In the first episode of Inventing Anna, fake German heiress Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) declares, “I work for my success. I earn my accomplishments.” Whenever a person of a certain status suggests that they alone are responsible for their accomplishments, it raises red flags. “I did it alone” is often code for “I came from a wealthy family and had the right connections,” but in the case of Delvey, that kind of statement embodies the very ethos of a specific time in pop culture: the era of the girlboss. It would be impossible to separate Delvey’s real crimes from the girlboss era, and Netflix’s Inventing Anna doesn’t just recognize this connection — it uses it to tear down the girlboss myth once and for all.
The term girlboss was coined in 2014 by Sophia Amoruso, founder of online retailer Nasty Gal. She defined the term in an interview with Elle as “someone who has big dreams and is willing to work hard for them.” She added, “Being a girlboss is really about being the boss of your own life.” In that same interview, Amoruso rejected the “feminist” label, saying, “I think the most feminist thing to do is just show up and be a girlboss. Maybe girlboss is a new word for feminism.” And she wasn’t the only one popularizing pseudo-feminist catchphrases: In 2013, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead rejected the “women can have it all” narrative and instead encouraged women to lean in and grab every opportunity. And one year later, Beyoncé’s declared, “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.”
Altogether, these platitudes combined with hustle culture created an environment where women are fed the idea that the only thing standing in the way of their economic success is their (lack of) worth ethic. (Kim Kardashian declaring, “I have the best advice for women in business: get your f–king ass up and work,” might be the 2022 iteration of the girlboss mentality.) The real Delvey came to prominence in New York City in 2016, at the height of the girlboss craze. As Delvey was hustling to secure funding for the Anna Delvey Foundation, Forbes was including Amoruso on its list of America’s richest self-made women and dubbing her “richer than Beyoncé.”
And though not one character in Inventing Anna uses this phrase to describe Delvey, the concept of the girlboss looms large — she might not say it explicitly, but it’s exactly what she wants to be. She wants to be seen as a creator, as a woman of substance who doesn’t work for anyone.
In Episode 7, when her friends confront her for not paying Rachel back for an ill-fated trip to Morocco, she yells, “You’re all so basic. You don’t know what it’s like to create something.” Even in prison, Anna doles out girlbossy wisdom, like when she declares to journalist Vivian (Anna Chlumsky) “I was always who I am.” And she frequently calls herself a “boss” to lend herself more credibility.
It’s Anna’s girlboss allure that reels her friends, Neff (Alexis Floyd) and Rachel (Katie Lowes), into her orbit. Neff is impressed by Anna’s $100 cash tips, recognizes the businesswoman in her and becomes her pseudo-assistant. Meanwhile, Rachel, a photo editor at Vanity Fair, is clearly enamored with Anna’s girlboss vibe. “We are coming about in a time, in the last 20 years, where women and women’s careers and women having it all is a huge hot topic. It’s in the characters’ worlds we see now on television, it’s in the stories we read, it’s in the magazines, it’s in all of that. And Rachel wants that. Definitely,” Lowes tells Tudum.
Rachel isn’t the only character enamored by Anna’s girlboss persona. In Episode 3, which takes place mostly in 2014, Anna sets her sights on winning over Nora (Kate Burton), a wealthy woman with an interest in funding entrepreneurs. Anna latches on when she hears that Nora built a girls’ club for businesswomen when she was starting her own business. She attempts to bond with Nora about how difficult it is to “be a woman in business.” Then she seals the deal at an exclusive arts fundraiser, securing her connection to Nora by publicly declaring her a mentor — telling everyone that Nora’s a “huge supporter of female entrepreneurs.”
Not only does this show of female solidarity make Anna look good, it also traps Nora. If she were to back out of ADF now and return to her previous mentee, Chase, it would look anti-feminist. And in the world of the girlboss, where every woman had a sworn duty to help other women, this would be an unforgivable sin. But Anna doesn’t only use feminism to her advantage; she uses sexism too. In Episode 4, Anna breaks down in tears to manipulate top lawyer Alan Reed (Anthony Edwards) into taking her on as a client. She begins her pitch by asking, “You know how hard it is for a young woman in business?” And when he tries to turn her down, she sobs about how difficult it is for her to be taken seriously because of what she wears and how she looks, essentially guilting him into signing on.
It’s clear that Anna isn’t actually living up to the girlboss image. One second, she’s the next female entrepreneur — rising in status thanks to her feminist declarations — the next, she’s sobbing in a man’s office about how sexism is holding her back. She uses those very real systemic disadvantages to get ahead. She even attempts to use sexism to defend herself after being caught, telling Vivian “Every day men do far worse than I’ve allegedly done, and what happens to them? Nothing. No consequences, no fallout, and definitely no jail time.”
One of the pillars of girlboss and hustle culture is that women can achieve equality in the business world if they work hard enough aka the “you have the same number of hours in a day as Beyoncé” mentality. Though Anna wants to embody this idea, her actions blatantly rebuke it.
Anna may claim at the start of the show that she’s earned all of her accomplishments, but the truth is that she would never have accomplished anything if she didn’t have connections to the right people. After Anna guilts Alan into looking at her business proposal, she invites him to a dinner party with all of her connections in the NYC financial world. It’s these connections that win Alan over. And in the world of Inventing Anna, connections aren’t earned, they’re bought. Anna has to scam to make connections in the art world — which would allow her to start her own company as the “boss.” Yes, it could be argued that the con itself is work, but it’s also what lands her in prison.
It’s not a stretch to link Delvey’s life to the girlboss era. As Alice Porter writes in Refinery29, of Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes, the controversial founder of Theranos, are “antiheroes of the girlboss era” because of their “refusal to do the work required to gain the type of success they yearned for.” Inventing Anna has a different analysis. In the series, fraud is “the work” Anna needs to do to accomplish her goals. This is reminiscent of what writer Jia Tolentino observed in her essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams,” from her book Trick Mirror, in which she directly referenced Delvey. “The feminist scammer rarely sets out to scam anyone, and would argue, certainly, that she does not belong in this category. She just wants to be successful, to gain the agency that men claim so easily, to have the sort of life she wants,” Tolentino writes. “The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology.”
But Inventing Anna doesn’t just use Anna’s story to deconstruct the girlboss ideal. Vivian , the journalist rushing to uncover Anna’s story, operates in direct opposition to it. Specifically, she dispels the popular girlboss myth that women can have it all. Throughout the series, Vivian’s reporting is limited by a major, unmoveable deadline — the arrival of her first child. She knows that once she gives birth, she might not be able to tell Anna’s story. A typical girlboss story would have her work through labor, perhaps even finish typing the story as she’s learning how to breastfeed. Instead, this hard deadline is accepted as a truth — something not even the strongest, smartest, most determined person can avoid. In Inventing Anna, motherhood changes a woman’s life irreversibly, and that’s OK.
Vivian also defies the girlboss trope that women can — and perhaps even should — make their success on their own. Vivian’s article wouldn’t be possible without the help of her fellow Scriberia writers — characters who, it should be noted, were created for the series. Show creator Shonda Rhimes has made her feelings about the term girlboss very clear. “I think the girlboss archetype is bullshit that men have created to find another way to make women sound bad,” she said in an interview with Time. But is girlboss culture all bad? When asked about the term, Chlumsky says that, while she could see how it could be “very empowering,” the term was also problematic. “What’s wrong with ‘woman boss’?” she asks. It’s true that the term is infantilizing, a kind of corporate pink tax women pay to be taken somewhat seriously. But there’s an aspect to girlboss culture that can be useful: confidence.
Kacy (Laverne Cox), the personal trainer Anna hires and befriends, is a firm believer in the idea that the universe looks out for those who do good. In fact, she says the universe saved her from being a victim of Anna’s cons. She’s frequently spouting girlboss-y phrases like “you’re a bad bitch” and “stand in your power.” Though these clichés may seem empty, they actually help the women in Inventing Anna take control of their lives. Kacy tells Rachel, “Stand in your power,” which gives her the confidence to stand up to Anna. And Kacy’s attitude helps her set boundaries with Anna that keep her from getting conned. So, can girlboss culture actually be good? Cox thinks so. “We can have the critique of the grifter,” she tells Tudum. “But then also understand that there’s something empowering [in saying] we are responsible for our own lives.”
Perhaps parts of girlboss culture can be good, just like parts of Anna are good. But the girlboss herself, much like Anna Delvey, was never real.
