“Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles” by Kate Flannery
2023/Henry Holt
$27.99/240 pages
It was 2004 and, a year out of college, Kate Flannery was struggling and decided to move to Los Angeles, where she didn’t know a soul and she didn’t have a job.
And then she met Ivy, who handed Flannery a card and invited her to be a model-entrepreneur at an up-and-coming new store, and when Flannery hesitantly said she was a feminist, Ivy said that was okay as women supported women at their workplace.
Days later, Flannery was an American Apparel “girl.” At first, the job was mostly retail but Flannery knew that she could work up the ladder of the company led by a charismatic man named Dov whom many of the other employees idolized and some slept with. Flannery’s inner feminist was outraged, but when she kept quiet about one of his dalliances, she found herself instantly promoted.
Traveling from city to city, hiring employees who fit the mold, opening stores and making decisions, the job was perfect. Eventually, Flannery began to see American Apparel in a light she didn’t like. But how to extricate herself? The company owned her apartment, her car, her schedule, her wardrobe.
This business memoir is a saucy, profane and irreverent personal account of a corporate scandal. If you can’t handle four-letter words or dressing-room sex, don’t read it. But you’ll miss a rompy, edgy, uneasy tale. Flannery perfectly captures that universal optimism that arrives upon graduation and the belief that you’re bullet-proof. Then her eyes are open and she’s tired of everybody’s mess, and how could you resist that?
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