What’s the real cost of strong fashion? The disturbing HBO documentary about Max, which examines the numerous controversy involving the well-known fast fashion brand, Brandy Melville, is at the center of Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion. The clothing company has grown and maintained a cult following of young girls who adored its picturesque, feminine products, its comparatively affordable price points, and star fans since the 1980s. But, Brandy Melville and its CEO, Stephan Marsan, who are notorious for their racial discrimination and sexual abuse, have addressed a number of troubling problems with the company’s widespread popularity.
In the film, director Eva Orner makes the case that Brandy Melville, a product associated with a very particular type of properly presented childhood, has built its success, like many other rapid fashion brands, on many levels of exploitation—from the teenage girls it courts and employs to the Chinese immigrant staffers sewing its clothes in sweatshops in Prato, Italy. The film includes perspectives from journalists like Kate Taylor, whose 2021 analysis for Insider into Brandy Melville revealed overt racism and sexual abuse as well as interviews with former business employees and two former company executives.
What information about Brandy Hellville and The Cult of Fast Fashion is essential to understand.
How Brandy Melville became so popular
Brandy Melville was founded in Italy in the’ 80s by Silvio Marsan and his son, Stephan, now the brand’s CEO. While some might assume that its name refers to a person, the store’s moniker is actually based on a fictional story created by the company about an American girl, Brandy, who falls in love in Italy with an Englishman, Melville. The company gained a lot of popularity when it opened its first retail location in the United States in 2009, choosing a neighborhood in Los Angeles that was ideal for stoking a younger clientele: the Westwood neighborhood, close to the UCLA campus, where their flirtatious, California girl clothing became popular with American teenagers. The brand has 94 locations worldwide, including 36 stores in the U.S., in the decade and a half since Brandy Melville began selling in the U.S.
The brand’s social media presence helped to increase its appeal to teenage girls. It first adapted the influencer marketing model and capitalized on the content the teenage girls were posting about the clothing on Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok to expand its customer base. On its own Instagram account, which currently has over 3 million followers, Brandy Melville frequently reposted images of customers wearing its clothing. In turn, this prompted young girls to tag the brand and post themselves in photos that might be shared, which would free up advertising for the company. Famous people like Kaia Gerber and influential women like her were frequently given free clothing to wear and share. But when it came to who they featured on their social accounts, Brandy Melville seemingly had a narrow vision, they often selected girls that fit a certain aesthetic—young, thin and white, often blonde and usually with long hair.
Why Brandy Melville has a ‘one size fits most’ approach
Brandy Melville is renowned for its “one size fits most” sizing philosophy. The retailer once provided more conventional sizing, but the majority of their clothing has long been only offered in one comparatively small size, about a U.S. extra small or small. According to a former Brandy Melville executive interviewed anonymously in the documentary, this tactic was an explicit part of the company’s business model, as a way to keep the brand “exclusive” and associated with a specific ( and very thin ) physical aesthetic.
Brandy Melville’s “one size fits most” sizing policy negatively affected both customers and employees. Social media posts in the documentary depict customers complaining about not fitting into Brandy Melville clothing and making plans to lose weight to fit into the store’s small outfits. Former employees who made the documentary claimed to struggle with eating disorders and maintaining a healthy body image while working in the stores and felt pressured to fit into the brand’s clothing. Employees were required to send daily, full-body photos of their work outfits to Marsan, who allegedly fired employees whose looks he didn’t like.
Marsan is not interviewed in the documentary, and Brandy Melville did not comment.
Brandy Melville fostered a toxic work environment
Former Brandy Melville employees claimed in the documentary that the company engaged in unfair employment practices. The employees said the company often recruited young, thin, white women, who were sometimes even shopping as customers, to work in their stores. In the New York flagship store, where Marsan had an office with a view over the sales floor, he had a light installed in the register that he would flash when a shopper was coming in for a meeting.
Employees who were hired claimed to be required to send full body photos of their outfits to Marsan, who kept them in a folder on his phone. Some also claimed to be asked to send photos of their chest and feet.
Over the years, the business has been the subject of two lawsuits as a result of serious racism allegations. One complaint was made by a former executive, who claims the company shut down his Brandy Melville store in Toronto because its target group was primarily people of color. Across the company, racism was embedded in the store’s logistics, according to some former employees, white staffers were tasked with working the sales floor, while non- white employees were assigned to work behind the register or in the stockroom.
Former employees claimed that exclusive treatment was given to favorite staffers who frequently matched the “Brandy” aesthetic when they were invited on extravagant production and development trips to China and Italy. Some received access to a New York apartment as well as car services. Taylor claimed in the documentary that a 21-year-old staffer who was staying in the apartment reported being sexually assaulted by a middle-aged Italian man who was unchainedly also staying in the apartment while she was researching her 2021 Insider exposé.
What to know about Brandy Melville’s controversial CEO, Stephan Marsan
Little is known about Marsan, who basically has no online profile. A former Brandy Melville store owner who was interviewed for the documentary and for Taylor’s 2021 Insider interview said that Marsan and other senior executives at the company were participants in a group discussion called” Brandy Melville gags,” in which racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic jokes and memes, as well as sexually explicit photos, were exchanged. Additionally, the store owner claimed that Marsan was a vocal supporter of Trump and that he made fun of the young women who were Bernie Sanders supporters. According to the store owner, Marsan’s political views were fueled by his hatred of taxes and his self- identification as a libertarian—an ideology he believed in so deeply, that he named a sub- brand of Brandy Melville, John Galt, after the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a book he sometimes used in the decor of the stores and gifted to employees.
It’s difficult to understand Marsan’s overall finances because Brandy Melville’s trademark is owned by a Swiss company while Brandy Melville’s trademark is owned by a different shell company. Brandy Melville has also come under fire for allegedly stealing designs from other clothing companies and independent designers, just like other fast fashion companies. Former employees said in the documentary that sometimes leadership would ask what kind of clothing they were wearing so they could wear it for Brandy Melville.
How Brandy Melville draws attention to the issues brought on by fast fashion
Brandy Melville is an illustration of the larger issue of fast fashion and its detrimental effects on the environment and human rights in the documentary. It makes reference to the brand’s rapid production cycle, which is fueled by rapidly changing trends, as well as its relative cheapness, as factors that may contribute to clothing waste, which has become a problem in recent years as fast fashion has dominated the garment industry. The emphasis on affordable, quickly produced, and trend-driven clothing frequently results in poor quality, which causes consumers to quickly throw their clothes away. Meanwhile, marketing trends like influencer gifting or shopping hauls, key tenets to Brandy Melville’s success, also encourage rapid consumption and disposal.
The documentary makes the case that Brandy Melville’s store employees are exploited similarly to those who make their clothes. The cheap and quick production of their trendy clothing is made possible by the efforts of Chinese immigrants at their Prato, Italy factory, which is known for its high-quality textile production and cases of sweatshop exploitation in its numerous factories. By looking at the landfills in Ghana, where textile waste from the west is polluting its bodies of water, which has grown rapidly since fast fashion has become the most popular fashion style, the documentary also makes light of the human cost of fast fashion.