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 called Brandy and an Englishman called Melville who falls in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large segment of Gen Z, very online and since inundated with images of very thin celebrities like Bella Hadid . As one former store employee puts it in a new HBO documentary about the brand: Brandy Melville was for the rather plain, but very trend-conscious girl.
Related: ‘Discrimination was their brand’: How Abercrombie & Fitch went out of fashion
Over the past fifteen years, the brand has built a massive following through Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok posts by and by teenage girls that channel a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits that accentuate pre-adult metabolism, exposed midriffs that look so tight they hug seem to beg for a measuring tape, long hair flowing happily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all,” where that size was small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phones: organically popular, ubiquitous, and a reinforcement of existing, retrograde ideas of what is cool and popular. A divisive status symbol for razor-thin celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner, 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 this week at SXSW and HBO, expands on a 2021 expose from Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on the company’s dark, downright creepy management — and not just the ‘opaque minefield’ of ‘sustainable’ fashion, as director Eva Orner told the Guardian, but accusations of discrimination, ‘pedo energy’ and sexual assault by the company’s leadership.
The 91-minute film analyzes the brand’s appeal to young, mainly white girls; the company’s exploitative and manipulative behavior, as evidenced 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 of second-hand clothing dumped by Western countries. Orner and her team spoke to hundreds of former employees, although most did not want to appear on camera for fear of retaliation or reduced future employment opportunities. “It’s a very, very strange and ugly worldview of that company,” she said.
Unlike most fashion brands, Brandy Melville has no public CEO, mission statement or top-down brand personality. 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 virtually no internet presence and exactly two Google image results. “How do you run this company that exists all over the world – there are over a hundred stores – that is all over the internet, on social media, and this guy has never done an interview? He does not exist. And that is very purposeful and traditional,” says Orner. It is not surprising that Marsan refused to participate in the film.
According to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were recruited into the store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with eating disorders while representing the brand, Marsan was a suspicious, vengeful presence. Shop assistants, mostly girls around the age of 16, had to pose every morning for their ‘daily photo’ – photos of their outfits, for ‘brand research’, texted to and saved by Marsan. (Brand research, as some note, usually amounted to blatantly ripping off their clothes as cheaply and as quickly as possible, resulting in several lawsuits.) Marsan reportedly preferred skinny redheads, liked Asian girls and “didn’t want to a lot of black people’. ,” said an anonymous former assistant.
A former employee who has sued the company for wrongful termination says he was told to fire girls if they were overweight or black. “If you’re white, you had to be visible,” recalls a black employee who, like most people of color, was demoted to the warehouse. Another former employee of the New York flagship store remembers how Marsan installed a button on the cash register that he would flash when he saw a “Brandy girl” checking out who he wanted to hire and photograph.
It gets worse – as in Hitler jokes and anti-black racist memes worse, sent by Marsan in a text message conversation with other managers. An alleged sexual assault of a young girl living in Brandy Melville’s rented Manhattan apartment. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-proclaimed libertarian, used his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as store props. The brand is doubling down on the not-so-subtle message about eating disorders (“one size fits most”, it was renamed when customers complained about the lack of size options), especially during its highly profitable expansion into China.
Even worse is the company’s persistent 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 many companies producing fast-paced clothing in sweatshops made by immigrant workers under the “made in Italy” label, and to Accra, Ghana, a country that trades with Western countries. strongly encourage the acceptance of loads of Western clothing waste. To drive home the point: a Brandy-typical ‘made in Italy’ label, buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee-deep in the tangle of discarded clothing. “There’s not much that shocks me,” says Orner, but the enormous amount of Western clothing waste dumped in Accra – a worker there suspects the seabed around the city is now completely covered in clothes – was one of the “worst” things that she has ever seen. . “We send them our waste and destroy their land,” she said. “These are things they don’t want or need.”
Although nominally about a particular buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film offers a broader call to rethink your relationship with fashion. The film offers the standard little prescriptions for sustainable fashion: buy natural fibers and secondhand, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of the landfill for as long as possible. But also that “none of this is going to solve anything,” Orner said. “There are too many clothes on the planet. We produce too much. We make 100 billion garments produced worldwide every year. And most of them end up in the landfill within the first year.”
Brandy Hellville is committed to keeping the vision focused on the bigger picture, but isn’t particularly optimistic about the brand’s potential for change, nor about turning the tide of fashion waste. Since the Business Insider article sparked social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has moved on. Management, from Marsan onwards, said nothing. Unlike Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and response to discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgment, no apology, no rebranding. No entry, just more clothes. Brandy Melville’s annual revenue reached $212.5 million in 2023, up from $169.6 million in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a very Trumpian thing to do,” Orner said. “What we have to do is get up and keep going, keep the story going and not let them get away with outsmarting us.”
“The power is in the consumers who don’t buy the product,” she added. “And if we don’t let them get away with it, we have all the power. They just make stupid clothes.”