Questionable Italian fashion model Brandy Melville is the subject of a new HBO Original documentary that takes viewers inside Brandy Melville’s world.
” Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” shows the product, which notably makes clothes of only one dimensions, and accusations of racism and misogyny in their stores by previous employees, managers and fashion officials.
The European store, founded in the early 1980s, has shops in over 15 locations. In the 2010s, the brand gained traction in the United States among young women, and Brancy Melville is frequently associated with the “skinny cosmetic” promoted on social media platforms like Tumblr at the time.
The film demonstrates how this promotion promoted unrealistic beauty standards among adolescent girls and sexualized them. Famous people like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner wore and promoted the company at some point.
The film also looks into the bank’s impact on the environment and promotion of consumption. Here’s what we learned.
Brandy Melville prejudice charges: CEO accused of excluding Black buyers
Franco Sorgi, a former store employee, reported to Business Insider in 2021 that Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan had told him he did n’t want overweight or Black people to wear his clothing. Sorgi opened the second Brandy Melville business in Canada in 2012 and, at one place, owned 11 areas.
Sorgi claimed that Marsan claimed he wanted “good-looking prosperous little women” as his customers in order to influence the well-known high school girls and boost sales.
More than two dozen current and former workers, according to Business Insider, contacted the moment and claimed that civilization had an impact on the bank’s employment practices. According to its investigation, Marsan and various executives routinely joked about Adolf Hitler in texts, including an image that allegedly showed Marsan’s experience being allegedly etched onto Hitler’s system.
The video details the analysis as well as evidence from former Black employees about the company’s alleged discriminatory and discriminatory work practices, including claims that Black employees were pushed to operate backstock, which are suggestive of those made by former Abercrombie employees.
Kali, who is Black and previously worked in the Broadway store in New York City, said she first worked in the appropriate area before moving on to the investment area.
” The share space had no white employees,” the statement read. If you were pale, you had to be in view”, she said. We all knew it was n’t inappropriate for us to be pushed out of sight, but it was n’t something we were necessarily angry about.
‘ Brandy Hellville ‘ takes deeper glance at fast fashion hazards
The HBO film examines the agency’s promotion of speedy fashion, or cheap and cool clothing produced by mass- market retailers.
Clothing that is collected by companies like Brandy Melville, Shein, and Fashion Nova ends up in landfills despite efforts to contribute it. The clothes ends up elsewhere, like Accra, Ghana’s money and home to the country’s second industry and called a “dumping surface” for America’s unnecessary clothes.
” From the beginning of the supply network to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system”, Chloe Asaam, a African clothing designer and program director for The And Foundation, says in the film.
Before being swept out of the water, cotton waste arriving in Accra is either burned or ends up in the gutters. The beach along the Gulf of Guinea was featured in the film, where clogged shorelines and possible sandbags abound. According to Joe Ayesu of The And Foundation, a check of the water below revealed 96 silk counts in a 10 ml test.
According to Ayesu, this pollution would then be ingested by local residents as a result of their consumption of fish.
Past Brandy Melville people ‘ stories are shared on social media.
Brandy Melville is known for using its younger employees and customers for Instagram promotion, but does much standard marketing there. According to the documentary, their social media account is run by the agency’s strange CEO.
In an interview that was released on Wednesday, Delaney Rinke opened up to People journal about how her Brandy Melville incident turned out. When he was 14 years old, the shop scouted him and hired him there for four years.
” I was really, really young, so I was very miserable at work”, Rinke told the outlet, after recalling an “insane” process where people were required to take pictures of their clothes.
” Photos had to be very staged and make us look a lot older than we were”, the now 22- year- old said.
Despite this, the film’s director, Eva Orner, told Teen Vogue in an interview published Wednesday it was hard finding former employees who wanted to appear on camera. ” Everyone was very young when they worked there, and now they’re young women embarking on careers or in their twenties”, she told the outlet. ” A lot of them were really scared”.
Brandy Melville is accused of copying the fashion style of its employees.
Former New York store employee Kali claimed that” the higher -ups” adored a pair of lavender high-waist pants she wore to work one day and that they were able to copy the fashion.
One of the key contributors to the doc, Business Insider senior features correspondent Kate Taylor, said,” They were able mass- produce what these cool girls were already wearing.” ” In some cases, the names of these things on the Brandy Melville website, ( they’ll ) be like Jocelyn shirt. And it’ll be because this shirt was literally purchased off of Jocely n’s back”.
One of the participants claimed Brandy Melville CEO Stephan Marsan would take girls from Los Angeles’ more wealthy neighborhoods on shopping trips to curate outfits from various stores and copy the looks, with some modifications, and that he would do so without giving an interview.
How to watch” Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion”
” Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion” is available to stream on Max.
Contributing: KiMi Robinson