Is it a pencil skirt or a boob tube? It’s American Apparel, so it’s probably both. The body-con, block-coloured clothing emporium opened its first outlet in Ireland earlier this month, bringing stretchy 70s-flavoured basics to the mid-market. But the big question (well, perhaps not the big question) is are its Dublin staff good looking?

This is not a cruelly random inquiry. American Apparel chief executive Dov Charney, a man who collects lawsuits the way other CEOs collect vintage cars, has been accused of engaging in “beauty profiling” - hiring and firing on the basis of someone’s looks rather than their ability.

A US staffer-cum-informant last month emailed the Gawker gossip blog the following insight: “One week, he (Charney) went on a huge tirade and made stores that weren’t doing well send in group photos. Why, you ask? He made store managers across the country take group photos of their employees so that he could personally judge people based on looks. He is tightening the AA ‘aesthetic,’ and anyone that he deems not good-looking enough to work there, is encouraged to be fired.”

The company has denied that it screens for looks and said it’s style that matters. According to a spokeswoman, its T-shirts, tunic dresses and leggings are really “art supplies” that need to be shown off in suitably cool way. But appearance-based discrimination has long been common throughout fashion retailing, as well as an unspoken truth across a number of workplaces, from the shop floor to the boardroom.

Customer-facing businesses want their customer-facing staff to have, well, nice faces. Researchers have found that beautiful people are paid more. Now this scary, eugenics-tinged practice is making its unapologetic way into retailers’ official HR handbooks with alarming alacrity (witness the outrageous “look policy” at Abercrombie & Fitch, which yesterday lost its wrongful dismissal case against a student with a prosthetic arm).

Popping into American Apparel’s new Dublin branch opposite Trinity College to see if its staff were really that gorgeous, I was distracted at the entrance to the shop by a stand displaying an article from green culture website Beanstockd, with the unnerving headline: “It’s ok to like American Apparel.” Uh huh. So there are reasons not to like American Apparel, an innocent and totally un-bothered customer might think before heading straight for the canary yellow waist belts.

In recent months, I’ve been massively entertained by the bizarre legal spat between Charney and film director Woody Allen, which went something like this: they used Allen’s image without consent, he called their ads “sleazy” and demanded compensation, they said you’re calling us sleazy, the judge said yes and your problem is?

However ethical their clothing procurement policies may be, it is never good to lose the moral high ground to Woody Allen. But I’m willing to bet that 95 per cent of the people who cross American Apparel’s threshold in search of a humble hoodie have never heard of Dov Charney, much less that he has had a number of sexual harassment cases taken against him. (Every single one of his relationships and sexual encounters with staff has been consensual, okay?)

Given what Beanstockd refers to as its “lo-fi pornographic ad campaign”, it’s not hard to conclude that sex and even accusations of sleaze are part of the sell. I think American Apparel’s ”art supplies” - the various shades of a colour detergent ad clothesline – are fabulous if you’re having a thin day or are under a certain age. There’s got to be a time and a place for gold hot pants, even if that time and place is largely confined to a Kylie Minogue music video, circa 1999. But if I buy a short skirt, I want it to just be a short skirt, free of connotations: not part of some roller-disco corporate ethos hatched by one of those tedious cult-CEO types, and especially not one with no concept of employer-employee boundaries.

American Apparel’s clothes are tight, tight, tight. If you’re usually a “small”, don’t even think about trying on anything less than a “medium”. If you’re usually a “medium”, well you might just about scrape into a “large”. And if you’re a woman over size 12, forget about it: one look at the bandeau-style underwear will tell you everything you need to know about its target customer: young and/or flat-chested.

So were the sales staff stunningly attractive? Of course. Forget about brushing up your CV, job-hunters: book a session with your local portrait photographer and get some smartly lit “portfolio” pics taken. We’re all models now.