By now, it is an indisputable and well known that fast fashion is an unnatural abomination of capitalism, built on the backs of sweatshops from the hollowed corpse of our planet’s already-scarce resources and sustained by an unhealthy level of social media-driven consumerism for the sole purpose of providing a company’s multimillionaire CEO with yet another newer, slightly nicer yacht.
Brandy Melville is no different. Through the veneer of a more traditional Zara-Hollister-H&Mesque clothing store, the company has tended to avoid directly addressing the connotations of its business model in the eyes of the public. And its facade probably would have lasted longer if the Brandy Hellville documentary, released this past spring and directed by Eva Orner, specifically didn’t come out to shed light on the situation in a more widespread format.
For my part, I’ve never shopped at Brandy Melville or its similarly aestheticized counterparts, but I can certainly see the appeal. Despite being founded in Italy, the company’s branding, at least in the 2010s, was perfect to appeal to the popular crowd of California’s teen girl demographic. The tall, skinny and blonde (usually white) surfer girls captured in a tumblr-esque authentic-feeling pose, skinny jeans and long flowing hair. The marketing ads give off a distinct feeling of a teen girl’s Instagram photos from 2014 that she took with her friends.
However, even the act of pursuing the ideal of thinness and whiteness comes with some less-than-savory connotations. The “one size fits all” controversy was a staple of Brandy Melville’s 2010s public image — even to this day the brand offers only one size on all its clothes, equivalent to an extra small or small at other clothing brands.
As emphasized in the documentary, the trend of young girls starving themselves in order to fit into Brandy Melville clothes clearly shows the harmful effects of promoting such standards to a young and impressionable demographic.
Racial tensions also formed a point of controversy as a result of this strict brand image, as exposed by the documentary. POC girls working in Brandy Melville stores have reported more often than not being assigned to work in the backroom while their white counterparts speak with the customers.
Additionally, the company’s CEO, Stephen Marsan, has faced numerous serious allegations — as explained in “Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion” — of racist comments, including one that he wanted to close one store location because it was frequented by more black people than white people.
The owners of Brandy Mellvile have also been notoriously exposed for participating in a group chat in which they brazenly made racist, anti-semitic and insensitive jokes, most famously including the sharing of a photograph of Marsan dressed as Adolf Hitler.
The most audacious incident including Brandy Melville’s mistreatment of workers revealed by the documentary was the recounting of an incident in which a 21-year-old immigrant employee of Brandy Melville was staying at the “Brandy apartment” in SoHo, Manhattan. While on a visa, she arrived to find that an older Italian man with connections to the company leads was also unexpectedly staying at the apartment. She reports going out to drink with him before being allegedly drugged and waking up naked in bed with him. She reported the rape to a nearby hospital but not to the police, for fear of losing her job and being deported.
Brandy Melville’s corruption runs deeper than just the exploitation of its workers and the reinforcement of harmful beauty standards on its audience. The very products the brand sells are allegedly made on the backs of sweatshops. While the “Made in Italy” tag on all its branded clothes holds the association of luxury in America, as the documentary points out it’s likely that Brandy Melville outsources its clothes from Prato, a poor area of Italy made almost entirely of textile workers who are often underpaid and forced to work in poor conditions.
The environmental cost of Brandy Melville’s business practices is also nothing to scoff at. In order to limit the cost of clothing, companies often rely on synthetic fibers like polyester and nylon, which take years to biodegrade in landfills and have a profoundly negative impact on the environment through their shedding of microplastics.
That isn’t to mention the fact that their obscene levels of production requires the industry to use nearly 342 million tons of oil per year. and about 700 gallons of water to create a single shirt. The textile-dying is the second largest source of water pollution, as the leftover chemicals in the water are often just dumped back into rivers. The clothes themselves are also often dumped when their owners get bored and want to move onto the next microtrend cycle or when the clothes inevitably break from being made from poor quality materials, as stated by the documentary.
Most of this isn’t new in the fast fashion industry. We’ve seen the insides of SHEIN’s sweatshops, we shame Temu on X for their awful business practices, and yet still we go on TikTok and see thousands of influencers recording their hauls from cheap fast-fashion-esque stores that everyone knows will be thrown out within weeks.
The internet has a remarkable ability to catch onto injustices and call people out occasionally, but as I’ve observed, it unfortunately seems as though it is also perpetually cursed with short-term memory loss, completely unable to keep calling those same people out and boycott their products for more than a few weeks.
While we should still definitely remind each other to not let the offenders slip back into their habits of exploitation and bigotry, perhaps an equally valid goal is to work on fundamentally dismantling consumerism’s deathgrip over our culture.
Why are clothes more important to us than not perpetuating exploitation? Why does going viral on the internet matter so much that it takes precedence over advocating for our planet, which is actively being strangled by the companies we support?
In truth, TikTok’s de-influencing trend of reminding audiences that they DO NOT NEED to buy the products marketed to them by other influencers has brought me some of the most hope for the (albeit slow) death of this corrupt industry. Because the constant chasing of a consumer ideal only ever benefits the rich who get to pedal all their terrible business practices.
