There have been a handful of celebrity deaths that I've been gutted by, and Dolly Parton is one of them. I'll have more thoughts on this in Thursday's newsletter, since this news came through just as I was sending this out, and honestly I'm still processing in real time. As I'm sure many of you are, too! But for now, rest in peace, Dolly.

For the OG readers of this newsletter, you know I'm a sucker for any and all indie print zines I find in the wild. Today's cover story is my chat with illustrator Christina Lee, who's done some amazing work for places like The Fader, i-D magazine, and my alma mater, Teen Vogue. She's releasing her own comic book about working at American Apparel as a teenager, when the brand was at the epicenter of the indie sleaze era and the controversy that came with it. Sixteen years later, she's revisiting what it was like to be a teen girl coming of age inside that world, and all the bizarre parts of that culture that look very different to her now.

Plus: Vanity Fair drops a writer after her viral courtroom moment, new scripted shows from Amelia Dimoldenberg and Issa Rae, a D.C. journalist gets fined $800 a day for not revealing her sources, and more media intel in Seen and Heard. One reader also sounds off on Vogue's September cover.

xoxo,

Stephanie

American Apparel was the final resting place for my ego death in the early 2010s. My ass was truly humbled with every shopping trip that forced me to go up at least three sizes to fit into a skirt that was still objectively way too tight, but I was in no position to leave defeated and take the L.

That was part of the strange chokehold American Apparel had on teens and twenty-somethings during what we now call the indie sleaze era. The brand sold a very specific kind of cool: edgy, raunchy and just inaccessible enough to be alluring. At the time, a lot of what made American Apparel feel transgressive was precisely what made it appealing. Looking back, though, some of the things we accepted as part of the aesthetic — the hypersexualized ads, unforgiving sizing and bizarre workplace culture — land very differently. American Apparel founder Dov Charney was eventually fired amid allegations of misconduct and faced multiple sexual-harassment lawsuits. 

Illustrator Christina Lee spent her senior year of high school working at the Valley Fair Mall location in Santa Clara, California, from 2009 until she left for college in 2010. She coveted the job as a teenager. Sixteen years later, she’s looking back at what it was actually like to be a teen girl working for one of the era’s most controversial brands — and she made an entire comic book about it, aptly called ‘I Used to Work at American Apparel.’ 

Before Christina reads her comic at Gutter, a Brooklyn-based comics reading and animation show, at Nook on Sept. 3, I caught up with her to chat more about the comic and how it all came together.

What about your time at American Apparel compelled you to create a comic about it?

Everything was unique to me about working at American Apparel because it was my first part-time job. In fact, I made my first comics when I was 17 years old, and one of them was a 3-panel strip about working at this crazy store.

What compelled me to revisit this subject 16 years later was a desire to reexamine, with new hindsight, the “indie sleaze” subculture that was important to me as a teenager and in my early twenties. I’ve noticed older people being nostalgic for and younger people being enamored with the 2000s, and I wanted to honestly show what it was like to be a young woman in this era; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

What's one moment from working there that still sticks with you?