—Diane Arbus
Soon after my trip abroad, I enrolled in full-time photography classes at City College of San Francisco, where I learned to develop my own negatives and expose my own prints. For our final project we had to shoot a series of some sort, and I decided on a Russian Orthodox Church down the street from my apartment. The building was tiny, and from the outside you could hardly tell it was a church at all. It was the architectural equivalent of a loner.
I felt a kinship to this humble outsider church in the middle of San Francisco’s metropolis, so I knocked on the door and asked Mother Maria, the nun who lived there, if I could take some pictures. I grew up Greek Orthodox and still have an appreciation for the sights, sounds, and scents of the faith, which I think helped gain Mother Maria’s trust. It turned out that she hadn’t grown up Orthodox but had chosen the faith. My conversations with her were pretty powerful—I knew so many people who had dropped out of society in so many ways, but here was a woman who had looked the world in the face and decided, in the purest way possible, that she wanted none of it.
Mother Maria was a badass.
The Russian Orthodox faith eschews any sort of luxury, which means the entire service is spent standing. In Mother Maria’s view, the world outside the church—which she called the “worldly world”—was a place full of gluttonous distractions that kept us from discovering our true spiritual selves. She invited my worldly self in nonetheless, allowing me to photograph her and the church. The photos didn’t turn out that great; I still had a lot to learn.
A few weeks later, though, Mother Maria called me. The old priest had died and she wanted me to photograph his funeral. When I arrived his body was near the altar in a simple casket handmade from a few pieces of wood with a white satin sheet stapled to the interior. Aside from me there were about eight other people in attendance. So many of the worlds that I had dipped into played at shrugging off modern society, but the priest was a man who had truly rejected it. In a city full of noise, he’d found light by living in the shadows. Holy shit, is that heavy.
My baptism by fire helped me to find comfort in many different environments. I photographed truckers, bartenders, and outsiders in Nowheresville. I had begun to feel like I really knew what I was doing with a camera. And I’d upgraded to my twenty-first-birthday gift, a Hasselblad medium-format camera. That camera, to this day, is the best gift I’ve ever been given. It was my mother’s last effort to help me find my way. I decided that I wanted to attend the San Francisco Art Institute. In order to do so, I needed to have a finished photography portfolio.
In order to fulfill this prerequisite, I chose to return to the church. Mother Maria introduced me to a priest, Brother Eugene, who lived on a small plot of land outside Santa Rosa, selling his vegetables at the farmers market on weekends. I spent the day with him and we talked about everything under the sun. He fed me trailermade borscht and I went on my way. I then set off to a Russian Orthodox monastery in Point Reyes.
The monastery was one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. There was a shipping container where a young monk spent his days dipping beeswax candles to be used in churches and sold in gift shops. Some men built caskets. Some gardened. They were shut off from the world but they were open enough to let me in. I couldn’t help but think that when they weren’t wearing robes, I could have mistaken these guys for metalheads.
In the end I decided that I couldn’t stomach the $50,000-a-year tuition and chose to forgo art school. But my series, which I called Armed to Bless, was an education in itself: It was one of the first times that I had ever finished something that I set out to do.
Find Your Framework
Applying to SFAI gave me the framework to be free within a set of rules in a way that school and jobs had not allowed me. Armed to Bless was an accomplishment beyond just taking pictures. It taught me that when I do things because I want to do them, and not because I have to, I can accomplish a lot. This type of framework is all around us and it also exists outside applying to or attending school. When it came to starting my own business, I found the framework that I needed on eBay. I probably could not have built a website of my own at that point, but my ambition grew with each crack of opportunity. The framework of eBay presented me with a series of easy-to-complete tasks (take photo, upload photo, write description) that eventually added up to a business. Starting it was as easy as picking a name and uploading the first auction. That instant gratification would never have come had my first step been to write a business plan. And without that instant gratification I might not have kept going. If you’re dreaming big, #GIRLBOSS, don’t be discouraged if you have to start small. It worked for me.
Putting the “Art” in Sandwich Artist
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.
—Leo Burnett
Anything you do can be creative. If, when you make a smoothie, you try to make the best smoothie the world has ever tasted, it’s a creative act. If you throw a frozen banana and some yogurt in a blender and hit puree, well, not only is it uncreative and boring, but I also feel really bad for you.
I was always looking for ways to make my job creative, no matter what that job was. At Subway I loved the giant spray nozzle that hung above the dishwashing sink. Blasting mayo off of the spatula was uniquely satisfying. I liked making bread, spacing out the little twisted sticks of dough into perfect patterns on trays before sliding them into the oven. I learned the secret to the perfect doughy center in Subway’s cookies: slamming the tray down on the counter, causing the cookies to spread out while the pan was still hot. And any job that pays you for slamming things . . . well, consider yourself lucky.
None of the jobs at Nasty Gal are shitty to me, and I know because at some point I’ve done almost all of them. Whether it was styling, directing models, steaming clothing, or shipping an order—they were all creative. And when something got really boring, I turned it into a game to see how quickly, efficiently, and accurately I could get the job done.
The Venn Diagram of Creativity and Business
Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steelmaking.
—Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
I would never have accomplished what I have had I felt forced to choose between my creative talent and my business acumen. At Nasty Gal, I’m the CEO and creative director, two titles that are rarely on the same business card—but what no one seems to talk about is that business is creative. I’m as creative when I’m choosing an investor as when I’m reviewing collection samples. I have as much fun hiring people as I did with a camera in my hand.
Keeping the Nasty Gal brand consistent as we have grown has been one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. I’ve gone from being a solo artist to one part of a killer band. Our C-level team is the rhythm section, the rest of the team is playing guitar and keys, and I’m just scatting. Be-bop a doo-wa . . .
It wasn’t too long after I’d launched the eBay store that I started to recognize how important the thumbnail photos were. Thumbnail photos are prime real estate in e-commerce—they hook your customers in while simultaneously informing them about what they’re looking at. These thumbnails can’t be too messy or too bland. They must display the items clearly so that as prospective customers zoom quickly through the catalog page, they know what they’re looking at and also find it interesting. I saw that when the shape and style of an item was clearly visible in even the tiniest photo, it inevitably went for a higher price than a thumbnail where the silhouette was obscured or confusing to look at.
To this day I blur my eyes when I edit photos. I load all my photos on Bridge, shrink them down super-small, then cross my eyes like a goofball and flag the images that still catch my eye. This allows me to edit quickly without getting distracted by the details—if the composition or silho
uette sucks, it doesn’t matter what the model’s face says. The DNA of a successful image, and brand, must be encrypted into its tiniest representation while gracefully telling the same story in its largest incarnation. My thumbnail photos were the postage stamps to Nasty Gal’s success.
I was used to making dozens of little creative decisions every day, but designing the first Nasty Gal website was my first macro “branding” project. Though once again, I didn’t see it as a branding project—Nasty Gal just needed a website, so I made one. I had no formal graphic design training, but knew what I liked and what I didn’t, and had spent so much time observing and talking to my customers—through eBay and MySpace—that I was confident I knew what would appeal to them.
Block type was really big in 2008, so I found some clunky font on a German graphic designer’s blog and downloaded it for free. I smashed the letters together, making one solid shape, and the first Nasty Gal logo was created. I went through a million iterations of the site, but it was always a fairly simple design. The color scheme was always pink, black, and gray because I didn’t want it to be too heavy. I used a close-up shot of my friend Dee’s face in the navigation (Dee was an early eBay model and now works for Nasty Gal as an apparel designer) and it was up there for years. The main tenets of the navigation were “Shop New” and “Shop Vintage.” It’s not as if I invented the English language here, but Nasty Gal was definitely one of the first websites to sell both new and vintage and position it as such.
I knew how to use Photoshop from editing photos, but I did not know how to use InDesign, so I designed Nasty Gal’s first website entirely via Photoshop. Also, as I was self-taught, I didn’t know any shortcuts. I moved everything one pixel at a time. I must have spent hours hitting the arrow key, like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo . . . okay, now that box is halfway to where I want it to be, so . . . doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo . . . You get the picture. When Cody, who helped with the site development, showed me that I could hold down the shift key and move something like ten pixels at a time, it was as if the heavens opened up, the angels sang, and I got back several hours, maybe even days, of my life.
I have always been an observer. When I see music live, I like watching not only the band but the crowd as well. What are their favorite songs? Who’s a fan and who has never even heard this band? Where’s the obligatory fifty-five-year-old man with no rhythm who arrived alone and is louder than anyone else in the room? Currently, I am always trying to imagine things from the customer’s point of view. Now that Nasty Gal’s creative decisions are made by our creative team, they have to look at things from three views: their own, the customer’s, and mine. Thank God I hire brave people, because the inside of my head can be pretty weird sometimes.
Nasty Gal is now at an inflection point where we have to institutionalize the magic, as I like to say. That means that everyone’s job, to some extent, is to pull out of my head what has made Nasty Gal successful for the past seven years. When the brand was an extension of just me, I never had to stop and ask myself whether or not it was “on brand.” Today, our team is constantly working together to examine what has made us successful, what of that we want to keep around, and what newness we can introduce to evolve the brand. We then have to communicate that and share it. Our creative team is learning how to think like I think and I’m learning how to think like they think. Brains everywhere, all the time. Cue air drums.
PORTRAIT OF A #GIRLBOSS:
Leandra Medine, Manrepeller.com and author of Seeking Love, Finding Overalls
When I was a kid I really thought I was going to be a ballerina, but then I realized I suck at dancing. So by the time I was in college, I wanted to become a reporter. I hoped I’d get a fact-checking job at New York magazine out of college, but instead I started Man Repeller.
I was a junior at the time and started the blog because I was writing so much content that was not funny at all and I just felt like I needed a place to inject a little bit of humor. What I wanted to do with my life figured itself out. I did not by any stretch of the imagination think that it was possible to take my blog anywhere that professional stuff happens. Sometimes I still feel like the universe is playing a trick on me. Since 2010, I have since grown Man Repeller from a one-person blog (here’s hoping, fingers crossed) to a website with staff writers and graphic designers and ad sales people and bikini waxers on demand! Just kidding. Fuck waxing.
I remember when I was younger that every time my mom wanted to buy something expensive, she had to run the purchase by my dad. I knew I never wanted to have to ask anyone to appease my indulgences, so that was a point of motivation to work hard. If you’re working, you’re working hard, and if you’re not doing that, what are you doing? I also think you age a lot quicker if you can’t keep yourself busy and under the right, healthy dose of stress. Too much of anything obviously isn’t good, but as my dad always said: Overwhelmingly busy is a much better state to be in than overwhelmingly bored.
Fashion has always informed the way I approach life. It’s also helped me manipulate my moods: I could be having a shitty day but the right pair of shoes can sometimes change that—which is powerful. I make a lot of jokes about fashion, but I love it. And on the topic of style, I think clothing will always look good—no matter how outlandish or ridiculous you might think it is—if you wholeheartedly own it. If you feel equally as excited and comfortable in a fruit-silhouette head contraption as you do in a pair of jeans, the rest of the world will watch. And likely in admiration. There are no apologies necessary for being you.
It sounds incredibly platitudinal, but no one will ever be able to love you if you don’t love yourself. What’s beautiful about it is that if you love yourself enough, you don’t need the validation from anyone else. My advice to #GIRLBOSSes is to get excited about the mistakes you’ll make.
Own Your Style Like You Own Your Used Car
When you don’t dress like everyone else, you don’t have to think like everyone else.
–Iris Apfel
As much as I would like to say that photography was my first love, I think my first real creative effort was getting dressed.
Mom, and me, with her “punked” collar. 1987.
Both my parents were well attired, but my mom especially had great style. Before she headed out the door, she put the finishing touch on her outfit by “punking” (better known as popping) the collar of her ’80s polo shirts. It was always in my blood to care about what I wore and how it fit. At age six, my one true love was a pair of acid-wash jeans with an elastic waist. In sixth grade I became obsessed with the Sanrio crew: Hello Kitty, Pachacco, Kero Kero Keroppi, and the lot. My look could best (or worst?) be described as suburban mall Harajuku girl through a Northern California lens: baby T-shirts, barrettes, and white Walgreens’ knee-high socks that I wore with my Converse One-Star sneakers.
Before I knew that real punks don’t wear polo shirts.
When I was fifteen I liked a pair of bedraggled brown Levi’s corduroys that I found at the Salvation Army by my house so much that I wore them at least five days a week, until they met their untimely demise in a gas station parking lot (I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say that it involved a really upset stomach, lack of a nearby public bathroom, and me crying in shame). Even when I was in my Abercrombie & Fitch phase (yes, even I have succumbed to peer pressure), I washed my jeans after every wear so that they still fit exactly the same as they did when I bought them.
A staple look from my boring-ass Abercrombie phase. 1998.
I was a ’90s teenager, so of course I went through a grunge phase, donning bell-bottom flares that dragged on the ground and an equally shapeless men’s V-neck sweater. My clothing choices were in line with my contrarian nature. As I mentioned earlier, my mom begged and pleaded with me to buy clothes at the mall, a typical teenage girl’s dream; we spent hours there only to leave empty-
handed as store after store failed to usurp my preference for the corduroy and threadbare T-shirts I could only find at the local thrift store.
After that, I went through a couple of different iterations of skater girl: the cute type, with tiny board shorts, a tight tank top, and skate shoes; and the not-so-cute type, when I cut off all my hair and paired those skate shoes with baggy Dickie’s work pants.
At age seventeen I was a crust punk who refused to change her all-black clothes. At eighteen I was goth, which still involved all-black clothes, but at least now I changed them. That was when I lived in Seattle—and the goth suited the gloom. After that, when I moved back to San Francisco, I became a rock ’n’ roller and that stuck for a long time. I hooked my thumbs through my belt loops and did honky-tonk scoots across dance floors. My long hair parted in the middle and I wore exclusively vintage T-shirts with high-waist jeans that practically grazed my boobs.
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.
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