I connected with the time and the perspective but the story itself felt very under developed. I wouldn’t recommend it to other readers.

Didn't finish this, was not at all what I expected from the synopsis and was not a big fan of the narrator. Don't think we need this in our collection.

This was pretty fascinating and I learned a lot. This title is narrated by the author and she is great and I was very immersed in her story. As someone who was obsessed with American Apparel as a young girl, I loved learning about the ins and outs of what was really happening.

I LOVE that the author read this. It gave so much tension and depth to the story. I truly felt connected to Kate's experiences even though I would never experience life quite like her. Truly a great audiobook.

This was a wild ride through what could be considered the catalyst of the super-fast fashion craze and how toxic that whole industry was (my very first work uniform was an American Apparel t-shirt and black pants lol).

The format took a bit of getting used to, but all in all, it was a wild story exposing a fast fashion giant that, after a while, did not look so good just standing there in its American Apparel underwear, and we know now, and we are not so down.

One thing I love about memoir audiobooks in general is that the author typically reads the story which I feel helps convey their message and intentions more clearly.

I, unfortunately, did not get the chance to read this via audiobook before the publication date, however, I do intend to borrow it from my library to read and review in the near future. I am looking forward to reading Strip Tees by Kate Flannery and am very thankful to the publisher for approving this arc for me.

Strip Tees, A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, is exactly what it sets out to be. Kate Flannery worked for American Apparel in its heyday. She went from touring the factory floor to scouting talent and hiring for stores around the country as a young twenty-something. This memoir is a snapshot in time, a time machine back to the early 2000s, and a behind-the-curtain look at the American Apparel culture.

The book delivers on its premise. As a millennial, it was a fascinating and quick read. It took me back to a time when American Apparel was on top of the trends, and it told me more of the story that I had never heard. But it lacks depth and exploration. It lacks a sense of self and growth from Flannery. It reads more like a tell-all than a memoir. I would have liked to know more about Flannery’s life after this, how it shaped her worldview, and what she’s done. The reader is taken on this journey and shown the inner workings of a flawed, now fallen, company, but there is no real takeaway. Flannery was young and seemingly blameless. There is little introspection and no accountability or ownership in her actions.

Strip Tees is an interesting but niche tale. It doesn’t feel universal.

I found this book to be ok. My problem was that I just couldn't get into it. Maybe it was the subject matter or maybe it was the writing, but I just couldn't focus on it. I felt like I should care but I just didn't.

I really had no idea what to expect from this but knew I had to read it if Kate Flannery wrote it because everything she does is hilarious. This was a bit humorous but not laugh out loud funny like I was expecting. I was also expecting more of a life memoir and this was certainly not that. This is more like reading the diary of a young girl in LA during the American Apparel era. It was eye opening and fascinating in many ways because I had zero background knowledge of the brand or this time in life. This was a quick read and I thought it was definitely worth reading. It is worth noting that Kate does not voice the audiobook like I was hoping she would. This is not at all what I expected from her but was enjoyable all the time. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Being a Millennial myself I was very excited to read STRIP TEES: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles by Kate Flannery and it was a very captivating read! In this book Kate shares her life as a young woman starting a new job at the clothing company American Apparel. It was definitely interesting to read about her take on the controversies with the CEO and founder Dov Charney. Reading this was extremely nostalgic to me as I distinctly remember the time when American Apparel ads were everywhere and I had put American Apparel items on my Christmas wishlist. I even wore their iconic striped thigh high socks! Swipe to see! I liked how this book looked at the time in her life when she’s finding herself and her career goals and how advertising, cult like loyalty, ethics, and feminism can affect all that. I really liked the inclusion of colour photos and the audiobook is narrated by the author.

"I was in Los Angeles for less than a month before I got scouted by a cult."

With a first line like that this story automatically draws you in. For the first half of this story I was really interested in Kate’s journey. We follow her, having just moved to LA, as she is searching for a job that will be exciting and meaningful. After being approached and given “the hustle” (the term American Apparel uses for their recruitment speech) she is dazzled by the girls and the idea of this company that appears to be based on women’s empowerment and sexual freedom. But American Apparel turns out to be run by a predator. Many of the girls are being taken advantage of and sexual harassment is abundant. Kate shares her experience working in this environment for years.

In the beginning of the story, the reader can see what Kate didn’t. That American Apparel is not what they have said they are and the things that are happening are not okay. There is a fascination with learning how a culture like this could exist and even thrive on our world. I had no idea this happened! Personally, I was waiting for the moment Kate realizes this was all so wrong and begins to share her lessons learned. That moment she decided enough is enough and begins to speak out, advocate, self-reflect. But that doesn’t happen… Kate is almost raped by a coworker and she stays. She stays for years! She only leaves the company because she is let go eventually. Here’s the thing, I don’t blame past Kate for any of her actions. She was being manipulated, she was young, and clearly a victim. But in the end there was no lesson here. No real point made. No moment of self reflection. The actual ending to the story was especially disappointing as she starts a new job that we all know now was also at a company being run by a sexual predator. How depressing! While I know all to well that this is the reality of our world, I would rather read something encouraging. That there is hope that we can escape this. That things can get better. This felt very much like the message was “just accept that as a woman; men are going to try to sexually assault you… oh well.”

TLDR; at the risk of sounding too harsh - I don’t know why this book existed. It adds nothing to the collection of stories about the abuse that women face. Instead, feels very defeating and pointless.

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced audio copy in exchange for my honest review.

Comparing the work culture to a cult was such a smart move. I loved this. It was incredibly nostalgic as a millennial. It made me really wish that I could read the stories of the other American Apparel employees (particularly Dov’s Girls). Incredibly intriguing.

Thank you NetGalley & Henry Holt for the ARC

I had no idea who Kate Flannery was, but her memoir intrigued me because I used to spend my paychecks from Abercrombie & Fitch at American Apparel. That tells you a lot of me back then. In my defense, American Apparel's clothes were so soft - yes, even more than A&F - and it was the beginning of me feeding into my OCD, anxiety, and neuropathy without even realizing it. Nervous me misses my soft clothes. Ethical me is happy the bad guy got it for once. Nerdy book reader me is impressed that we get to hear from a girl who was inside it all, loved it all, and wanted it all to succeed, only to realize it wasn't what she thought it was.

Flannery has a unique point of view, and I enjoyed her honesty. It would be a good read, but I wanted to hear her emotions when she spoke about her happy, fun, and struggling times. She was a great narrator who knew how to bring life to her story.

This is a memoir that has value to anyone who grew up around the time of American Apparel and walked past their stores and their new take on fashion marketing, shopped there for their soft clothing, and was interested in learning about a strange part of the fashion business, or wants to hear a story of a girl who decided between a fashion cult and her self-respect.

Thanks, Macmillan Audio, for the gifted book!

Content Warnings: toxic workplace, sexual harassment, sexual assault, gaslighting

Thank you to MacMillian Audio for a gifted copy of Strip Tees!

What a….thought provoking memoir—I was hooked from the opening line. I hate to say that I think I'm a little too young to have been in the American Apparel crowd, it was really interested to listen to what working in fashion was like in the early 2000’s. I really felt for Kate at the end of the book, and it left me wanting more information around all of this. I think this book was a great illustration of how smart young women can get tangled up in systems that gravitate around sex and the abuse of power.

I typically don’t give memoirs a star rating since it’s someone’s life and their stories.

I was embarrassed for her, and ashamed for her, but I kept listening. The author recalls her own exploitation. At times she is complicit, a mixture of naïveté and ambition. At times she is just an economic victim, trying to get by in LA.

Either way, she portrays the toxic culture of the LA based fashion company American Apparel, and how surviving on denial, she helped recruit more young women by traveling from city to city snapping Polaroids.

The author does an excellent job narrating her own audiobook.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61796659

Wow! Did not know what I was getting myself into.

Audiobook: 5 stars. The narrator was also the author & she was AMAZING. Told the story so we’ll and engaging! I really loved it!

Story: not gonna lie, I picked this book up because I love a good memoir & the fashion world is so interesting to me. Especially something like American Apparel. I am FLOORED with what Kate shared in her book & sadly the things she allowed by being silent. The many girls that started working for this horrible company & the things they did to reach success were just heartbreaking.

I had a really hard time with his how Kate kept calling herself a feminist and such throughout the whole book but sold her soul to AE/ Dovs management. I had a hard time believing her feminist side was really authentic.

Watch out for: lots of cursing, drug use, sexual assault, mature “friendships” happening when everyone is drunk.

So all in all- I sit stuck reviewing this book for the publisher. Because I thought the story was captivating and the narrating was AMAZING. But the story itself was just so sad and lifeless & the ended was just… sad. I hope Justice is done.

*also, I can’t in good standing recommend this book because of the amount of drug use & make out sessions that took place.*

I received a copy for an exchange of an honest review.

STRIP TEES
Kate Flannery


Happy endings
Special girls
Sex in the dressing rooms
Employment that felt like being inducted into a cult

All of that and more is included in Kate Flannery's newly released, scandalous memoir.

It’s called STRIP TEES. It’s both a punny and an ultimately sad play on words. The memoir is about Kate’s experience working for American Apparel in the early 2000s.

Ten minutes in I felt twenty years younger.

I was taken back to the days when I shopped at FOREVER 21, wore low-rise jeans, and read books like #GIRLBOSS and THE SECRET.

It took me way back.

STRIP TEES may be the most Californian memoir I’ve ever read, and it has the air of fast fashion. It was a quick and insightful read. I appreciated Flannery’s candor and the overall moral of the story. It read much like a behind-the-scenes confessional.

It felt like it skimmed the surface a bit, not diving too deep into very deep and serious subjects, including sexual harassment, sexual assault, and the ensuing trauma. It is a very approachable contemporary memoir.

Thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for the advanced copy!


STRIP TEES…⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Strip Tees is an intriguing look into the toxic workplace that is/was American Apparel. I honestly had no idea about just how toxic AA was even despite being a teenager at the turn of the millennium, but even as an adult, this was a pretty harrowing read. I appreciated the inner conflict of the author with wanting to earn a good living and feeling a need to compromise on some of her initial values. I found the book well-written, informative, and eye-opening.

The pictures told the story. At one point in Strip Tees, Kate Flannery’s American Apparel memoir, she receives a series of photos for store display that depict a girl she’d recently hired as a high schooler, posing provocatively for the company’s 37-year-old male leader. The teenager was seemingly becoming a “Dov girl,” one of the employees who shared Dov Charney’s bed.

For consumers who didn’t know the photo subjects personally, American Apparel’s problematic yet iconic ads told a different story. They saw a clean and sexy look (Charney couldn’t abide tattoos or facial piercings) for the 2000s, a retro romp they could join with a clean conscience. The products were made in the U.S.A., after all.

Charney opened the first American Apparel store in 2003, and by the turn of the 2010s it was exploding around the world. The brand name featured often in the early days of this site, The Tangential, as a key signifier of ironically high-end hipsterdom.

“‘Classic Girl’ is in,” wrote my colleague Becky Lang after perusing American Apparel’s website circa 2011. “Find your ‘timeless beauty’ by wearing nude-colored, belly-baring halter tops, oversized polo shirts and a lack of makeup and deodorant that says, ‘I’m not really this preppy. I just got out of rehab and they threw these clothes at me and give me a cigarette now.'”

The sketchiness at the company’s core wasn’t an especially well-kept secret, but it was kept well enough. At the climax of Strip Tees, Flannery has to decide whether to accede to Charney’s pressure to send an email to the company’s human resources team, assuring them that an instance of sexual assault was just a misunderstanding.

Strip Tees, which borrows the company’s aesthetic for its Helvetica-forward cover, has a similar minimalism in its prose style. Though it’s a far cry from the inscrutable deadpan of Tao Lin — whose Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009) was a foundational text of the alt lit era — Flannery’s book is direct and unfussy in its chronicle of her years working for the company.

After taking a retail job at a Los Angeles store, Flannery quickly learned American Apparel wasn’t just another clothing company. The company’s employees were also its models, which served to both solidify their relationship to the brand and to provide Charney with access to a bottomless “spank bank,” as Flannery puts it. It also saved the company money, though a foray into professional modeling taught the author that working in the industry proper was hardly less exploitative.

Flannery is forthright about the company’s allure for young women like the one she was in 2004. The company seemed to be run by her peers — with Charney the glaring exception that proved, in fact made, the rule. American Apparel made its customers feel sexy, and the halo of desirability glowed over its employees all the more so. When Flannery hit the road to recruit employees for new stores, she graduated from “uninspired hours of missionary sex with my ex” to “The Year I Fucked Everybody.”

While Flannery details the manipulative culture that made it hard for her to leave the company even as the alarm bells in her head reached a state of constant clamor, she also underlines the fact that the wider world had its own problems. Strip Tees doesn’t attempt wide-ranging cultural criticism, but it stands as a sobering depiction of the years leading up to the Me Too movement. How would the conversation around American Apparel go today?

Whatever conversations Strip Tees sparks aren’t likely to have much impact on the brand as it stands today: owned by Gildan Activewear, operating only online, and no longer manufacturing its signature shirts in the United States. (It’s now Central American apparel.)

Charney was terminated over harassment claims in 2014, then bought much of the company’s machinery in a bankruptcy sale and launched a similar company called Los Angeles Apparel. He appears in Strip Tees as an absurdly entitled, emotionally immature character who’s incapable of empathy and elevates similarly problematic men.

Flannery (not to be confused with The Office actor) found a career in television, but Strip Tees keeps its focus squarely on her American Apparel years. It’s a straightforward account of what was going through her head as she carried on participating in a company culture that she likens to both a cult and hypnotism.

Her discipline in sticking to that story is both a strength and a limitation. The book invites questions about the broader cultural relevance of American Apparel as a brand, and about the outside parties, from journalists to investors, who participated in the company’s rise. Flannery alludes to those questions, but largely keeps her readers in the trenches for this first-person narrative.

Flannery’s fellow employees also largely remain ciphers. Although the author describes becoming close with many of her colleagues, Strip Tees readers don’t learn much about them. In part, that reflects a corporate culture of divide and conquer, where employees were left to surmise (often incorrectly) who was and wasn’t sleeping with Dov. Still, it limits the book’s reach. Whatever parallels there may have been to Flannery’s discomfiting experience with the brand, Strip Tees hews to being one woman’s story.

The author herself narrates the audiobook in a tone that reflects the cool competence she seems to have brought to her work for the brand. If the listener is left curious about people and events beyond the scope of Flannery’s narrative, in part that’s because the audiobook comes most alive when the author occasionally ventures beyond the company’s insular confines.

In one particularly striking episode, Flannery reminisces about an experience watching a hypnotist during college orientation. For one student the performer’s trick goes too far, and “after that night,” recalls the author, “anytime I would see that girl on campus, I’d think, there’s that poor girl who couldn’t get unhypnotized.”

The analogy is clear: at American Apparel, Flannery and her colleagues just couldn’t seem to snap out of it. Strip Tees is both a direct indictment of Charney’s culture and an indirect critique of the broader forces that allowed it to flourish.

American Apparel was once considered a feminist centered clothing brand that gained success in their brick and mortar stores throughout North America. Behind the scenes it was founded by Dov Charney, a perv who was anything but a feminist. When Kate Flannery moved to LA, it didn’t take her long to be sucked into the American Apparel Cult. With her employment on the line, the lines between reality and company expectation often blurred. Kate’s story is about how she fell into and out of the cult of American Apparel.

I appreciated the unfiltered truth and the awareness of the choices being made. Kate also did a great job at describing the atmosphere that she was sucked into and how the need to climb the company ladder also helped her come to terms with realizing she was but a cog in the system.