If you have n’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably do n’t have a teenage girl in your life. A certain large expanse of the general Z, who have been quite online and inundated with images of very thin celebrities like Bella Hadid, is associated with the clothing brand, which is confusingly named for two characters, an American woman named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome. Brandy Melville was for the kind of simple but very fashion-conscious woman, as one former store employee put it in a fresh HBO documentary about the product.
Over the past ten and a half, the brand has grown a sizable following through Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, and overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than$ 40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phones, just like Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, and it was all about being organically popular, ubiquitous, and strengthening retrograde notions of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol that many people love to hate and secretly want on such thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.
The company has also come to be associated with fast fashion’s environmental disaster and shady, discriminatory business practices, which has grown in popularity recently. Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered at SXSW and on HBO this week, digs deeper into a 2021 exposé by Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on the company’s murky, outright creepy management – not just the “opaque minefield” of” sustainable” fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but allegations of discrimination, “pedo energy” and sexual assault by company leadership.
The 91- minute film sifts through the appeal of the brand to young, mostly white girls, the exploitative and manipulative behavior of the company, as attested by numerous former employees, and the exploitative nature of the fast fashion industry in general, as evidenced by sweatshops in Prato, Italy, and beaches in Accra, Ghana, buried in piles upon piles of secondhand clothes dumped by western countries. Orner and her team spoke to hundreds of ex- employees, though most did n’t want to go on camera for fear of retribution or diminished future job opportunities. ” It’s a very, very odd and ugly worldview coming from that company”, she said.
Unlike most fashion brands, Brandy Melville has no public CEO, no mission statement or top- down brand persona. Every store is owned by a different shell company, and each store’s name is a Swiss company. The company’s structure is “designed to be not traceable”, said Orner. Taylor identified the CEO as Stephan Marsan, an Italian man with little online presence and just two Google image searches, according to Taylor’s report. How do you run a business that is spread out across the globe, with over 100 locations spread across the internet and social media, and this man has never given an interview? He does n’t exist. And that’s very purposeful and crafted”, said Orner. Marsan, unsurprisingly, declined to participate in the film.
Marsan was a suspicious, vindictive presence, according to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were hired in-store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with an eating disorder while representing the brand. Shop employees, usually girls around the age of 16, had to pose for their “daily photograph” every morning – photos of their outfits, for “brand research”, texted to and kept by Marsan. ( Brand research, as several note, usually constituted blatantly ripping off their clothing, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, resulting in several lawsuits. ) Marsan reportedly preferred skinny redheads, liked Asian girls and “did n’t want a lot of Black people”, said an anonymous former assistant.
A former employee, who has sued the company for wrongful termination, says he was instructed to fire girls if they were too heavy or Black. ” If you’re white, you had to be in sight”, recalls one Black employee relegated, as most people of color were, to the stock room. Another former employee of the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan put a button at the register that he would flash if he discovered a” Brandy girl” checking out of people he wanted to hire and take pictures.
It gets worse, as in, Hitler jokes and racist memes that Marsan sent in a text message to other managers. a young girl allegedly sexually assaulted in a Brandy Melville-rented apartment in Manhattan. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self- described libertarian, using his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as store props. The company is doubling down on its not so subtle eating disorder messaging, which it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of sizing options, especially in its very profitable expansion into China.
Worse, too, in the company’s dogged pursuit of a business model that, like other fast fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M, prioritizes churn and zeitgeist over quality, clogging landfills and exploiting cheap human labor. Orner and her team travel to Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of the few businesses that uses immigrant labor to make quick garments in sweatshops under the “made in Italy” label, and Accra, Ghana, a nation whose trade agreements with western nations force it to accept loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a Brandy- typical “made in Italy” tag buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee- deep in tangles of discarded clothes. Not a lot surprises me, said Orner, but one of the “worst” things she’s ever seen was the amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra, where one worker suspects the sea floor is now completely covered in clothes. ” We are sending them our trash and destroying their country”, she said. ” It’s things they do not want or need”.
Although the movie is supposedly about a particular buzzy brand, Orner hopes it is a bigger example of how to reconsider one’s relationship to fashion. The film offers the standard small prescriptions to sustainable fashion: buy natural fibers and secondhand, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of a landfill as long as possible. But also, that “none of that’s going to fix anything”, said Orner. There are” too many clothes on the planet,” the statement read. We overproduce. We make 100bn garments that are produced annually globally. And the majority of those are incinerated within the first year.
Brandy Hellville is steadfast in keeping the focus on the bigger picture, if not particularly optimistic about the brand’s potential for change or halting the flow of fashion waste. Brandy Melville has continued since the Business Insider article three years ago caused social media outcry against the business. Management, from Marsan on down, said nothing. Unlike the case with Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and backlash to discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgement, no apology, no brand shift. No admission, just more clothes. Annual sales for Brandy Melville totaled$ 212.5m in 2023, up from$ 169.6m in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. ” It’s a very Trumpian thing to do”, said Orner. What we need to do is stand up and keep the conversation going and stop letting them get away with it by outwitting us.
” The power’s in the consumers who do n’t buy the product,” she added”. And if we do n’t let them get away with it, we have all the power. They’re just making stupid clothing.”
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On April 9th, HBO will show Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion, and a UK release date has been set.