Still from Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion | Eva Orner / © HBO Max
“From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system” says Chloe Asaam, who represents the Or Foundation. She’s speaking in Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, an HBO documentary that explores the toxicity of the international brand Brandy Melville.
The documentary, directed by Academy and Emmy award–winner Eva Orner, is inspired by journalist Kate Taylor’s investigative reporting on the brand, published in 2022, in which she discovered the dark secrets that were kept by Brandy Melville about their business practices and how they treat their workers—namely a revelation about a sexual assault case involving a 21-year-old employee. Orner’s film features interviews with both former executives and young girls that have worked for the brand in a variety of capacities, while also consulting activists and professionals within the fashion industry. These testimonies build a picture of a brand with few ethics outside the value it places on its own aesthetic.
Brandy Melville is a multinational fast fashion company that was first based in Italy. In the United States, it gained significant traction once it introduced a “California girl” style and flooded the social media of America’s “it girls.” The brand is known for producing trendy clothes that are affordable, but here’s the kicker: they have a “one size fits all” business model.
A former associate of the brand states that while this idea may seem like it could cost the business a lot of customers, since its clothes would fit fewer customers, the company’s CEO Stephan Marsan’s philosophy was that the one-size-fits-all model would, paradoxically, keep the brand exclusive. And this is exactly what makes the brand desirable to young, naive teenage girls; it preys on their insecurities and makes them feel valuable only if they are able to make Brandy Melville’s single size fit them beautifully.
Brandy Melville girls are not just girls that shop at the store; they are girls who embody the specific lifestyle of a young, cool, privileged girl. In order to make this aesthetic seem genuine and attainable, Brandy Melville reposts photos from social media of its satisfied customers—free marketing for the brand, and also a way of publicizing the lucky girls, as if looking good in the brand was an honorable achievement.
“I was very shocked and excited that I fit in something in the store,” Kaitlyn Rutledge, a Parsons fashion studies student, told me. Brandy Melville thrives on rewarding girls that fit their ideal image—skinny, blonde white girls. In fact, Marsan would handpick the girls that he wanted to replicate the company’s clientele, and he would promote them to “product research girls,” who burnish the style of the brand while accompanying the brand’s executives on extravagant business trips.
“Product research girls” are girls who work in the store whose look is valued by the brand’s executives—so much so that they want these select individuals to shape the upcoming products released by the company. The knowledge that they might be picked as “product research girls” further incentivizes young customers to maintain and represent what is known to be the Brandy Melville girl look. Additionally, the company profits from the creative labor done by these girls on these research trips and in return, the girls receive a rise in their social status within the company. This is exactly the type of hierarchical structure that gives the company its appeal among young and insecure girls.
“If you’re white, you had to be in sight”: as the HBO documentary shows, this was a rule within the Brandy Melville retail stores. Skinny white girls were to be the face of the brand, while everyone else was forced to work jobs in the back, if they were lucky enough to be employed. The documentary explains, “Fashion has been built on these very racist, colonial structures and also on the backs of women, mostly women of color.”
Workers in Ghana alone receive 15 million used Brandy Melville garments each week, to sort through and recycle for sale if possible, and the documentary shows clips of women in Accra, Ghana, carrying 150 pounds of clothing over their heads. Aside from the obvious physical harm of this labor, the mere fact that there is this much waste to even be transported speaks to an abundance of other consequences, including those to the environment. As a result of the cheap quality of fast-fashion pieces, about 40 percent of these used garments end up in the waste stream. But in typical Brandy Melville fashion, this too is out of sight, out of mind.
In the HBO documentary, many of Brandy Melville’s young employees and consumers express a lack of awareness about just how much waste Brandy Melville produces. As Rutledge, the Parsons student, explains: “I was drawn to the brand because it was cheap and I was a student.” The naivety and vulnerability of its demographic allows Brandy Melville to persist without any real pushback.
After Brandy Melville was initially exposed in the article by Taylor, the brand did not put out any form of apology or announce a commitment to changing the unethical practices they were accused of. The only real change in the brand’s typical business practice was to turn off the comment feature on their Instagram feed.
Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion emphasizes the blatant toxic and unethical business practices of the company—problems emblematic of the fashion industry at large. This documentary itself is not going to bring fast fashion to a halt. It does, however, tap into our emotions, from the visual representations of the detrimental impact this has on the atmosphere in Ghana, to the subtle, and not-so-subtle, ways that we fall victim to the fashion industry’s discriminatory ideals. Seen in this light, the Brandy Melville business model starts to seem like a calculated and personal attack on our vulnerability. So far, the brand has not lost any sales; actually, they’ve continued to expand. And outside the Fifth Avenue store just a few blocks from The New School, there is still a long line of young girls desperately waiting to join the cult of Brandy Melville. Perhaps they haven’t seen the HBO documentary, or heard about any of the bad publicity. Perhaps it’s because these insecure teenagers still feel compelled to see if they, too, are a Brandy Melville kind of girl.
