On Tuesday, just as we hit “publish” on Leigh Stein’s dissection of the rise and fall of the girlboss, Sophia Amoruso, CEO of fashion site Nasty Gal and the original #girlboss, hit “publish” on an Instagram post that announced the end of the company she’d built over the last decade.
Amoruso wrote that she, “along with the majority of our team, are no longer with Girlboss” and that the downturn from Covid-19 had “decimated” her business.
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
The ambitious corporate feminism that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital was now falling, boss by boss. It was the end of an era for millennials who had come of age in a post-recession workplace in crisis, where they were told that if they need to fix something, they should start with themselves. In Refinery29, Connie Wang calls this group of millennials struggling against freefall the “grateful generation,” happy to be here and willing to tolerate, if not venerate, the toxic world these girlbosses made.
The younger generation … sees problems as networks — the ways in which our culture is tied to our economy which is tied to geopolitical forces, the environment, and random circumstance. When they see a problem, they are more likely to question the entire system. My generation had recognized the same problems, but our solutions relied on navigating these issues in isolation: Want a raise? Get another job offer. Want healthcare? Find work at a bigger company.
We are coming out of a long freefall of economy-above-all thinking, writes Eve Fairbanks in GEN, where the anxieties of the grateful generation meet the backward-looking boomers, who embody the “conviction that the precise economic conditions that reigned in the decades just after the Second World War are the only conditions that call forth the best in the American character.”
We’ve learned a lot about the coronavirus over the past three months — and yet we’ve also learned very little about it. Does it work in waves, does it work in hot spots? Does it flare up then down? Does it favor cities over rural areas? Indoor spaces or outdoor? This precarity has led to a “deep magical thinking,” she writes. “Many believe that we still have the right to choose how much to let Covid-19 affect us.”