Kate Flannery arrives with a Seven Sisters diploma in hand and a new job at an upstart clothing company called American Apparel. Kate throws herself into the work, determined to climb the corporate fashion ladder. Having a job at American Apparel also means being a part of the advertising campaigns themselves, stripping down in the name of feminism. She slowly begins to lose herself in a landscape of rowdy sex-positivity, racy photo shoots, and a cultlike devotion to the unorthodox CEO and founder of the brand. The line between sexual liberation and exploitation quickly grows hazy, leading Kate to question the company's ethics and wrestle with her own.
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.
