Strip Tees: a Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles by Kate Flannery

Author:Kate Flannery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

We were doing our best approximation of go-go dancing, just being silly. I never gave the footage a second thought.

But Lilou, here to get fully indoctrinated at the Factory before heading back to Paris to open more stores, told me that the video of me dancing was blown up larger than life and playing in a loop in the window of the Paris American Apparel, just a few blocks from the Pompidou Center.

“Paris loves you,” Lilou told me, shaking her head in amazement. “Paris just loves you.”

Lilou was looking at me like I was something special. A celebrity. Just the way I was probably looking at Caralee when she walked off the back cover of the LA Weekly and into the Echo Park store the day we met. Suddenly I began to feel very special—somehow a video of me had made it all the way to Paris before I had. And even better—Paris loved me!

That famous feeling glowed under me all day, but when I got home and bragged about it to my roommate, he was unimpressed.

“Did they pay you for that?” he asked.

“Well, I was on the clock,” I said.

“That’s it?” he asked.

That’s it, I thought. $10.50 an hour.

“So they’re using your image—without your permission—and didn’t even pay you for it,” he said, smugly. “They’re ripping you off.”

I felt myself bristle at the suggestion. Anyone attacking American Apparel back then—from an old classmate at Bryn Mawr who said she was sure I had to be sleeping with Dov, or the two ex-employees who had just filed sexual harassment lawsuits, claiming the environment of American Apparel was full of sexual innuendo that created a workplace hostile to women—they were the enemy. I was in for the greater good of the company, not nickel-and-diming like some greedy Hollywood sycophant.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “We’re spokesmodels, we do it all.” When Ivy had said that to me, it sounded inspirational, but now the words sounded hollow coming out of my own mouth. They hung in the air like misshapen clouds, hard to define.

“Sure,” my roommate snorted. “Of course they want you to think that.”

What a mansplaining asshole. He had no idea what American Apparel was really like on the inside. And he also was making huge assumptions about knowing what was best for me, which was dinging my misogyny radar. Maybe it was time to move out and get my own place now that I could afford it. I had been working so hard and it was finally starting to pay off—he was probably just jealous he was making peanuts for emptying Ben Stiller’s trash can.

My roommate was a nobody—I was an American Apparel girl who was big in Paris.

But later that night, I couldn’t get to sleep. My roommate’s words were looping through my head.

You’re getting ripped off. They didn’t even pay you for it.

He did have a point.

Why hadn’t I gotten paid for the video? Ivy hadn’t even bothered to tell me that it was used

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