A racy, thoughtful memoir of her tenure during the rise and fall of the controversial company ... Devourable, rendered in efficient, colorful scenes. Flannery’s conversion from credulous retail recruit to company woman doesn’t trade in hyper-intellectual #MeToo-era analysis or retrospective scolding. Instead, its currency is the prickly panic of realizing your life doesn’t match your principles.
Flannery offers us a glimpse behind the micro-ribbed cotton curtain during the company’s heyday ... Goes down as easy as a rum and Diet Coke, breezily written and punctuated at its intermission by a few pages of glossy photos ... The climax of the memoir builds percussively to several harrowing scenes, one after another ... Though Flannery is clear-eyed about the exploitation and pettiness of American Apparel under Charney — and the cruelty of a culture in which a woman’s best method for career advancement was turning him on — she avoids the pitfalls of easy dogmatism, weaving in the sneaking suggestion that perhaps every company is just as exploitative, if not quite so nakedly.
The illusion of choice forms the basis of Flannery’s prima facie case against the toxic pre–#MeToo workplace. Unfortunately, it all collapses under the cognitive dissonance she attempts to reconcile between then and now. The propulsive plot stalls at Colleen Hooverish homilies... and too many dramatic ironies.
Flannery finds traditional notions of sexual exploitation so infantilizing and recherché that she reduces second-wave feminism to just Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin ... Flannery’s account of her time at American Apparel makes it difficult to assess whether her life was any better than that of the Lowell mill girls.
The author provides a disturbing look at the dangerous ways modern capitalism can debase, deform, and blind the individuals it exploits. A candid and provocative memoir.
Bold ... Flannery succeeds in illustrating the fashion industry’s blurred lines in the decade prior to #MeToo, and the tough choices women faced between professional success and personal safety. This is an authentic portrait of the battle to remain true to oneself.
