If you havenât heard of Brandy Melville, you probably donât have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand â confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome â is synonymous with a certain large swath of gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic but very trend-aware girl.
Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain 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, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brandâs pieces sold for less than $40, in âone size fits allâ, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone â organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of whatâs cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also 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 a 2021 exposé by Business Insiderâs Kate Taylor on the companyâs murky, outright creepy management â not just the âopaque minefieldâ of âsustainableâ fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but allegations of discrimination, âpedo energyâ 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 didnât want to go on camera for fear of retribution or diminished future job opportunities. âItâs a very, very odd and ugly worldview coming from that company,â 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; the name is owned by a Swiss company. The companyâs structure is âdesigned to be not traceableâ, said Orner. In her reporting, Taylor identified the CEO as an Italian man named Stephan Marsan, a shadowy figure with almost no internet presence and precisely two Google image results. âHow do you run this business thatâs all around the world â there are over a hundred stores â that is all over the internet, all over social media, and this guy has never done an interview? He doesnât exist. And thatâs very purposeful and crafted,â said Orner. Marsan, unsurprisingly, declined to participate in the film.
According to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were recruited in-store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with an eating disorder while representing the brand, Marsan was a suspicious, vindictive presence. Shop employees, usually girls around the age of 16, had to pose for their âdaily photographâ every morning â photos of their outfits, for âbrand researchâ, 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 âdidnât want a lot of Black peopleâ, 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. âIf youâre white, you had to be in sight,â recalls one Black employee relegated, as most people of color were, to the stock room. Another former employee in the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan installed a button at the register, which he would flash if he spotted a âBrandy girlâ checking out whom he wanted hired and photographed.
It gets worse â as in, Hitler jokes and anti-Black racist memes worse, sent by Marsan in a text thread with other managers. An alleged sexual assault of a young girl living in the Brandy Melville-rented Manhattan apartment. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-described libertarian, using his personal copies of Ayn Randâs Atlas Shrugged as store props. The brandâs doubling down on its not-so-subtle eating disorder messaging (âone size fits mostâ, it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of sizing options), especially in its very profitable expansion into China.
Worse, too, in the companyâs 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 visit Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of several companies to produce quick garments in sweatshops using immigrant labor under the âmade in Italyâ label, and to Accra, Ghana, a country whose trade deals with western countries strong-arm it into accepting loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a Brandy-typical âmade in Italyâ tag buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee-deep in tangles of discarded clothes. âNot a lot shocks me,â said Orner, but the sheer amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra â one worker there suspects the sea floor around the city is now completely covered in clothes â was among the âworstâ things sheâs ever seen. âWe are sending them our trash and destroying their country,â she said. âItâs things they do not want or need.â
Though nominally about a certain buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film offers a larger call to rethink oneâs 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 ânone of thatâs going to fix anythingâ, said Orner. âThere are too many clothes on the planet. We overproduce. We make 100bn garments that are produced annually globally. And most of those are in landfill within the first year.â
Brandy Hellville is resolute on keeping the vision trained on the bigger picture, if not particularly optimistic on either the brandâs possibility for change nor turning the tide of fashion waste. Since the Business Insider article triggered social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has soldiered on. 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. âItâs a very Trumpian thing to do,â said Orner. âWhat we need to do is stand up and keep, keep the story going, and not let them get away with it by outsmarting us.
âThe powerâs in the consumers who donât buy the product,â she added. âAnd if we donât let them get away with it, we have all the power. Theyâre just making stupid clothing.â