Boots Riley’s frantic fashion satire exposes exploitation in clothing trade
Boots Riley’s fashion industry satire, *I Love Boosters*, follows three young women who steal designer clothes and resell them cheaply. Their schemes bring them into conflict with a billionaire couture designer and lead them to team up with a rival thief, exposing exploitation in the clothing trade.
Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige play the boosters; Demi Moore appears as designer Christie Smith. The caper mixes shoplifting, a fraudulent self-help scheme and supernatural elements, including a portal that sends clothes to China, where workers made them in poor conditions. The review calls the film funny but relentlessly frantic, and says Moore’s role is closer to a potent cameo than a leading part.
In short
- Three women steal couture and sell it at lower prices.
- The caper turns towards the fashion industry’s labour practices.
- The review finds it funny but exhausting.
Explained simply
Clothing is sold through a global trade: garments may be designed and marketed by luxury brands, while being made by workers far from the shops where they are sold. Concerns about low pay and poor working conditions have long raised questions about who benefits from the industry and who bears its costs.
Boots Riley is a filmmaker whose work often uses comedy and surreal events to examine power and money. In I Love Boosters, Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige play young women who steal designer clothes, while Demi Moore plays a wealthy fashion designer; the story uses their clash to explore the distance between luxury fashion and the labour behind it.
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Originally published by The Guardian as “I Love Boosters review – supercool outlaw women go shoplifting in Boots Riley’s frantic and funny caper”.