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"  Earlier this year, Nasty Gal\u2014the L.A.-based online emporium that is not quite as sordid as its name suggests\u2014held an Instagram contest. It asked fans to declare their devotion by creatively interpreting the company&amp;#039;s slogan, &amp;quot;Nasty Gals do it better.&amp;quot; From all over the country, N-A-S-T-Ys poured in, spelled out in nail art, Scrabble letters, sidewalk chalk, and studs on the back of a jacket. Kitchens were raided for edible art supplies: Skittles and candy hearts and alphabet soup. The words were baked into the tops of pies and arranged in strands of spaghetti on a plate of Bolognese. There was even, somewhat alarmingly, a photo of a Nasty Gal tattoo (&amp;quot;frighteningly real,&amp;quot; one staffer recalled, though its authenticity was never entirely determined). Perhaps most surprising, a number of devotees eschewed Instagram in favor of the U.S. Postal Service. Scrawled in marker, sprinkled with stickers, this old-school fan mail\u2014collected in a bin in the company&amp;#039;s computer-crowded downtown L.A. headquarters\u2014seemed steeped in a sort of &amp;#039;70s nostalgia, as if The Virgin Suicides&amp;#039; Lisbon sisters had decided to express their love for a digital-age phenom using construction paper and Elmer&amp;#039;s. Nasty Gal sells streetwear that falls on the more risqu\u00E9 end of the H&amp;amp;amp;M and Topshop spectrum\u2014cutaway bodysuits, cropped moto jackets, &amp;#039;90s-style bustiers, and the best-selling Slasher shredded jean short (in the tradition of Rihanna or, depending on your frame of reference, Tawny Kitaen), all mostly priced under $100. But the site also promulgates an ethos: a blithe, sexy spirit that feels 100 percent Californian in its riffs on surf, skate, and music-festival cultures and its emphasis on the fearless and enthusiastic display of one&amp;#039;s body. First-time visitors to the site may click on a pair of, say, high-waisted black leggings with gaping holes skipping down each thigh (engineered to showcase a region that most of womankind has been conditioned to conceal at all costs) and wonder, Who on earth would wear this? But the reason Nasty Gal gets the kind of fan mail usually reserved for Twihards is that the brand fundamentally gets why a girl would want to not just toe the border of good taste but kick her way through it. This emotional connection\u2014perpetuated minute to minute on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook\u2014flows upstream as well as down. Nasty loves its girls, and girls\u2014at last count, 400,000 visitors per month\u2014love their Nasty. Increasingly, though, it&amp;#039;s not just &amp;quot;gals&amp;quot; who are idolizing the company&amp;#039;s face and founder, 28-year-old Sophia Amoruso. With minimal advertising and, until last year, no outside investment, Amoruso turned a vintage stall that she founded on eBay with a couple hundred bucks in 2006 into a 150-employee empire selling a vast mix of vintage and contemporary clothes. As of this fall, Nasty also boasts an in-house label, Nasty Gal Collection; a range of denim (including its inaugural high-waisted style, known as the Kink); and\u2014in the ultimate example of media aging backward\u2014a print magazine, Super Nasty. When Inc.com published its 2012 ranking of the fastest-growing online brands, Nasty Gal came in number 11 of 5,000 and was the number-one retailer in the pack. In 2008, the company&amp;#039;s revenue was $222,000; by 2011, it was $22.9 million. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s 10,315 percent growth,&amp;quot; says Nicole Guarascio, the West Coast trend director of fashion forecasting company Stylesite, with something approaching awe in her voice. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s exponential.&amp;quot; And it&amp;#039;s ongoing: Nasty Gal&amp;#039;s earnings are projected to multiply by more than 500 percent in 2012, up to $128 million. In the world of fast fashion, of course, that&amp;#039;s still small potatoes. Urban Outfitters and H&amp;amp;amp;M are projecting 2012 earnings of $2.77 billion and $2.75 billion, respectively. But Nasty Gal is succeeding in the very niche where many brick-and-mortar monoliths falter. In the age of social media, if a brand&amp;#039;s communiqu\u00E9s don&amp;#039;t seem authentic, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s almost worse than not doing it at all,&amp;quot; says Guarascio. For the Gen-Y consumer born between roughly 1980 and 2000\u2014also known as Millennials, Generation We, Generation Next, the Net Generation, and, according to Wikipedia, something called Echo Boomers\u2014&amp;quot;the whole culture is about transparency and honesty, and identifying with real individuals that you relate to.&amp;quot; Amoruso doesn&amp;#039;t have to hire some consultant to help her find the right aspirational-yet-down-to-earth voice that would resonate with her customers. She just is one. So if you were sitting in the blond-wood boardroom of H&amp;amp;amp;M\u2014nope, still not sold online\u2014you&amp;#039;d be watching Amoruso closely. Still, on the kind of scorching New York summer morning that seems to liquefy all ambition, not to mention eye makeup, Amoruso picks at a croissant with her fingers and declares, in the opening salvo of this interview, that she&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;not really a career person.&amp;quot; It echoes the statement made by her outfit: the two-inch sliver of midriff visible between her cropped black tank and a cognac-color, knee-length, &amp;#039;70s suede skirt; the choppy bob; the teal glitter nail polish, which coincidentally matches the rough tattoo of a cross on her finger. Amoruso radiates the kind of cool that should be intimidating, except for the fact that she insists on being anything but. This persona extends to the grinning, bedheaded models on her site, who display her wares with a kind of carefree, loose-limbed sex appeal, as if they just tumbled in from Coachella and decided to take some pictures for the fun of it. The mood on Nasty Gal is surprisingly un-nasty. In this all-girls club, everyone is welcome to join. Bitchy is not on-brand.  The original motivation for Nasty Gal was merely to get Amoruso out of having to work for anyone else\u2014which is not to say she didn&amp;#039;t want to work. Having sold shoes, worked in photo labs, checked student IDs at an art school, and, for a week at least, scrubbed ring-around-the-collar off of men&amp;#039;s shirts at a dry cleaner, she was living in San Francisco and in between jobs, she says, when &amp;quot;I thought, Whoa, I&amp;#039;m going to try to sell stuff on eBay, like every other girl who tries to do that around that age.&amp;quot; Nasty Gal Vintage started as a one-woman operation: Amoruso scoured Goodwill, then styled and photographed her finds on a cadre of friends and girls scouted on MySpace. Throughout the first year, her models posed in front of her aunt&amp;#039;s blue garage door. Amoruso then wrote up the items on eBay and sold, packed, and shipped them, one by one. The secret was in the styling: Instead of presenting the pieces nostalgically, she remixed vintage from disparate eras in a modern way, quickly learning the rules of perceived value. &amp;quot;You cannot put a plain blouse, no matter how beautiful, on eBay and have people duke it out,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Everything had to be really crazy or avant-garde or designer or beautiful.&amp;quot; Bidding wars ensued. For one &amp;quot;crazy neon kid&amp;#039;s sweater&amp;quot; with a hole in the armpit and a starting bid of $9.99, &amp;quot;I did not tell anybody this thing was worth $500&amp;quot;\u2014but some girl had to have it, and that&amp;#039;s what it sold for. The company name she borrowed from the hypersexual 1975 album by Betty Davis\u2014not to be confused with Bette\u2014the snarling &amp;#039;70s punk-funk paragon and wife of Miles. Davis was beyond merely sexy or strong; she was defiant, uncompromising, an original badass. Clearly, a logical patron saint for a retail venture. Initially, &amp;quot;it was like, if I can survive with a name like this\u2014that&amp;#039;s funny,&amp;quot; Amoruso says. &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t trying to be a CEO.&amp;quot; Now that she is one, she seems to appreciate the moniker even more. It provides a sort of psychological moat around the brand. &amp;quot;If you can accept the name, it&amp;#039;s like you&amp;#039;ve passed the first step,&amp;quot; says Amoruso. In the era of &amp;quot;peer-ents,&amp;quot; in which teenagers and their mothers often shop at the same stores, Nasty Gal feels like it&amp;#039;s for actual youths\u2014not just the young at heart. And these days, a dress that can make Mom shudder has a certain kind of cachet. &amp;quot;Plus I think it&amp;#039;s pretty obvious to our customers that some big corporation isn&amp;#039;t behind something that was named as, like, flippantly as this business.&amp;quot; By 2008, NastyGal.com had left eBay, becoming its own online destination and beginning a breathtaking expansion; 2011 was a big year: Amoruso and a core team of a dozen &amp;quot;OG&amp;quot; Nasties relocated from San Francisco to downtown L.A., and the company got its first boost of outside financing\u2014unique in an industry in which most ventures are financed to the hilt from the word go, and in which many are founded for the sole purpose of one day being sold off to the highest bidder. London-based Index Ventures (which also funds part of Net-a-Porter and the British fast-fashion phenom Asos) invested $9 million for less than 10 percent of the business, with Amoruso retaining control. &amp;quot;[Six years ago] if you&amp;#039;d said, &amp;#039;Do you want to have 150 employees and spend your days in conference rooms,&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;d have said, &amp;#039;Oh, that sucks,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; says Amoruso. &amp;quot;But when I was editing every photo, I was like, How can I find someone to help me not do this day-to-day stuff so I can keep growing the business?&amp;quot; Today, &amp;quot;the business kind of has a mind of its own,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I feel like its humble servant in a lot of weird ways. I put myself where it needs me.&amp;quot;  The it in &amp;quot;Nasty Gals do it better&amp;quot; presumably refers to dressing, taste, coolness\u2014but also, unavoidably, sex. Whether you are currently a college-age intern or you work with them, you will recognize Nasty Gal wares as the uniform of a pantsless generation, for whom the acronym NSFW does not extend to the question &amp;quot;What should I wear today?&amp;quot; That doesn&amp;#039;t mean that all 3,000-odd items for sale on Nasty Gal at any given moment are revealing. But even with the site&amp;#039;s most buttoned-up blouse, a certain sultriness pervades. Ask Amoruso about the complexities of selling very sexy clothes to very young women\u2014the company&amp;#039;s sweet spot is ages 18 to 24, but surely little sisters armed with Mom&amp;#039;s credit card are on board too\u2014and she fiddles uncomfortably with the heavy bronze collar that circles her neck. She trusts her clientele to have the kind of Kate Moss\u2013esque knack for contrast and context that can render any look more hipster than Hustler. &amp;quot;You can wear dresses that we sell and look like a Kardashian,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Or you can look really awesome and cool.&amp;quot; And it&amp;#039;s true: On the site, stretchy micro-minis have a certain youthful, non-Snooki verve when paired with combat boots and friendship bracelets; a red lip does look alterna-girl sexy, a tad defiant, as long as it&amp;#039;s worn with scrubbed cheeks. For the women who&amp;#039;ve mastered this artful balance, a certain be-who-I-wanna-be feminism could be said to underlie this kind of dressing. In these clothes, a girl effectively opts out of compromising, of being &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;polite&amp;quot;\u2014from the neck down, at least\u2014and lays claim to her own sexuality. Are bum-skimming shredded jean shorts today&amp;#039;s Helen Gurley Brown fishnets? Amoruso knows she has benefited from her feminist forebears, but she finds the existing terminology too preachy for her liking. &amp;quot;I hate the word empowerment. It&amp;#039;s so tampon-y, or whatever,&amp;quot; she says. However, when her company finally did reach a focus-group level of critical mass, she learned that her young clientele, thankfully, does not. &amp;quot;These girls were using this word, you know? They were like, &amp;#039;Nasty Gal makes me feel really confident, like I can do anything.&amp;#039; Like we&amp;#039;re dressing them to live out their dreams. Even though we&amp;#039;re selling revealing things that someone may interpret the wrong way or may not be able to pull off, the overarching feeling is, &amp;#039;I don&amp;#039;t have to be a wallflower,&amp;#039; or &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m expressing something inside me.&amp;#039;\u200A&amp;quot; When Amoruso was 17, she wasn&amp;#039;t very Nasty: She wore all-black, didn&amp;#039;t shave her legs, refused to let a guy open the door for her. &amp;quot;As a kid, I used to read teen magazines, all these horror stories about, say, getting your first period. They&amp;#039;d make you think it&amp;#039;s the worst thing in the world to be a girl, it&amp;#039;s so terrifying. &amp;#039;This boy dumped me\u2014oh God, what do I do?&amp;#039;\u200A&amp;quot; she says. Nasty-ness is the opposite of that kind of fear. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a full-circle kind of thing: It&amp;#039;s fun to be a girl, to wear makeup, to show a little skin,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s just about owning yourself.&amp;quot; Within her company, the oft-repeated mantra is that Nasty Gals &amp;quot;aren&amp;#039;t sexy for someone else\u2014they&amp;#039;re sexy for themselves.&amp;quot; And if the bandage dress fits, why would you not wear it? If that&amp;#039;s the way you feel (and dress), it&amp;#039;s a safe bet that plenty of people aren&amp;#039;t going to get it\u2014whether those people are your date, your dad, or your boss. But Nasty Gal will. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/a12583/nasty-gal-sophia-amoruso-profile/>