Book Review: ‘Strip Tees,’ by Kate Flannery

Nonfiction

Kate Flannery’s “Strip Tees” is a racy, thoughtful memoir of her tenure during the rise and fall of the controversial retail company.

A Los Angeles American Apparel store, photographed in March 2009.Credit...Lawrence K. Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images

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By Estelle Tang

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STRIP TEES: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, by Kate Flannery

After a chance meeting with a recruiter at a dive bar in the winter of 2005, Kate Flannery walked into American Apparel’s Los Angeles headquarters wearing tight surf shorts and her mother’s floppy felt hat. That day — as Flannery writes in her first book, “Strip Tees,” a racy, thoughtful memoir of her tenure during the rise and fall of the controversial company — she watched garment workers produce “quivering piles of kelly-green men’s underwear”; posed for Polaroids in a leg-baring velour romper; and encountered the company’s brash, charismatic founder, Dov Charney, “a flip phone pressed to one ear while another waited in a holster on his belt loop.”

Entranced by the utopian vision of a sex-positive, sweatshop-free workplace where a woman could “do it all,” Flannery accidentally left her mom’s hat behind. When she saw it again, “it had been sliced into pieces” so that the company could turn it into a mass-produced pattern. It was a fitting introduction to the company that would leach her useful qualities and mistreat the whole person.

“Strip Tees” is 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, spiked with salacious specifics that evoke the highly sexed environment of American Apparel’s cultural and commercial peak.

Flannery accepted a role on the shop floor. Even better than the “revolutionary girl power” and celebrity spotting were her colleagues, whom she describes in mostly tender detail. There were gossipy tête-à-têtes, parties and alcohol-fueled photo shoots. “Shopgirls” appeared in the company’s advertisements, wearing hot shorts or ’70s-inspired tube socks and little else.

Longer-tenured employees apprised her of the company’s subterranean dynamics. One admitted she at first mistook Flannery for “another Dov girl,” i.e., the founder’s “girlfriends that are on the payroll. … The girls in the ads, sometimes.” Flannery felt affronted. “I was here to work, to climb to the top with only my own ambition giving me a boost,” she writes. “A tiny bit of jealousy burned like acid inside me.”

After a Jane magazine journalist alleged that Charney had masturbated in front of her, Flannery tried to reconcile public censure with her Bryn Mawr-graduate feminism. Her prose evinces the discomfort of a well-intentioned young woman staving off reality with twisted logic: “Dov was just being honest about sex, wasn’t he? Wasn’t that so much better than being some secret masturbating creep in the shadows?”

Meanwhile, business was booming. Charney approved of a clerk Flannery had hired — “she’s cute, but she’s not trying too hard” — and Flannery got promoted. She ventured into the strip malls and bars of America to find more “girls just like that” (no boys, except as muscle) to staff new stores across the country. She loyally scouted scores of girls Charney would approve of, even as two former employees sued him for sexual harassment. As the company grew, so did his demands: On vacation with her family, Flannery received a peremptory summons to a foundering store in Miami.

One night after she arrived there, having been relegated to “the boys’ company apartment” by a hostile co-worker, she woke up with a male co-worker’s hands “slipping under my tank top,” roving over her body and then pinning her down. When Charney heard about the incident, he responded by offering her an apartment of her own, a car, a work trip to Australia. “When H.R. calls,” she quotes him saying, “you tell them you can handle this yourself — don’t give in to victim culture.”

No fairy-tale denouement or empowering mic drop ensues. Instead, we get a brief, weary admission: Flannery stayed for two more years. An epilogue perfunctorily outlines Charney and American Apparel’s demise: Charney was fired in 2014; the company was in bankruptcy court by 2015. (This summer it was reported that Kanye West had enlisted Charney to help rebuild his Yeezy brand.) It would be unfair to judge an overworked 24-year-old for her decisions, but the memoir’s abrupt conclusion is fair game: It sidesteps the fascinating question of what happens when your boss falls off his pedestal, but you stick around anyway.

It’s elsewhere that we discover how Charney’s influence on Flannery — and the retail landscape — has lingered. In a May interview, the author said, “I still find myself buying things from his new company, Los Angeles Apparel — it’s the only place I can get made-in-America string bikinis.”

Estelle Tang is a writer and editor.

STRIP TEES: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles | By Kate Flannery | 222 pp. | Henry Holt & Company | $27.99

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