshing truth: “Mixing in social consciousness [with business] involves oxymorons, paradoxes, ironies. In the end, American Apparel is about better capitalism.”

I call it Good Capitalism, and it’s a business model that the entire fashion and beauty industry is catching on to. It used to be that doing good – supporting charitable causes or producing a special product from “fair trade” materials – was a cost of doing business. Now promoting ethical style is big business, with the goodness of the marketing message – whether it’s “no logo” or “sweatshop-free” or “for a cause” – almost taking precedence over the goods themselves. At what point does selling ideas overtake the selling of shmatte?

Take PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics: Here are some New York girls selling makeup with cute names like Paint Me Empowered. Yes, all profits go to assisting victims of rape, combatting female genital mutilation and violence against women and promoting women’s equity in the workplace. I happen to think shilling lipstick is a shady way to raise funds from the guilt-ridden toffs trolling Nordstrom, but if I don’t buy one, does that inadvertently put me on the side of the genital mutilators? So, you see how, as consumers, we are being subtly manipulated. The larger danger of righteous marketing is that, as a culture, when we begin to suspect its motives, we get cynical.