In 2014, the world looked very different. Denim skirts were still widely recognized as hideous, Taylor Swift had a cute, dirty-blonde lob, and Nasty Gal was a buzzy clothing company with a fascinating, punky C.E.O.: Sophia Amoruso. Look how far we’ve come: nowadays, Urban Outfitters stores near and far are hawking denim skirts; Taylor has discovered her inner goth; and both NastyGal and Amoruso are no longer the darlings they once were.
But from this fashionable mess, Netflix is hoping its new comedy series—inspired by Amoruso’s book #Girlboss—will rise, like a Doc Marten-clad phoenix. Especially now that the show has found its star.
Britt Robertson (Tomorrowland, Under the Dome, Life Unexpected) will play Sophia, a character seemingly based on the young Amoruso described in #Girlboss, when the series premieres in 2017. It will begin before Amoruso ever dreamed of founding Nasty Gal—at a time when she was just stumbling into online fashion retail, a broke rebel with a Peter Pan complex. As the show goes on, viewers will watch as the devout anarchist learns “the value and difficulty of being the boss of her own life”—or, as her younger, poorer self might have put it, buys into the capitalist machine, man.
Amoruso's book blends memoir with career advice—it’s sort of a Lean In for millennial girls, if the hashtag in the title didn’t tip you off. It balances memories of her old life as a freegan with advice on how ladies—especially edgy ladies like her—can find a way to succeed in the overwhelmingly male, not-punk corporate sphere. One of the book’s nuggets of advice? “Be a nice person at work. . . . If you are a total terror to work with, no one will want to keep you around.”
But over the past few years, Amoruso and her company have faced some negative publicity that implies they’re not quite living up to that core #Girlboss tenet. Nasty Gal laid off 10 percent of its staff in February, according to Women’s Wear Daily, following multiple previous layoffs that led Amoruso to step down from her position as C.E.O. In 2015, a lawsuit claimed the company had fired four women for getting pregnant (Nasty Gal claimed in a statement that the accusations are “false, defamatory, and taken completely out of context”). And from employees’ own descriptions, Nasty Gal and its senior managers sound a bit less utopian and mold-shattering than its founder might have hoped.
The show comes from creator and show-runner Kay Cannon (Pitch Perfect 2, New Girl, 30 Rock), who will also executive produce alongside Charlize Theron, Laverne McKinnon, Christian Ditter (who will also direct), and Amoruso herself. Netflix has already proven it knows how to find comedy in dark places—prisons, underground bunkers—which means that it could find great material by looking at the nastier side of Nasty Gal, if the show lasts long enough to get to that stage of Amoruso’s career. And if it doesn't, well, you can bet her former employees will have some colorful things to say.
