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.