Brandy Melville is a fashion brand that has been adopted by teenagers who want to project an aesthetic of casual fun. But behind its naturally cool exterior is a culture of racism, sexism and abuse under the watchful eye of an elusive CEO. The new documentary Brandy Hellville: the cult of fast fashion, aired this week on Maxreveals the origins of the brand that caters to skinny white girls with money to burn, and the way the exploitation of the company’s own workers mirrors the exploitation of those left behind to clean up the mess left by fast fashion.
BRANDY HELLVILLE: THE CULT OF FAST FASHION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: A disclaimer appears on the screen that reads: “Due to ongoing litigation, two former associates of Brandy Melville requested that their identities be withheld. They are played by actors who read the transcripts of their interviews.” The first interviewee then details how she first heard about Brandy Melville, the fast fashion brand that gained widespread popularity in the 2010s among teenagers, and details the cultural cache of owning clothing and jewelry from the brand.
The essence: If you’re not a young woman from Generation Z, chances are you don’t know the fashion brand Brandy Melville, and you’d be forgiven for that: you weren’t the target audience. In the 2010s, the brand exploded in popularity thanks to a massive presence on social media (mainly Instagram), promoting its line of casual and simple clothing that became very popular among teenage girls. But Brandy Melville was a brand shrouded in mystery and controversy from the beginning. First, there was non-inclusive sizing: each garment produced for the brand is only available in one size small. There was also the “unwritten agreement” that the store employees were primarily young, thin, beautiful white girls. Then there was the fact that all of its stores were run by different shell companies, and that its current CEO, a man named Stephan Marsan, was almost impossible to identify or find online. Marsan was an enigma, but he also managed to fuel not only a culture that promoted unrealistic standards of beauty, but one that fostered a culture of racism, anti-Semitism, and, as a devotee of Ayn Rand, he was known for pushing his own fight against taxes. libertarian views on his young employees.
As the brand’s popularity exploded, it produced thousands of new garments weekly, something that is common among fast fashion brands such as Zara, H&M and Shein. The documentary offers a shocking look at a second-hand market in Accra, Ghana, the largest of its kind in the world, which receives millions of pieces of discarded fast fashion clothing each week, far more than anyone in the world receives. the country needs. If you thought you were being nice by throwing your old clothes into one of those metal donation bins, what you were really doing was making your clothes a problem for Ghana, because they don’t want the low-quality waste of the Western world.
In addition to revealing where all of Brandy Melville’s discarded clothes end up, the film reveals the underworld of fast fashion sweatshops located precisely in Italy. Brandy Melville, even though its name sounds American, is an Italian company and proudly labels all of its clothing as “Made in Italy,” but the big reveal here is that there is a major clothing production center in Italy, in a city called Prato. , where thousands of Chinese immigrants have moved and opened fast fashion factories. The mayor of Prato speaks with some pride about how his city is an industrial center and an important source of income, while acknowledging that most of what leaves his city is disposable garbage and that many of the workers are treated like “slaves” (their word) who emigrated there, but work under the optics of Italian haute couture.
The focus alternates between the lurid and possibly criminal abuse of the “Brandy girls” employed by the company and the destructive nature of fast fashion, and the documentary is a disheartening look at a brand that is beloved despite those things.
What shows will it remind you of? Brandy Hellville combines aspects of The true costan exhibition of the fast fashion industry, with Hot: The rise and fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, the Netflix documentary about another brand whose racist and dimensionist labor practices led to its downfall. The thing is, Brandy Melville has not fallen out of favor in the public eye and, in fact, she is as strong as ever.
Our opinion: I found a thread on Reddit populated almost exclusively by Brandy Melville devotees denouncing this documentary (before it even came out), with many fans defending Brandy Melville and claiming that they aren’t as bad as brands like Shein and Temu when it comes to disposable fashion and had no plans to stop shopping there. But the overall damage caused by fast fashion as an industry is only half of it; I can’t help but think that perhaps the film’s subtitle does it a disservice because this film is also the story of a brand marketed to (and willing to exploit) young women and girls, by a mysterious man with a toxic agenda.
The film attempts to make a connection between colonialism and the exploitation of marginalized people at the heart of fast fashion, with capitalism and the exploitation of young employees at the heart of the Brandy Melville brand. Ultimately, it feels like it could have been two separate films, one focusing on the hell of working at Brandy Melville and another exposing fast fashion for what it is.
However, stepping away from the film, it’s not difficult to understand that what unites the two stories is that, for all our collective awareness of environmental, social and political injustice and harm, we are all willing to put up with that. for a shiny new shirt or necklace. We know fast fashion is bad, but as long as a few people at the top benefit from it and promote it to the hungry masses, it will never go away. And now, thanks to this movie, we know that Brandy Melville is also a little evil, that she relies on a business model that rarely benefits her workers and that she is downright hostile toward anyone who doesn’t want her brand used, all because the profit of one man. . We know all these things and yet we are doing nothing about it.
Parting Shot: “There are a lot of people who think this is too difficult to solve, and it simply isn’t,” says Claire Bergkamp, CEO of Textile Exchange, as we watch dozens of garments being washed on a beach in Ghana. “Solutions exist, but for me, the best thing we can do now is simply buy less.”
Memorable dialogue: “From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we are all being exploited by the same system,” explains Chloe Asaam, an activist at The Or Foundation, and it is a stark realization that many of those exploited by fashion are also its audience. target: women. When it comes to fashion in general, women are the main cotton pickers, seamstresses, traders and, in Ghana, those who carry loads of second-hand clothes to the market on their heads; On a global scale, in dozens of countries, we are all being harmed by this system.
Our call: STREAM IT! This film is essentially about two vicious sides of the fashion industry and the one brand that represents the worst of both. Although many of us know deep down that fast fashion is bad news, the film puts a face to its victims and clearly illustrates how wasteful and destructive it is. While there is no easy solution to fast fashion, perhaps after learning about the deeply disturbing practices of the Brandy Melville company, we can collectively remove at least this brand from that scene.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show. Chain reaction.
