S ophia Amoruso wants to get something straight about the term “Girlboss”. “It’s about choosing for ourselves what success looks like, ” she explains. “I don’t want to equate it with the word feminism.”
Granted, it’s her phrase and, accordingly, should be hers to define. In 2014, Amoruso published #Girlboss, a self-help book-slash-memoir about the launch of her fashion brand Nasty Gal. Nasty Gal was an eBay store that became an e-commerce beast, selling clothes inspired by celebrities including the Olsen twins, Sienna Miller and Kate Moss, and pulling in revenues of almost $28m in 2011. The New York Times dubbed Amoruso a “Cinderella of tech”; she appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and was named one of its richest self-made women. Then, in November 2016, she filed for bankruptcy. “It was a very slow face plant, ” she says, drily.
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Now the story has resurged via Netflix, which has fictionalised #Girlboss in a series of the same name (minus the hashtag). The first season covers the genesis of Nasty Gal. Its protagonist – based loosely on a 23-year old Amoruso – is unlikable and entitled: in the pilot, she gets sacked from her job in a shoe shop after eating her boss’s lunch. She is, predictably, a hot mess, and the opening scene has the usual visual and sonic tells of the bad girl: Suzi Quatro on the stereo, a car key with a disembodied Barbie head keyring. Naturally, fictional Amoruso is wearing a vest, jean shorts and knee-high boots. Watching things unfold, you get the feeling that this isn’t a protagonist whom the audience is supposed to side with entirely; by way of explanation (and perhaps defence) Britt Roberston, who plays her, has said that the character “can’t make her way in life because nobody understands her story or gets who she is”.
Girlboss: Series On The Success Story Of Sophia Amoruso
Watching a fictionalised version of her life, Amoruso says, “was “crazy”. How did she feel about how she was characterised? “It portrays a 23-year-old, ” she says firmly. “There are things that are a lot like me at that age, and things that are exaggerated. It was never the task to recreate me.” She hopes the series will make people laugh, though presumably, for her, it is discomfiting viewing. “One part that really gets me is episode 13. We’ve just launched the website and we’re having the party. The camera pans in on my character and you see that she’s alone. That’s a feeling that I’ve experienced a lot. When you are the founder, you’re not everyone’s friend. You’re not a peer.”
The series has sparked a testy conversation around Amoruso, and how her stories (real and fictionalised) represent modern feminism. This puts her in quite a strange position, given that she says she is a feminist but that the book is
A feminist manual. It’s a curious distinction. #Girlboss has always been aligned – especially on social media – with go-getting, 1% feminism; her book has even been described, by the Washington Post, as a “Lean In for misfits”. “Girlboss is not a literal term, ” she insists. “It could mean being a stay-at-home-mom.”
Girlboss Tv Show: Netflix Is Turning Sophia Amoruso's *#girlboss* Into A Show
For Amoruso, being a girlboss often meant going it alone – she touches on the idea of separation several times. I wonder whether she could be alluding to the much-publicised rifts she had with her employees. In 2015, Nasty Gal was sued for allegedly firing four pregnant women and a man about to take paternity leave. However, when pressed on the subject , she remains quiet and never references the cases (which were settled out of court). Did she enjoy running her own company? “It all happened very quickly, ” she says. “I think it takes a lifetime to become a good leader. When you found a company accidentally, you don’t think ‘This is what our culture’s going to be, this is the kind of leader I’m going to be’”. Amoruso jokes that she herself is unemployable. “I’m not good at doing what I’m told.”
She’s introspective when she considers what she would have done differently. “There’s so much I didn’t do for the first several years at Nasty Gal, and today I know how important those things are, ” she says. What would she say to her younger self? “Focus. You have to space out your ambitions – don’t try to do them all at once.”Girlboss star Britt Robertson and Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso at an event for their Netflix drama Credit : MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images
Underdog narratives typically build to that big, final victory, where our beaten-down hero somehow overcomes the odds stacked against them, achieving the dream they never thought could ever be achievable. We cut to black, the credits roll, and we’re left feeling good inside. But what happens when that inspiring tale suddenly gets a dodgy epilogue?
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The major question hanging over the new Netflix drama Girlboss is how much it’ll lift from the inspiring rags-to-riches true-life story that forms its premise. Girlboss is based on the life of the Nasty Gal entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso, who turned an everyday eBay shop into a thriving lifestyle industry with nearly $300 million in sales.
If Sophia’s story was fictional, that’s probably where it’d end. But Amoruso’s internet-shaking clothing enterprise rapidly fell apart, its feminist credentials undermined by a series of lawsuits, and its increasing overhead resulting in the humiliation of a recent bankruptcy filing.
Luckily for Amoruso, Girlboss was in production long before Nasty Gal filed for Chapter 11 last November, but it has cast an uncomfortable shadow over the new series, replacing what would have been an inspiring true-life saga into a giant pink elephant.
This Is The Real Story Of
It’s no surprise that Netflix was at one point drawn to Amoruso’s journey. A self-made millionaire with millennial swagger and a severe fringe, Amoruso was the sort of 21st century feminist success story that think piece writers could only dream of; a savvy, sweary, hashtag-friendly wunderkind who uses words like “curate” and “chill”, with a snarky, hipstery appeal that quickly turned her into the avocado-on-toast of e-commerce.
As Amoruso tells it, she went from dumpsters to high fashion with remarkable speed. The daughter of solidly middle class parents in mid-Nineties Sacramento, Amoruso learned to fend for herself when both of them lost their jobs, instilling in her a before-her-years work ethic that saw her set up her own lemonade business at age 9, read books about start-ups before she was in braces, and work ten different jobs by the time she was 22.
Having dropped out of community college, she was living with her step-aunt and struggling to get by as an anti-capitalist crusader. Her boyfriend lived in a treehouse, while she shoplifted and dumpster-dived for food. So she began selling clothes on eBay, something that turned out to be a particularly successful venture. She would raid charity shops for items of clothing, which she would then sell at an upscaled price. One Chanel jacket that she purchased for $8 at a Goodwill store ended up being sold for $1, 000.
Girlboss Costume Designer On Sophia's Outfits
She would rope in friends to model vintage clothing for the tiny thumbnails on eBay, pictures that were well-lit and vaguely aspirational in comparison to the less fanciful photographs employed by other sellers, while she would regularly trawl the site for misspelled listings, assuming that someone selling an “Eve Saint Laurent” jacket would know little about the actual value of said items.
Named after an old Betty Davis track, Nasty Gal was soon cultivating its own brand identity: vintage clothes for cool, unique young women. Amoruso spread the word on MySpace and subsequently Facebook, targeting consumers who had previously ‘liked’ brand-appropriate fashion outlets like Nylon Magazine. Booted off eBay for promoting her own websites, Amoruso quickly moved her online store elsewhere, taking on employees and moving into an office in Los Angeles.
Partnerships were struck with fashion and footwear brands, and the success of the brand caught the eye of venture capitalists who wished to invest. Over $49 million of equity came Nasty Gal’s way, and Amoruso’s reported $280 million net worth saw her land on Forbes Magazine’s list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
The Adventures Of A Nasty Gal
Meanwhile, Amoruso was regularly cited as one of the key “influencers” in the Ban Bossy movement, which encouraged young women to annihilate the regressive definitions of the word, ones that tend to demean women who are assertive or ambitious. Amoruso was now talked about as if she were a girl-power hero and a role model for a generation of budding female entrepreneurs. “Amoruso is making feminism cool again, ” claimed a hysterical Business Insider profile in 2014.
But the truth seemed a bit less empowering. 2015 saw the first of several lawsuits filed against Nasty Gal by former employees of the company, who claimed they had their employment terminated after becoming pregnant. Another employee claimed they were let go while suffering from advanced kidney failure, and that the company allowed her healthcare coverage to lapse, meaning she was unable to afford medication. Many of the cases have since been settled out of court.
The lawsuits suddenly compelled media outlets to take another glance at
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