Brandy Melville, one of the most popular teenage clothing brands, remains one of the industry’s most controversial. Although recognized for its trendy crop tops and adorable pajama sets, Brandy is notorious for its unapologetically discriminatory marketing strategies. However, HBO’s new documentary “Brandy Hellville: The Cult of Fast Fashion” released on April 8, exposes more of the controversies buried deep under the deceptive brand.
One of Brandy’s most well-known controversies is their “one-size-fits-all” sizing, ranging from a US size 0 to 2. Essentially hinging the company around size exclusivity, Brandy was criticized for perpetuating an unrealistic ideal of the average teenage girl, implying that only a certain body type could embody the elusive Brandy Melville aesthetic. Social media began to consider being able to fit into Brandy’s apparel more appealing to the clothes themselves.
However, the one-size-fits-all ‘cult-culture’ is just the tip of the Brandy Melville9o, iceberg. Behind the scenes, Brandy’s success results from a brilliantly crafted marketing dynamic that utilized racially charged ideals to its advantage, as the documentary reveals.
A former Brandy employee, known as Kali, exposes the racist inner workings of the average Brandy store. She shares her experience on how she and other minority Brandy employees were either pushed to the stock rooms or behind the registrars while the blonde white girls were in charge of greeting and speaking to guests.
“There were no white people working in the stock rooms. If you were white, you had to be in sight,” said Kali.
Other accounts of Brandy’s work environment also mentioned how all Brandy girls were forced to take daily “store-style shots” — essentially a full body picture of their outfits which managers would send directly to the founder and owner of Brandy, Stephan Marsan.
Apart from Brandy’s internal flaws, HBO’s documentary exposed its issues with sustainability as well. Having been founded in Italy, Brandy’s recognition isn’t as authentic as some consumers think: Brandy’s infamous “Made in Italy” tags are a “luxurious” disguise for multiple mass-production factories run by illegally employed workers in what is known as the fast fashion textile capital of the world, Prato, Italy.
Fast fashion feeds into the short-lived attention spans of teen girl consumers that have been reduced to trends, resulting in mass amounts of waste that are never truly taken care of. The documentary highlights some communities struck by the impacts of Brandy’s fast fashion waste, such as Ghana.
“Ghana is like the dumping grounds for American and European fast fashion, we have deals with countries in Africa to take the clothing out of our countries even though they don’t necessarily need it,” said the former fashion editor of Teen Vogue, Alyssa Hardy.
After decades of getting away with feeding into the worst intentions of a teenage girl and contributing to what some may call the largest environmental problems of our time, Brandy Melville’s controversies beneath its basic uptown California girl aesthetic are finally coming to light. However, action needs to be taken against these cruel claims – starting with consumers reevaluating what elitist ideology is being promoted when purchasing the latest Brandy PJ set.
