You have already heard that the reign of the girl’s head is over. As several women industry leaders abandon their roles to perpetuate toxic work environments and some even face trial in federal court for alleged fraud and conspiracy, the liberal assumption that women operating capitalist structures can transform radically corporate culture and improve the lives of average working women. it is slowly being replaced.
As with any cultural object that has lost its luster, it is instinctive to want to retrace the steps that led us to this unified place of fatigue and skepticism. Recently, authors, journalists and filmmakers have participated in this exercise with different results – and sometimes unintentionally – that illustrate the universal persuasion of wealth and power and skew the few benefits of representation politics. Today, Amazon offers the latest entry in this canon, a four-part docuseria called LuLaRich this does not focus so much on the rise and fall of a singular girl’s head, but portrays the ease and effectiveness of selling this fantasy of empowerment to a particular subset of millennial women.
Ready for serialization in our time obsessed with scammers, LuLaRich tells the story of millennial fashion retailer LuLaRoe, not to be confused with Lululemon, Lulus or Laila Rowe, a multilevel marketing company known primarily for its huge collection of showy and patterned leggings and, from the 2017, defective clothing, a series of lawsuits and accusations from Washington state that functioned like a pyramid scheme. In 1988, Utah native DeAnne Stidham began selling dresses she bought at the local exchange meeting, hosting Tupperware-like parties at her home. After more than 20 years of reselling dresses, she and her second husband Mark started a long dress business that went viral on Facebook and connected them to the first woman who bought her stock, installing the MLM or direct selling business model. and the launch of LuLaRoe in 2013.
After experiencing a few years of high demand, lucrative bonus checks, and employee benefits, LuLaRoe’s first and largest salespeople began to experience the company’s drawbacks. After receiving poorly designed and even moldy clothes that they could not afford to pay out of pocket to attend mandatory conferences, the American dream that they bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars escaped, which led to the mobilization of harmed employees on Facebook. and the inevitable fall of the company’s grace.
Like his approach to the 2019 documentary Guys cheat, LuLaRichCo-directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason build a fascinating but familiar story that uses an assortment of puzzling testimonials from former LuLaRoe retailers, employees and members of the Stidham family who held executive positions, ideas from cultural and business experts , pop culture clips, deposition images and a central interview with DeAnne and Mark, the charisma of megacastastic pastoral care and amazing Mormon values (they happily share that two of their children, who are not biologically related, are married), sure they will be memorized alongside Joe Exotics and Billy McFarlands who have captured the nation’s attention over the past two years.
Viewers who aren’t familiar with LuLaRoe’s story, but who enjoy the subgenre of scam documentaries, will immediately recognize if they don’t predict many of the series’ stuffed rhythms and devices, especially in the cartoon character of the former coordinator of company events, Sam Schultz, celebrity cameos and the cult portrait of the business. When we learn that DeAnne was pressuring women to fly to Tijuana for weight loss surgery, it feels like the only logical direction the increasingly shattered series could take. Also, the visual cues from the series can sometimes feel heavy. I’m not sure the audience needs a frying pan with a Barbie doll, as Jill Filipovic reads the instruction book DeAnne’s mother wrote about being a traditionally female woman. We really need to see a clip of Charlie and Grandpa Joe singing “(I’ve Got A) Golden Ticket” by Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory after Schultz uses the metaphor of a golden note?
“When we learn that DeAnne was pressuring women to fly to Tijuana for weight loss surgery, it feels like the only logical direction the increasingly destructive series could follow.”
While LuLaRich tells a suitably compelling story about the predatory and absorbing nature of MLMs, is less adept at analyzing the paradoxes of demographics that successfully attract to their networks: nuns, middle-class white women, and stay-at-home moms, especially military women and Mormon women in Utah, where there is more MLM per capita. Women in traditional marriages where their main role is parenting are more likely to join MLM because their flexibility allows them to work from home.
Similarly, the docuseria exposes how LuLaRoe’s marketing unfolded the pop-feminist slogan and image of the “boss babe” to recruit mothers and wives, while subtly promoting a politically conservative message about the obligation of women. women to their families. Basically, the company told the women that “she can have it all,” although she hinted that “she” should want more of her family.
Journalist Jill Filipovic, whose presence made me wonder especially why she didn’t approach any black women’s culture writer to talk about this topic, tenderly remarks that the fashion company sold a “white vision” of motherhood and work-life balance, as sponsored by LuLaRoe appear on screen social media posts of heterosexual white couples and their children posing in their backyards. However, the series does not explain why these women’s relationship with the workforce and their family dynamics differ from the realities of lower-class, non-white women, particularly black women, who have historically always had to working while raising children. Two color employees point to the company’s lack of diversity (former integrator LaShae Kimbrough, who is black, shares a particularly funny piece of news about the company’s declining cruise due to the immense number of whites), but the directors do not provide any real context as to why the company attracted the demographics it did.
LuLaRich it may not generate as much fanfare as Guys cheat—After all, these are leggings, but they will certainly attract people with a cultural mindset interested in the intersections of religion, feminism, capitalism, leisure and white women. While she might be more rigorous in analyzing these clashing cultural events, she manages to tell a fascinating story that will make you laugh and capture a meme dialogue until frustration and disappointment end up completing them.