The clothing retail industry demands the performance of aesthetic labor, whereby visible employees embody a store’s desired “look.” Scholars currently understand this labor process as focused on extracting gender, sexual, and class dimensions of worker appearances to promote the company brand. Drawing on 55 interviews with U.S. clothing retail workers, the author argues that racial dynamics of this job create a tri-racial aesthetic labor process that promotes White-dominant beauty standards and exoticizes certain phenotypical forms of racial difference. Clothing retail managers often select and reward White workers, while using lighter-skinned and sometimes racially ambiguous looking Asian, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial workers to carefully diversify brand representations. Darker-skinned Black women appear to experience exclusion, devaluation, and alienation in their performance of aesthetic labor.

Retail offers notoriously bad jobs that exist at the nexus of work and consumption. Previous brand-based retail studies assert that youth workers see the stores’ coolness and the employee discount as compensating for the low pay and variable schedules. The authors use interviews with 55 former and current young clothing retail workers to examine how they experience retail work in relation to their consumer identities. The authors find that while some workers identify with the brand, all workers criticize the poor working conditions. Workers draw on their consumer identities to understand what good service entails and sometimes to resist managers’ orders that they interpret as bad deals for shoppers. This article concludes that youth retail workers’ consumer identities do not compensate for the low pay and poor work conditions but instead help them navigate the interactive aspects of service work and find fulfillment on the job.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract