#GIRLBOSS (16 page)

Nasty Gal is now at an inflection point where we have to institutionalize the magic, as I like to say. That means that everyone’s job, to some extent, is to pull out of my head what has made Nasty Gal successful for the past seven years. When the brand was an extension of just me, I never had to stop and ask myself whether or not it was “on brand.” Today, our team is constantly working together to examine what has made us successful, what of that we want to keep around, and what newness we can introduce to evolve the brand. We then have to communicate that and share it. Our creative team is learning how to think like I think and I’m learning how to think like they think. Brains everywhere, all the time. Cue air drums.

PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:

Leandra Medine, Manrepeller.com and author of
Seeking Love, Finding Overalls

When I was a kid I really thought I was going to be a ballerina, but then I realized I suck at dancing. So by the time I was in college, I wanted to become a reporter. I hoped I’d get a fact-checking job at
New York
magazine out of college, but instead I started
Man Repeller
.

I was a junior at the time and started the blog because I was writing so much content that was not funny at all and I just felt like I needed a place to inject a little bit of humor. What I wanted to do with my life figured itself out. I did not by any stretch of the imagination think that it was possible to take my blog anywhere that professional stuff happens. Sometimes I still feel like the universe is playing a trick on me. Since 2010, I have since grown
Man Repeller
from a one-person blog (here’s hoping, fingers crossed) to a website with staff writers and graphic designers and ad sales people and bikini waxers on demand! Just kidding. Fuck waxing.

I remember when I was younger that every time my mom wanted to buy something expensive, she had to run the purchase by my dad. I knew I never wanted to have to ask anyone to appease my indulgences, so that was a point of motivation to work hard. If you’re working, you’re working hard, and if you’re not doing that, what are you doing? I also think you age a lot quicker if you can’t keep yourself busy and under the right, healthy dose of stress. Too much of anything obviously isn’t good, but as my dad always said: Overwhelmingly busy is a much better state to be in than overwhelmingly bored.

Fashion has always informed the way I approach life. It’s also helped me manipulate my moods: I could be having a shitty day but the right pair of shoes can sometimes change that—which is powerful. I make a lot of jokes about fashion, but I love it. And on the topic of style, I think clothing will always look good—no matter how outlandish or ridiculous you might think it is—if you wholeheartedly own it. If you feel equally as excited and comfortable in a fruit-silhouette head contraption as you do in a pair of jeans, the rest of the world will watch. And likely in admiration. There are no apologies necessary for being you.

It sounds incredibly platitudinal, but no one will
ever be able to love you if you don’t love yourself. What’s beautiful about it is that if you love yourself enough, you don’t need the validation from anyone else. My advice to #GIRLBOSSes is to get excited about the mistakes you’ll make.

Own Your Style Like You Own Your Used Car

When you don’t dress like everyone else, you don’t have to think like everyone else.

–Iris Apfel

As much as I would like to say that photography was my first love, I think my first real creative effort was getting dressed.

Mom, and me, with her “punked” collar. 1987.

Both my parents were well attired, but my mom especially had great style. Before she headed out the door, she put the finishing touch on her outfit by “punking” (better
known as popping) the collar of her ’80s polo shirts. It was always in my blood to care about what I wore and how it fit. At age six, my one true love was a pair of acid-wash jeans with an elastic waist. In sixth grade I became obsessed with the Sanrio crew: Hello Kitty, Pachacco, Kero Kero Keroppi, and the lot. My look could best (or worst?) be described as suburban mall Harajuku girl through a Northern California lens: baby T-shirts, barrettes, and white Walgreens’ knee-high socks that I wore with my Converse One-Star sneakers.

Before I knew that real punks don’t wear polo shirts.

When I was fifteen I liked a pair of bedraggled brown Levi’s corduroys that I found at the Salvation Army by my house so much that I wore them at least five days a week, until they met their untimely demise in a gas station parking lot (I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say that it involved a really upset stomach, lack of a nearby public bathroom, and me crying in shame). Even when I was in my Abercrombie & Fitch phase (yes, even I have succumbed to peer pressure), I washed my jeans after every wear so that they still fit exactly the same as they did when I bought them.

A staple look from my boring-ass Abercrombie phase. 1998.

I was a ’90s teenager, so of course I went through a grunge phase, donning bell-bottom flares that dragged on the ground and an equally shapeless men’s V-neck sweater. My clothing choices were in line with my contrarian nature. As
I mentioned earlier, my mom begged and pleaded with me to buy clothes at the mall, a typical teenage girl’s dream; we spent hours there only to leave empty-handed as store after store failed to usurp my preference for the corduroy and threadbare T-shirts I could only find at the local thrift store.

After that, I went through a couple of different iterations of skater girl: the cute type, with tiny board shorts, a tight tank top, and skate shoes; and the not-so-cute type, when I cut off all my hair and paired those skate shoes with baggy Dickie’s work pants.

At age seventeen I was a crust punk who refused to change her all-black clothes. At eighteen I was goth, which still involved all-black clothes, but at least now I changed them. That was when I lived in Seattle—and the goth suited the gloom. After that, when I moved back to San Francisco, I became a rock ’n’ roller and that stuck for a long time. I hooked my thumbs through my belt loops and did honky-tonk scoots across dance floors. My long hair parted in the middle and I wore exclusively vintage T-shirts with high-waist jeans that practically grazed my boobs.

I’ve always been willing to throw
myself
at the wall and see if
I
stuck when it came to general life experiences, and my approach to my personal style hasn’t been any different. I was always willing to try something new. As soon as I was over it, I moved on. And
thank God
I moved on. The whole pick-a-decade thing doesn’t really age well—you get to a certain point where it just ages you. Your style is a representation of who you are, and trying to pick your identity as an
adult (anime? cowboy? new age?) is just not a good look. I think that now, depending on my hair, I dress closer to my Tim Burton–character roots than I have been in a long time—and I’m comfortably rock ’n’ roll with a disco soul.

W&H Instead of T&A: The Nasty Gal Look

Even though Nasty Gal is still in adolescence, when it comes to trends we’ve already been through many phases. This isn’t because we’ve been trying to figure out who we were, but because evolution is the name of the game when you’re in the fashion industry. And we don’t just want to stay on top of that game—we want to stay ahead of it. We want to lap our competitors and leave them in our dust.

Christina and I always did this by shopping with a focus group in our heads. At trade shows we held up different pieces and asked each other, “Can you see anyone in the office wearing this?” The office has always been populated with girls who are style-obsessed and Nasty Gals IRL, so if the answer was no, we just didn’t buy it. I remember in 2009 we bought a whole lot of all-black everything. Rick Owens and Alexander Wang ruled the runways; under their influence girls were obsessed with asymmetrical draping and lug-soled combat boots in black black black. If anything was adorned with metal studs, then it was almost too hot to handle. If we sold studded underwear, I’m sure it would have flown off the site. By the time girls could walk into Forever 21 and snap up studded booty shorts and platforms, we
figured it was time to lay off the studs. This was about the time when the fashion world started to get a little preppier. Our customers loved short sets, button-up pinafore shirts, and ice-cream pastel colors, so for a while that was what we sold before we inevitably moved on to something else.

We always listen to what our customers want, but we don’t buy into every trend that comes along. If the silhouette du jour suddenly becomes that of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and fashion tells you that you should be wearing egg-shaped sweatshirt dresses that obscure your waist and emphasize your butt, well, you can buy that someplace else. Nasty Gal doesn’t want you to look like a marshmallow.

Selling vintage is a really good exercise in learning to recognize what people want right now as well as what they’ll always want. Nasty Gal always participates in the dialogue of the fashion industry, but there are core things that we talk about even if they’re not gracing the pages of
Vogue
at that particular moment: a rock tee, a motorcycle jacket, red lipstick, biker boots, skinny jeans, leather pants, a white lace dress. You have to know what looks good on you personally, and we have to know what looks good on us as a brand.

The epitome of style has always been the chic French woman: an Alexa Chung–looking gamine with simple, elegant clothes, such as loose shift dresses, and an overall effortless, understated cool. Yet if I may quote Bob Dylan, “it ain’t me babe.” I’ve got hips, and as soon as I got to a point in my life when I started to dress according to what actually suited me, I realized that if I didn’t wear something that accentuated my
waist, I looked like I was toddling down the street in a refrigerator box.

When I started the eBay store, my only styling experience was getting dressed in the morning, so I dressed the models as though I was dressing myself. That meant that if a garment didn’t have a waist, I gave it one. I also learned that while hints of androgyny worked for my favorite models, it didn’t work on eBay, where the thumbnail photo was pretty much the size of, well, a thumbnail. Thus, if my models had short hair, or even long hair pulled back into a ponytail, they might as well have had shaved heads. We always went with a look that was either a strong lip or a strong eye, which is now a staple of the Nasty Gal look. My most iconic model was Nida. A towering Thai girl at five foot nine, she was as bold as they came. She did her own hair extensions and wore false eyelashes as part of her everyday routine. In the photos she looked like a bombshell with hair down to her waist. This really stood out on eBay, where most of the models at the time were still dress forms or hippies in sandals. From this amalgamation of things the Nasty Gal look was born. For us, it’s never been about boobs and butts, but waists and hips (W&H instead of T&A . . . Get it?) and the styles that show them off: high-rise pants, cropped jackets, fit and flare, bandage dresses. Nasty Gal shows a little bit of skin somewhere—like a thigh-high slit in a maxi skirt—and if it’s not, it’s making up for it with a whole lot of attitude. I believe a #GIRLBOSS should have a sneer and a smile in her back pocket, ready to whip either out at any moment.

Nasty Gal has always paired vintage pieces with modern styling. Anyone who’s spent some time in thrift stores understands that part of wearing vintage is to know that you can’t always expect it to come right off the rack looking perfect. You must be able to see past that sad sack dress on a plastic hanger with a price tag stapled to it and imagine the myriad things you can do with it. I’ve belted muumuus, hacked hems, and rolled sleeves on the regs, and learned that sometimes the perfect oversized sweater or shrunken jacket is only as far away as the men’s aisle or children’s section. On eBay I sold a lot of children’s coats because, when they were styled right, they looked like the perfect cropped jacket. One of my own favorite pieces of vintage is a light pink child’s peacoat that looks straight off a Marc Jacobs runway. Eventually, I got to a point where I’d dressed so many models that I could look at something on a hanger and know exactly how it would fit on a girl. I could even look at a model and know what her measurements were and all of this helped make me a good buyer because it helped Nasty Gal avoid stocking stuff that was cute in theory but awkward when you put it on.

Despite the fact that I’m wearing YSL platforms as I write this, I have always believed that it shouldn’t cost a lot of money to look good. When Christina and I started buying new brands, we experimented with some more expensive offerings, and $300 dresses simply didn’t sell. Our customer works hard for her money, so it goes without saying that she’s going to be careful with how she spends it. That also
highlights the difference between fashion and style: You can have a ton of money and buy yourself all the designer goods you can stuff into the trunk of your Mercedes-Benz, but no amount of money can buy you style. Having good style takes thought, creativity, confidence, self-awareness, even sometimes a little bit of work. And there you have it, folks: A little bit of skin + attention to silhouette + an attitude + a vintage piece or two + a decent price tag = Hello, Nasty Gal.

It’s Not Hot. It’s Not Cold. It’s Cool.

I like to say that Nasty Gal is dressing girls for the best years of their lives whether a girl is eighteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, or sixty. At a recent meeting, when several of us were locked away in a war room, strategizing for the future, someone asked an assistant if it would be difficult for her to relate to me if I were older. “No,” she replied, “Sophia’s a badass bitch and she’ll always be a badass bitch!” That I’ve managed to build a company where an assistant feels comfortable calling the CEO a badass bitch in a room full of senior executives is pretty amazing.

The heartbeat of Nasty Gal doesn’t exist in one style, trend, or article of clothing. It’s in the way we talk, the way we carry ourselves, and the way we see the world. If you scroll through Nasty Gal photos from the early days, this is obvious: The styles have changed, but the attitude is the same. The Nasty Gal look has always been that hard-to-nail-down, you-know-it-when-you-see-it quality; the ultimate babe who’s
one-third girl-next-door, one-third genius, and one-third party monster. She’s cool. It’s this combination that has made casting models especially challenging for us—it’s not enough that a girl is tall, gorgeous, and fits the clothing—she has to be cool on top of it.