Book review: #GIRLBOSS

Nasty Gal clothing has turned a fan base into an empire thanks to the hard work of its founder and CEO, Amoruso, a 30-year-old hipster dynamo dream girl who describes her journey from anarchist shoplifter to multimillionaire in her advice memoir.

Amoruso’s voice is accessible and charmingly selfdeprecating without losing the effortless cool that characterizes her clothes, and her book is a DIY success manual written for women who were more prone to be voted “Most Unique” than “Most Likely to Succeed”. The book isn’t without its head-scratching moments. Some of Amoruso’s advice is relevant to contemporary upstarts, but other aspects of her story — how she transformed an eBay store into a devoted Myspace following and then a web-retailing pioneer — reads more like a time capsule from the early social media age than a career blueprint for today’s fledgling businesswoman.

Her habit of branding her book via the excessive use of “#girlboss” in the text is distracting; an unclickable hashtag makes about as much sense as a scratch ’n’ sniff radio commercial. Ultimately, though, Amoruso’s scrappy capitalist narrative makes an admirable attempt to prove that navigating the system isn’t the same as endorsing it