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Lena Dunham was just 23 years old when her second feature film, Tiny Furniture, won the best narrative feature prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The movie's success led to Dunham striking a deal with HBO for a comedy series about a group of 20-something girls navigating New York City.

Girls, which Dunham writes and also stars in, premiered on HBO in April. Critics immediately heaped praise on the comedy for its voice and colorful storylines; The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman called the show "one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in recent memory." A New York Magazine cover story called the show revolutionary - and USA Today noted that "Dunham is clearly a talent to be reckoned with."

But not everyone was so enamored. Within hours of Girls' premiere on April 15, a backlash started growing online, with critics charging that the show is narcissistic, lacks racial diversity and showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.

On Monday's Fresh Air, Dunham talks about creating the show, as well as her own experiences navigating life in New York City after graduating from college. She also addresses some of the criticisms lobbed at Girls, and details how she came up with the ideas for many of the scenes in the show. Interview highlights are below.

Interview Highlights
On the criticism Girls has received about a lack of diversity
"I take that criticism very seriously. ... This show isn't supposed to feel exclusionary. It's supposed to feel honest, and it's supposed to feel true to many aspects of my experience. But for me to ignore that criticism and not to take it in would really go against my beliefs and my education in so many things. And I think the liberal-arts student in me really wants to engage in a dialogue about it, but as I learn about engaging with the media, I realize it's not the same as sitting in a seminar talking things through at Oberlin. Every quote is sort of used and misused and placed and misplaced, and I really wanted to make sure I spoke sensitively to this issue. ...

I've been taking this long, stuttering period of moving out. ... I feel like I'm constantly asking them to please stay out of my work life but also to please bring me soup.

"I wrote the first season primarily by myself, and I co-wrote a few episodes. But I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like - not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn't able to speak to. I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me. And only later did I realize that it was four white girls. As much as I can say it was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, 'I hear this and I want to respond to it.' And this is a hard issue to speak to because all I want to do is sound sensitive and not say anything that will horrify anyone or make them feel more isolated, but I did write something that was super-specific to my experience, and I always want to avoid rendering an experience I can't speak to accurately."
On 20-somethings who still live with their parents
"I am a working woman out in the world, but I still live with my parents half the time. I've been taking this long, stuttering period of moving out. ... I feel like I'm constantly asking them to please stay out of my work life, but also to please bring me soup. It's this weird moment where you just don't have a sense of what age-appropriate behavior is because there is no age-appropriate behavior."
On her relationship with her parents
"When I graduated [from] college, my parents said, 'You can live with us,' but they made it really clear they were not going to support any of my endeavors. They were like, 'You can live with us and that's a great gift we can give you, but you have to have a job, you have to figure out, like we did, how to have a creative life, and we're giving you a great step ahead by already living in the city you want to be in, but we're not going to serve that function for you. Our parents didn't do it for us, and we don't think it's healthy.' "
On chick lit and romantic comedies
"I think romantic comedy, when done right, is my favorite genre. It's just a genre that's very human. Bridesmaids had a pink poster, and I loved it - and I don't want to call out any movie specifically, but there is a certain kind of film that is not fun to me in a guilty-pleasure way, and there is a certain kind of chick-lit book that isn't even fun to me in a guilty-pleasure way, because I don't see any of myself in it. Because none of my actions - and maybe this is speaking to my age, because I'm 25 - but none of my actions have ever been [determined] by the search for a husband, or wondering if I was going to have a family someday, or wanting to live in a really great house, or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond. There are just certain drives, and I think that those things may be representative of a desire for love or something else. I'm sure those writers would not appreciate me distilling their thesis down to the search for a diamond, but there's a kind of female character that doesn't make sense to me."
On guys she dates later coming out as gay
"It's happened to me more than once, and my mom says it must be genetic because she has a couple of them in her past, too. Our hope is that what it means is that we are a comfortable resting place for a guy who is figuring things out. Our fear is that we turn men gay."
On tattoos
"When I started getting tattoos, it was before I had any sexual relationship to anybody, so it was really about my relationship with myself. I kind of like that they come from that spot. They were never sensually motivated, they were personally motivated. So now I think about it more like, people who I am naked near are seeing these artifacts of who I once was, and maybe getting a clearer sense of who I am. There is something vulnerable about showing your tattoos to people, even while it gives you a feeling that you are wearing a sleeve when you are naked."

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Lena Dunham Addresses Criticism Aimed At 'Girls'

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Lena Dunham was just 23 years old when her second feature film, Tiny Furniture, won the best narrative feature prize at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The movie's success led to Dunham striking a deal with HBO for a comedy series about a group of 20-something girls navigating New York City.

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'Girls' Talk With Lena Dunham on Her New TV Show

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Lena Dunham talks about her upcoming HBO show 'Girls' that she not only stars in but writes and directs. (April 11) Subscribe to the Associated Press: http://bit.ly/APYouTube Download AP Mobile: http://www.ap.org/mobile/ Associated Press on Facebook: http://apne.ws/c7lQTV Associated Press on Twitter: http://apne.ws/bTquhb Associated Press on Google+: http://bit.ly/zuTKBL

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Concepts in Girls can qualify it to be a feminist text 

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Concepts in Girls can qualify it to be a feminist text 

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Lena Dunham's Girls: Representation of Race and Gender

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Home Box Office's (HBO's) Girls follows the lives of four sexually liberated and educated young women as they deal with living away from their parents, getting careers and finding love. Although the series may not be ground breaking thematically, as the programs predecessors often dealt with the same themes, the manner in which it depicts...

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Lena Dunham took criticism over her lack of diversity very seriously and (tried) to fix the problem. Obviously not hard enough because I don't even remember this character, so he wasn't on for long.

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Lena Dunham's latest well-intentioned disappointment suggests a cultural impasse over white writers portraying characters of color.

Responding last year to viewers who denounced the lack of racial diversity on HBO's Girls, its creator and star, Lena Dunham, told NPR, "I take that criticism very seriously... As much as I can say [writing four white main characters] was an accident, it was only later as the criticism came out, I thought, 'I hear this and I want to respond to it." She did just that in Sunday night's episode, choosing not only to cast African-American Community star Donald Glover as her character Hannah Horvath's new boyfriend, but also to address the issue of race as it manifests itself in their relationship.

Glover's Sandy made his first appearance in the Season 2 premiere. A handsome, easygoing, responsible law student who doesn't go in for the awkward sex and excruciating mind games of Hannah's most recent ex, Adam, he has only one flaw (or what passes for a flaw among 20-somethings in Brooklyn): He's a Republican. His political orientation barely comes up in the premiere, but Hannah's roommate, Elijah, thrusts it to the fore in Sunday's episode, picking a fight with Sandy in the bathroom over his presumed opposition to same-sex marriage. Before the credits roll, Hannah is using his soft-spoken conservatism as an excuse to break up with him-although, in true Girls fashion, what's really bothering her is his dislike of a personal essay she's given to him to read.

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It's in the midst of their final argument that Hannah and Sandy find themselves yelling at each other about race. "I also would love to know how you feel about the fact that two out of three people on death row are black men," she says. "Wow, Hannah. I didn't know that. Thank you for enlightening me that things are tougher for minorities," he shoots back. Soon, he's mocking her for exoticizing him-"'Oh, I'm a white girl and I moved to New York and I'm having a great time and I got a fixed gear bike and I'm gonna date a black guy and we're gonna go to a dangerous part of town,'" he scoffs. "And then they can't deal with who I am"-and she's feebly turning around the accusation on him. "The joke's on you, because you know what? I never thought about the fact that you were black once," Hannah says when it's clear the breakup is really happening, despite the fact that she's the one who introduced race into the conversation. "That's insane." Sandy tells her. "You should, because that's what I am." By the time he asks Hannah to leave, both have admitted they don't feel good about what they've said to each other. The viewer at home, witnessing such shrewdly observed yet ultimately unresolved racial and political tension, is bound to feel just as rattled.

It's a credit to Dunham and the episode's writer, Jenni Konner, that the scene is so unsettling. If they had responded to the controversy over Girls and race by quietly casting a famous black actor and pretending nothing more needed to be said, they might have looked just as naïve as Hannah, who claims not to see race because she's in denial about her own prejudices. Instead, they accompanied their tacit apology with a moment that challenged not only their own and their characters' privilege, but, in its deconstruction of what has come to be known as " hipster racism," that of the show's core audience. Although self-awareness pervades Dunham's work, it was surprising to see such insight from Girls on this particular topic.

Unfortunately, one great exchange does not a truly diverse TV show (or authentic portrait of New York City) make. And while there do seem to be more non-white faces in Girls' party scenes this year, Sandy is still the only character of color who plays a substantial part in any of the season's first four episodes. As she did with the controversial nannies Jessa attempts to liberate in Season 1, and despite the fact that Sandy at least occupies a similar social milieu to the characters, Dunham continues to cast non-white actors only when race defines their character-which is to say, she still doesn't get it.

But let's stop considering Dunham's case in isolation. She's hardly the only white writer or director who has recently been called out for not getting it. Last year, such venerated cultural figures as Quentin Tarantino and Michael Chabon both sparked debate -- not because they excluded characters of color, but because they placed them at the center of their works and represented their experience in ways some found problematic. In a piece defending Chabon's right to write from the perspective of an African-American man, as he does in his 2012 novel, Telegraph Avenue, Tanner Colby noted how many of the book's reviewers expressed discomfort with aspects of his portrayal. The controversy surrounding Tarantino's Django Unchained, meanwhile, has rivaled the Girls debate in intensity. The story of a serendipitously liberated slave's spectacularly violent quest to find and free his wife, its high-profile detractors include Spike Lee, who called it "disrespectful to my ancestors."
If white artists don't portray characters of color, they're whitewashing; if they do, they're appropriating or misrepresenting. That both criticisms are valid makes it even harder to imagine a way forward.
Taken together, the endless arguments over Dunham, Tarantino, and Chabon in the past year suggest that American culture has reached an impasse-and developed something of an obsession-when it comes to white artists portraying characters of color. If they don't, they're whitewashing; if they do, they're appropriating or misrepresenting. That the criticisms on both fronts are, in large part, not only valid but crucial makes it even more difficult to imagine a way forward.

What Dunham's latest well-intentioned disappointment makes clear is that it will never be enough for white writers to simply try harder in their depictions of non-white characters. Some may produce keenly observed, authentic-feeling portrayals, but even those who have spent their whole lives surrounded by people of diverse backgrounds will never know first-hand what it's like to be a person of color in America. They will never respond to Django Unchained in quite the same way as Haitian-American writer Roxane Gay. Those who don't get it will, for the most part, continue to not get it. The truth, distasteful as it may be to those who imagine that we live in a "post-racial" era or believe it's small-minded to apply identity politics to art, is that we still haven't reached a point in our history at which the discrepancies between the way people of different races (or genders or religions or sexual orientations) experience life are negligible.

The solution isn't to prohibit white writers from depicting non-white characters, or to require them to do so. Along with holding these famous names accountable for offensive representations, the US cultural mainstream desperately needs to make more space for writers and directors of color. Arguably more troubling than any of Django's content is the convincing case David Sirota made that a black director would not even have been allowed to make a big-budget film about a former slave slaughtering slave owners.

Ta-Nehisi Coates recently argued that Dunham would be better off sticking to her "authentic self" than adding non-white characters that aren't true to her life. He may be right, and in a world where the wealthy, white, well-connected Lena Dunhams always seem to end up in the spotlight, those who aren't part of her elite world shouldn't have to rely on her for representation. They need the same platform to be their authentic selves that she's been afforded. Until the divisions between races in America truly become meaningless, it's the only way our pop culture will ever reflect our particular patchwork of people and experiences.

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'I'm a White Girl': Why 'Girls' Won't Ever Overcome Its Racial Problem

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Lena Dunham's latest well-intentioned disappointment suggests a cultural impasse over white writers portraying characters of color. Responding last year to viewers who denounced the lack of racial diversity on HBO's Girls, its creator and star, Lena Dunham, told NPR, "I take that criticism very seriously...

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Bet you're a little surprised that 22% of viewers were MEN OVER 50 in 2012. My reasoning is because it is aired on a premium channel and the target audience (young women) may not have been subscribing.

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Girls Photo: Jojo Whilden

Girls is a show by and about urban women in their early twenties, so naturally it's drawing its biggest ratings among white dudes over 50. Wait, what? It's true: According to Nielsen data supplied to Vulture by HBO, a full 22 percent of Girls' audience has a penis and was born before the Beatles hit American shores, and no other single demographic group comes close in its love for Lena Dunham and her sexually curious Scooby gang. It's easy to dismiss this stat as more evidence that Nielsen ratings have about as much credibility as a Lindsay Lohan vow of sobriety. But after crunching the numbers a little harder (with some help from HBO), we found that while actual girls are still in the viewership minority, there are plenty of them watching by other means. As the show prepares for its season-one finale this Sunday, Vulture pit together a list of some more surprising things we discovered about the Girls generation.

It's not just older guys who really like Girls.
A full 56 percent of the show's so-called "linear" audience (anybody who watches the premiere or any of the week's rebroadcasts live or through a DVR) is male; 44 percent is female. By comparison, viewership for True Blood last summer was 52 percent female, though Girls is less testosterone-filled than some other HBO heavyweights: Boardwalk Empire had a 59 percent male audience last fall, while this winter's batch of Eastbound & Down, not surprisingly, boasted an audience composition that was 69 percent male.

... but women are more likely to watch on their own technological timeline.
It takes longer for HBO to process viewership that takes place through VOD, and so far the network only has data from Girls' first two episodes. But the early evidence is pretty striking: In a complete reversal of the show's gender breakdown for linear viewing, a whopping 63 percent of viewers watching Girls on demand are female, according to data from Rentrak, a company that measures VOD usage. (However, this isn't enough to change the overall male majority, as VOD only makes up for 21 percent of the show's total weekly viewership.) The women who watch using VOD are younger, too. Nearly half (48 percent) of Girls' VOD audience is made up of women ages 18 to 49; for the linear broadcasts, the number is just 30 percent. Why the disparity? We only have theories. Women might also be watching the show more than once (live, and then again via VOD). Or, despite cultural stereotypes about techies being guys, perhaps women are simply more tech-savvy about Girls.

Girls does not skew particularly young, at least not yet.
The median age of a Girls fan is 43, the same as Veep and just a year younger than GoT. By contrast, Sex and the City had a median age of 38 during its final season (in 2004), while last summer's True Blood boasted fans whose median age was 39. But there's a big caveat: This number only takes into account viewers who watch or DVR Girls on HBO's main channel; anyone who watches on demand or via HBO GO doesn't count. And perhaps more important, this median age figure doesn't measure any real-life Hannahs who, without the financial means needed to spend $80 per month on a Cadillac cable plan, may decide to simply download episodes of the show illegally. It's also worth noting that many successful HBO shows enjoy a significant boost in viewership (and often get younger) as they age and word of mouth builds and series are discovered on DVD and streaming. True Blood, for example, experienced massive growth in both its second and third seasons; GoT was much bigger this year than last.

Still, older women aren't particularly big fans of Girls.
Remember how we told you 22 percent of the folks who watch the show via linear TV are men over 50? Among women over 50, that number is just 14 percent. Older women aren't even more likely to watch Girls on demand: Just 15 percent of the show's VOD audience is made up of older females. Apparently nobody told them about Peter Scolari's junk making a cameo appearance: They've been fantasizing about that since Bosom Buddies!

New York City is not the center of the Girls viewing audience.
Not even close. According to HBO's analysis of Nielsen's data, the No. 1 TV market for the show is Providence, Rhode Island and New Bedford, Massachusetts. Kansas City comes in second, followed by Cincinnati, Charlotte, and Tampa-St. Petersburg.

Its audience is as ethnically diverse as other recent HBO series.
Fifteen percent of the audience that watches Girls on HBO's main channel is African-American, while 10 percent is Latino. That's pretty much the same as the audience composition for Veep, GoT, and Boardwalk Empire. True Blood and Eastbound & Down, which skew 16 percent African-American and 11 percent Latino, are slightly less white.

Barely any of Girls' fans watch it when it first airs.
A mere 14 percent of the roughly 4.1 million people who watch Girls each week catch it when new episodes debut Sunday nights at 10:30 p.m. Most folks (36 percent) catch up via repeats of the show on HBO later during the same week of its premiere. Another 24 percent record the show on a DVR and watch it within the week it airs, while the aforementioned 21 percent use HBO's video on demand service. (Math nerd sidebar! If you follow the overnight ratings reported by Vulture and other media outlets, you've likely seen reports of Girls drawing anywhere from 800,000 to 1.1 million viewers per week. That number includes live viewing - the aforementioned 14 percent - and anyone who watched the episode on DVR later Sunday evening.)

But HBO GO isn't really a factor, either.
Despite lots of talk about folks swapping HBO GO passwords to catch Girls, it turns out viewership via that platform is still pretty tiny: just 5 percent of the aforementioned 4.1 million, or about 200,000. In part, this is because barely 5 million out of HBO's approximately 29 million subscribers have even bothered to sign up for the service.

A few housekeeping notes: The age and ethnic data above is based only on viewers who watch Girls on HBO proper, not multiplex channels such as HBO2 or HBO On Demand. Gender breakdowns for linear broadcasts include viewers who watch the show live or via DVR on any HBO-branded channel.

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Girls is a show by and about urban women in their early twenties, so naturally it's drawing its biggest ratings among white dudes over 50. Wait, what?

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In the pilot episode of HBO's new series Girls, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) begs her parents to continue to bankroll her Brooklyn lifestyle by arguing that she is "the voice of my generation." Seeing the skepticism on their faces, she scales back and says she is at least "a voice of a generation." This amusing moment has become a sign of Hannah's simultaneous uncertainty and self-importance, but it's also an indication of HBO's hopes for the series.

Beaten into silence by the unrelenting media buzz surrounding the premiere of HBO's new series , I've had time to think about my response to the series' first two episodes. The HBO-stoked hype around Girls suggested that showrunner Lena Dunham, with guidance from Judd Apatow, would speak for a new generation in this dark comedy about life after college in New York City. In case you've been under a rock since the series premiered on April 15th, let me summarize the response so far: Girls has been critiqued for its lack of racial diversity and for its characters' focus on the trivial problems of the privileged. It has been applauded for its realistic portrayal of women's bodies and for its ability to find humor in awkward situations.

It's a challenge to find traction for a solid review after a single episode, but after two episodes of trying to decide how I feel about the show, I started to wonder: Who does HBO hope will watch Girls? Vulture pointed out that HBO likely released the Girls ' pilot free online to draw a twenty-something audience to the show, but media users like Dunham's character, Hannah Horvath, who in the pilot was "cut off" by her parents, likely don't have the income to subscribe to HBO, and likely wouldn't subscribe for only one series (though they may use their parents' HBO GO account to watch subsequent episodes).

Though HBO is fairly tight-lipped about their subscribers, The Wall Street Journal reported that Time Warner's premium cable networks HBO and Cinemax lost 1.6 million subscribers in 2010, while companies offering broadband distribution of movies and TV shows gained subscribers (Netflix, for example, gained almost 8 million subscribers). HBO finished 2010 with 28 million subscribers, its lowest number since 2005; this loss is no doubt due to a range of factors, but has been tied to HBO's inability in recent years to produce a major hit like The Sopranos or Sex and the City.

Unlike The Sopranos' 10 million viewers (its pilot drew 3.5 million) and Sex and the City's 6 million viewers (its pilot drew 3.7 million), the Girls' pilot drew 1.1 million viewers over two opening night airings. This suggests that HBO's massive advertising campaign, which created a buzz through both mainstream and alternative sources, unsuccessfully targeted a population they can't draw to subscription TV-twenty-somethings are more likely to watch the show online illegally or wait for the DVD release (though Jezebel pleaded with readers to save for HBO subscriptions to keep Girls in production).

But Girls' small initial audience also suggests that its audience " isn't easily defined." I suspect that HBO believes Girls can draw a loyal fanbase built from (mostly white, mostly privileged) women older than their twenties-a more typical HBO subscriber. A moment in Girls' second episode, "Vagina Panic," gives this older audience a small nod when Hannah's gynecologist, bewildered and overwhelmed by Hannah's seemingly endless monologue about her obsession with AIDS, pauses her exam and says, "you couldn't pay me enough to be twenty-four again." Girls' focus on self-indulgent panic attacks and cringeworthy sex scenes allows older viewers a chance to identify with its (admittedly narrow) coming-of-age stories. And while most older viewers might agree that they don't wish to repeat their twenties, HBO is betting that some will want to look back and laugh through the discomfort and embarrassment of their memories. If, as Dunham suggests, the show's heart is the relationship between Hannah and her best friend Marnie, it may have a chance at developing a respectable following that enjoys the show for more than its uncomfortable humor and shock value. If Girls can build upon what viewers of all ages share (and Dunham fulfills her promise to add racial diversity to the show), it may truly become a series that is "a voice of a generation."

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In the pilot episode of HBO's new series Girls, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) begs her parents to continue to bankroll her Brooklyn lifestyle by arguing that she is "the voice of my generation." Seeing the skepticism on their faces, she scales back and says she is at least "a voice of a generation."

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Shoshonna is always dressed in bold clothing with flashy accessories. This shows how charismatic and bubbly she is. Jessa takes a more carefree bohemian aesthetic, but notice her very youthful clips. This shows she still has a yearning for the childhood she never got to have, but she will never voice this.

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Marnie is dressed very professionally. Someone could say she is on her way to work, but she is always dressed like this in Season 1. This shows how she has a hard time letting loose.

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Hannah is at a classy book release party, and yet she is wearing a tacky, ill-fitting dress. This shows how she really does not know how to act like an adult and she doesn't seem to care either.

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Created by Lena Dunham. With Lena Dunham, Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Adam Driver. A comedy about the experiences of a group of girls in their early 20s.

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The article explains the creator Lena Dunham's thoughts behind the hit show.

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Tiny Furniture's Lena Dunham says her upcoming HBO comedy Girls isn't Sex and the City.

The series -- which she wrote, created, executive produces and stars in -- revolves around a group of twentysomething women in New York and is loosely based on her own experience post-college struggles with work and relationships. And while both series revolve around a group of female friends living, working and looking for love in New York, it's a completely different project.

"There is no Sex and the City revenge plot," she told reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association's winter press tour. "I revere that show just as much as any girl of my generation."

Executive produced by Bridesmaids' Judd Apatow, Dunham said the series reflects a part of the population that hasn't previously been seen on either film or television and fills the gap between the characters on Sex and the City and the CW's Gossip Girl.

"I knew that there was a connection because it's women in New York, but it really felt like it was tackling a different subject matter," Dunham says. " Gossip Girl was teens duking it out on the Upper East Side and Sex and the City was women who figured out work and friends and now want to nail family life. There was this whole in between space that hadn't really been addressed."

Dunham noted that the pilot intentionally features a Sex and the City joke because producers wanted to make it clear that the girls were inspired by the former HBO series and moved to New York to pursue similar dreams, with that being a driving force of the series as the girls struggle with growing up. "Their shitty boyfriend whose bed is on the floor is their Mr. Big," she said.

She also noted she was out of college for two years while working at a baby clothes store and baby sitting before she "begged and borrowed" money to make the festival indie hit Tiny Furniture, taking days off from filming to fulfill baby sitting commitments.

The struggles Dunham's character, Hannah, endures -- her parents cutting her off financially, struggling to become a writer, making the worst possible decision in many given opportunities -- reflect a frustrating time in her life when she shared the same frustrations, with the characters taking two steps forward while taking one step back.

The series also marks Apatow's return to series television after more than a decade, following the short runs of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, a pair of critically acclaimed yet low-rated comedies that failed to connect with viewers.

Apatow said he was drawn to Dunham's imagination after seeing Furniture and said Dunham has "many tales to tell" that stem from her own embarrassing experiences, while Dunham said Girls would provide men with a unique window into the psyche of women.

"I think it's interesting for guys to get an insight into realistic females. I think there are some hotties on the show," she said. "A 24-year-old girl is not the easiest creature to dissect."

Girls premieres April 15 on HBO.

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TCA: Lena Dunham Says HBO's 'Girls' Isn't 'Sex and the City'

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Tiny Furniture's Lena Dunham says her upcoming HBO comedy Girls isn't Sex and the City. The series -- which she wrote, created, executive produces and stars in -- revolves around a group of twentysomething women in New York and is loosely based on her own experience post-college struggles with work and relationships.

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I thought this author's insights to how important the costumes are on the show Girls was really interesting.

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The world's supply of Girls-related grievances is seemingly endless. If we needed anti- Lena Dunham vitriol to survive, we'd essentially live forever. But there's a lot of praise amidst the mudslinging too, and I think her HBO television show is especially worthy of such accolades.

I don't mean to imply that encompasses THE (capitalization crucial) experience of twentysomethings everywhere, or that all twentysomethings live in Brooklyn (although, I happen to be one who does). I firmly believe that such a show-a show that speaks to and about and for everyone-is impossible, and that Dunham is tackling one pocket of the twentysomething experience in a fresh way. Notions of class and race aside, the show treads in a lot of universal spaces: heartbreak, mental illness, the disillusionment that comes with adulthood, to name a few. The girls of Girls are trying to find themselves, and though their paths may be cushier or more "superficial" than those of the majority, many of us can relate to the soul-searching (and sucking) that comes with wondering: who am I?

And the all-consuming confusion of that process is reflected nowhere better than in the characters' imperfect wardrobes. The clothes they wear aren't so loud that they take away from what's actually playing out in each episode-they're not another character in their own right, as they were on Sex and the City or Gossip Girl. Instead, the clothes work like mood rings, telegraphing the kind of woman each character is trying to be that day.

In Marnie's regular clothing we see a woman playing it safe and attempting to fulfill a cookie cutter definition of female success. But we also see how influenced she can be by the thoughts of men, like when she opts for an artsy, plastic dress to impress one guy, or a folksy maxi dress to impress the next.

In Shoshanna's off-kilter attempts at the trends, which she always pairs with bedazzled barrettes or headbands, we see her naiveté in full force as she aspires to be the "cool girl" that has always eluded her. Her looks tend to stand out, though not for the reasons she'd hoped.

In Hannah's seemingly intentional mishmash of prints and her disregard for what society deems flattering for her figure, we see a young woman trying desperately to convince herself that she's different-that such concerns are beneath her.

And in Jessa's adoption of bohemian standbys like lace pants and fringed jackets, we see how that laissez-faire lifestyle contradicts with her reality, despite her efforts to convince the world otherwise.

But the girls' lack of sartorial savvy makes me appreciate the show more, not less. It's more in tune with the trajectory of my own life (fashion job and all) and those of my friends. Who hasn't worn something for the sake of a guy and then regretted it the minute they stepped outside? Who hasn't had a period of bucking conventional dress in an attempt to prove something deeper about themselves? Who hasn't tried to dress for a part that they're not quite ready to play? The point is we've all had our wardrobe slip-ups, especially during times when we've felt unmoored or insecure. Girls has an authenticity to it that other shows are lacking because it allows itself to go there, rather than rendering all disasters "beautiful" with a Louboutin heel or Chanel dress.
Scroll down to see some of our favorite snaps of the Girls characters.

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Why I Love the Realistic Fashion on GIRLS

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The world's supply of Girls-related grievances is seemingly endless. If we needed anti- Lena Dunham vitriol to survive, we'd essentially live forever. But there's a lot of praise amidst the mudslinging too, and I think her HBO television show is especially worthy of such accolades.

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This clip from the episode is the part when Hannah and Marnie are having a fight caused by financial strain. The two friends are mocking each other's problems, not realizing that they are both being ridiculous.

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My Critique of Season 1, Episode 9 "Leave Me Alone"

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My Critique of Season 1, Episode 9 "Leave Me Alone"

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This critique examines how the characters dress, the personal issues, and the lead-in that sets the narrative in the episode "Leave Me Alone" in Girls. The purpose of this is to explain how the show Girls talks about the fears young females may have as the embark on true adulthood.