by If you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named after two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who falls in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large number of gen Z, very online and immersed since it conscious with images of very attractive celebrities. like Bella Hadid. As one former store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic but very trend-savvy girl.
Related: ‘Distinction was their brand’: how Abercrombie & Fitch fell out of fashion
For the past decade and a half, the brand has grown a giant following through Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts by and from teenage girls focusing on a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accelerating pre-adult metabolism, exposed midriffs that are so taut that’s what they seem to be begging for. tape outfit, long hair flowing merrily, too bright. Most of the brand’s pieces were sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, and that size small. What Abercrombie & Fitch did to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – a popular, ubiquitous organism and reinforcement of existing ideas of what is cool and popular. Seeing rail-thin celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner is a divisive status symbol that many people love to hate, and secretly want.
More recently, the brand has also become synonymous with the environmental scourge of fast fashion and shady discriminatory business practices. Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered at SXSW and on HBO this week, digs deeper into Business Insider’s Kate Taylor’s 2021 exposé of the company’s fake, feckless management — not just the ” opaque minefield” of “sustainable” fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but accusations of discrimination, “pedo energy” and sexual assault by company leadership.
The 91-minute film sifts through the brand’s appeal to young, mostly white girls; the exploitative and manipulative behavior of the company, as confirmed by many former employees; and the exploitative nature of the fast fashion industry in general, as evidenced by sweatshops in Prato, Italy, and on the beaches of Accra, Ghana, piled upon piles of used clothing dumped by western countries. Orner and her team spoke with hundreds of former employees, although most did not want to go on camera for fear of having to make restitution or reducing future employment opportunities. “It’s a very strange 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. Each store is owned by a different shell company; the name is owned by a Swiss company. The company’s structure is “designed to be untraceable”, Orner said. In her reporting, Taylor identified the CEO as an Italian man named Stephan Marsan, a shadowy figure with almost no internet presence and exactly two Google image results. “How do you run this business all over the world – there’s over a hundred stores – that’s all over the internet, all over social media, and this guy has never done an interview? It’s not there. And that’s very purposeful and very artisanal,” Orner said. Not surprisingly, Marsan refused to participate in the film.
According to former store managers and some employees, nearly all of whom were recruited by the store for their outfits and nearly all of whom struggled with eating disorders while representing the brand, Marsan was a questionable, loyal presence. Shop employees, usually girls aged around 16, had to pose for their “daily photo” every morning – photos of their outfits, for “brand research”, texted to Marsan and kept by him. (Brand research, like many, tended to rip off their clothes in plain sight, as cheaply and quickly as possible, leading to several lawsuits.) Marsan is said to have preferred redheads. thin, liked Asian girls and “didn’t want many black people. ”, said an anonymous former aide.
A former employee, who sued the company for wrongful termination, says he was instructed to fire girls if they were overweight or Black. “If you’re white, you had to be visible,” recalls one Black employee who, like most people of color, was relegated to the stock room. Another former employee at the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan put a button on the board, which would flash if he saw “brandy’s girlfriend” checking out who he wanted to hire and photographing them.
It gets worse – like, Marsan has sent Hitler jokes and worse racist anti-Black memes in a text thread with other managers. Alleged sexual assault of a young girl who lives in a Manhattan apartment rented by Brandy Melville. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-described liberal, using his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as storage. The brand has doubled down on its less subtle eating disorder messaging (“one size fits all The most”, it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of size options), especially in its highly profitable expansion into China.
Worse, too, as the company pursues a business model, like other fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M, that prioritizes whimsy and zeitgeist over quality, ditching landfills and exploiting cheap human labor . Orner and her team visit Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of many companies that produce fast-moving garments in sweatshops using immigrant labor under the “made in Italy” label, and to Accra, Ghana , a country whose trade deals strongly with western countries. – enable him to accept loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a brand’s “made in Italy” tag is usually buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee-deep in a tub of used clothes. “It doesn’t really bother me,” Orner said, but the huge amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra – one worker there suspects the sea floor around the city is now completely covered in clothes – was among the “worst” things she had ever seen. . “We are sending them our trash and destroying their country,” she said. “They are things they neither want nor need.”
Although it’s nominally about a certain buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film will give more of a call to rethink one’s relationship with fashion. The film offers the standard small prescriptions in a sustainable way: buy natural and second-hand fibers, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of landfills as much as possible. But also, “none of that will fix anything”, Orner said. “There are too many clothes on the planet. We overproduce. We make 100bn clothes produced annually in the world. And most of those are in landfill within the first year.”
Brandy Hellville is determined to keep the vision trained on the big picture, if not particularly optimistic about the brand’s potential to change or turn fashion waste. Ever since the Business Insider article sparked a social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has had soldiers on. The management, from Marsan down, said nothing. Unlike the case with Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and backlash for discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgment, no apology, no brand change. No admission, but more clothes. Brandy Melville’s annual sales were $212.5m in 2023, up from $169.6m in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a very Trumpian thing to do,” Orner said. “What we have to do is stand up and hold on, keep the story going, and not let them get away with getting the better of us.
“The consumers who don’t buy the product have the power,” she said. “And if we don’t let them quit, we have all the power. They’re just making stupid clothes.”
