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‘Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion’: 5 Takeaways

Former employees of the brand, a Gen Z fashion favorite, recount race and size discrimination in a new documentary on HBO.

By Callie Holtermann

The clothing store Brandy Melville is known for selling diminutive, single-size pieces popular among Gen Z: linen short shorts, heart-print camisoles and sweatshirts printed with the word “Malibu.”

Behind its Cali-girl aesthetic is a business that mistreats teenage employees and cashes in on young women’s insecurities, according to “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” a documentary released on Tuesday on HBO.

The documentary intersperses former employees’ accounts of racism and size discrimination while working in its stores with a broader look at the labor and environmental costs of the fast-fashion industry . The filmmakers said Stephan Marsan, the company’s mysterious chief executive, did not respond to several requests for comment.

Eva Orner, the documentary’s director, said in an interview last week that it was a challenge to get former employees on camera because so many were fearful of the company. Those who were included were identified by only their first names. “I’ve done a lot of stuff in war zones, and with refugees and really life-or-death situations, and people have been more comfortable being on camera,” she said.

Ms. Orner, an Australian who won an Academy Award for the documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” had not heard of Brandy Melville before producers mentioned the company to her in 2022 as a potential subject of investigation. The more she learned, the more she was disturbed by the brand’s cultlike following among teenage girls, who see it flaunted by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.

“These are the values that are in this T-shirt: It is racism, it is antisemitism, it is exploitation,” Ms. Orner said. “I’m hoping parents watch this and are horrified.”

Here are five of the major claims made in the documentary.

The company’s business model is murky.

In some respects, Brandy Melville is similar to Zara, H&M and other retailers operating in the fast-fashion industry, which puts a premium on low-cost clothing manufactured on quick trend cycles. But its corporate structure is unusually “chaotic, messy and unclear,” Ms. Orner said.

Each Brandy Melville store is owned by a different shell company, while the trademark for Brandy Melville is owned by a Swiss company, Kate Taylor, the author of a 2021 Business Insider investigation into the company that informed much of the documentary, said in the film. And despite leading a brand that built its success in large part on Instagram, Mr. Marsan has next to no online presence.

Former Brandy Melville staff members said in the documentary that executives would sometimes ask to buy the clothes the employees were wearing so that the brand could replicate them. The company has been accused online of stealing designs from independent designers and was sued by Forever 21 for copyright infringement in 2016. (The case ended in a confidential settlement, according to court documents.)

It has stood by its ‘one size fits most’ policy.

The company offers the bulk of its clothing in just one very small size, which it describes as “one size fits most.” Mr. Marsan saw the policy as a way to keep the brand exclusive, according to former executives interviewed in the documentary, and criticism of the policy as confirmation that the strategy was working.

The film includes social media posts from customers saying they lost weight to fit into the brand’s clothing. Multiple former employees described struggling with eating disorders while working at Brandy Melville, and several said the pressure to be thin while working there affected their self-esteem.

One former employee said in the documentary that working in the store made her hate her body and feel generally insecure.

Former employees described discriminatory hiring practices.

The company went out of its way to hire thin, white women who were often recruited on the spot while shopping in its stores, employees said in the documentary. Some said they were required to take daily full-body photos that were sent to Mr. Marsan, who sometimes fired them if he did not like the way they looked.

White employees were more likely to be assigned to the sales floor, while people of color were placed in less visible roles in the stock room, according to three former employees.

Former executives of Brandy Melville filed two lawsuits containing “serious allegations of racism” that were denied by the company in preliminary court filings, said Ms. Taylor, the reporter. One of the executives said in the documentary that his store in Toronto was closed by Mr. Marsan because it was frequented by people of color.

Company executives exchanged racist and antisemitic messages in a group chat.

Senior leadership shared Hitler memes, pornographic images and racist jokes in a group chat called “Brandy Melville gags,” according to Ms. Taylor and two former executives interviewed in the documentary. One screenshot shown in the film features a skeletal woman wearing a sash that reads “Miss Auschwitz, 1943.”

Mr. Marsan, his brother, store owners and members of the company’s production team in Italy were all in the chat, according to one former store owner.

The group chat featured heavily in Ms. Taylor’s Business Insider article. “The evil genius of Brandy is that when this exposé came out, they didn’t do anything” except for briefly disable comments on their Instagram page, Ms. Orner said. “They just went on, business as usual.”

The company may reflect broader patterns of exploitation in fast fashion.

Ms. Orner argued that Brandy Melville was also a case study in the way fast fashion can exploit workers and contribute to environmental waste.

The company’s supply chain is opaque, but much of its clothing is manufactured at a factory in Prato, Italy, that employs Chinese immigrants, Ms. Orner said. Prato is home to several factories for fast-fashion companies, some of which have exploitative labor practices, Matteo Biffoni, the city’s mayor, said in the documentary. (He did not comment on whether this was true of Brandy Melville’s factory.)

The filmmakers also traveled to Ghana, where unwanted clothing items from the United States and Europe pile up in heaps and clog waterways. Brandy Melville’s business model involves churning out inexpensive, trendy items that are likely to be discarded in this way, Ms. Orner said, and shipping them out to influencers in bulk, in exchange for free promotion.

“You can’t make a film about fashion without showing the exploitation of pretty much everyone, from the workers, through to the models, through to the retailers to the consumers,” Ms. Orner said. “Everyone’s being exploited.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times. More about Callie Holtermann

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• How HBO’s <i>Brandy Hellville and The Cult of Fast Fashion</i> Reveals the Dark Side of the Brand

How HBO’s Brandy Hellville and The Cult of Fast Fashion Reveals the Dark Side of the Brand

W hat's the true cost of fast fashion ? That's the question at the heart of Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion , the shocking HBO documentary released this week on Max that investigates the many controversies surrounding popular fast fashion brand, Brandy Melville. Since the 2010s, the clothing company has developed and maintained a cult following of teenage girls who scooped up its beachy, feminine offerings and marveled at its relatively cheap price points and celebrity fans. The brand's immense popularity, however, has masked a number of troubling issues with Brandy Melville and its CEO, Stephan Marsan, from exclusionary sizing practices ( their clothing comes in just one size, about an American XS/S ) to reports of racial discrimination and sexual harassment from staffers working in their stores.

Read more : What Needs to Happen to Tackle Fashion’s Climate Impact

In the documentary, director Eva Orner makes the case that Brandy Melville, a brand associated with a very specific type of carefully presented girlhood, has built its success, like many other fast fashion brands, on multiple 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 documentary features interviews from former store employees and two former executives for the brand, as well as insights from journalists like Kate Taylor, whose 2021 investigation for Insider into Brandy Melville found not just rampant discrimination at the company, but blatant racism and sexual assault.

Here's what you need to know about the many controversies covered in Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion .

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 brand found immense popularity once it opened its first retail location in the U.S. in 2009, selecting a location perfect for tapping into a younger clientele—the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, close to the UCLA campus, where their flirty, California girl clothing became a hit with American teenagers. In the decade and a half since Brandy Melville started selling in the U.S., the chain has opened 94 locations worldwide, including 36 stores in the U.S.

The brand's popularity with teenage girls was bolstered by its social media presence. As an early adapter of the influencer marketing model, it used the content created by the teenage girls who were posting about the clothing on Tumblr, Instagram and TikTok to grow its consumer base. Brandy Melville often reposted photos of customers wearing its clothes on its own Instagram account, which currently clocks in at over 3 million followers. This, in turn, encouraged young girls to post themselves wearing the clothing and tagging the brand in the hopes their photo might get shared, creating free advertising for the company. Influencers and celebrities like Kaia Gerber were often sent free clothes to wear and post about, inspiring girls to post their own Brandy Melville clothing hauls. 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 notorious for its "one size fits most" approach to sizing. While the retailer once offered more conventional sizing, the majority of their clothing has long been only offered in one relatively 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. In the documentary, social media posts show customers lamenting about not fitting into Brandy Melville clothing, as well as plotting how to lose weight in order to fit into the store's small outfits. Former employees who appeared in the documentary said they struggled with eating disorders and having a healthy body image while working at the stores, where they felt pressured to fit into the brand's clothing. Employees were required to send daily full-body pictures of their work outfits to Marsan, who allegedly fired staffers 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

In the documentary, former Brandy Melville employees alleged the company used discriminatory practices when it came to hiring and workplace 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 overlooking the salesfloor, he had a light installed in the register that he would flash when there was a shopper that he wanted recruited.

Once hired, employees said were required to send full-body shots of their outfits to Marsan, who kept them in a folder on his phone; some alleged that they were asked to send photos of their chest and feet as well.

The company has also faced serious accusations of with racism over the years, resulting in two lawsuits. One was filed by a former executive, who claims that his Brandy Melville store in Toronto was shut down by the company because its clientele was mostly 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 also alleged that special treatment was given to favorite staffers, who often fit the "Brandy" aesthetic, were invited to go on lavish production and development trips to Italy and China. Some were also given access to car services and a New York apartment. In the documentary, Taylor said that while she was researching her 2021 Insider exposé, she found that a 21-year-old staffer who was staying in the apartment reported being sexually assaulted by a middle-aged Italian man who was unexpectedly also staying in the apartment.

What to know about Brandy Melville's controversial CEO, Stephan Marsan

Little is known about Marsan, who keeps a basically nonexistent profile online. According to a former Brandy Melville store owner interviewed in the documentary and in Taylor's 2021 Insider exposé, Marsan and other senior leadership at the company were part of a group chat called "Brandy Melville gags" where racist, homophobic and anti-semitic jokes and memes, as well as sexually explicit photos, were shared. The store owner also claimed Marsan was a vocal Trump supporter who made fun of the young women he employed 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.

Marsan's business practices are murky; while the trademark for Brandy Melville is owned by a Swiss company, each Brandy Melville store is owned by a different shell company, making it difficult to understand it's overall finances. Like other fast fashion brands, Brandy Melville has also come under fire for allegedly stealing designs from other clothing brands and independent designers. In the documentary, former staffers shared that sometimes leadership would ask what piece of clothing they were wearing so they could replicate it for Brandy Melville.

How Brandy Melville highlights the problems created by fast fashion

The documentary uses Brandy Melville as an example of the larger issue of fast fashion and its negative impact on the environment and human rights. It points to the brand's rapid production cycle, spurred by quickly shifting trends, as well as its relative cheapness, as factors that may encourage clothing waste, which has become a major issue in the years since fast fashion began dominating the garment industry. The emphasis on cheap and swiftly produced, trend-driven clothing often means sacrificing quality, prompting consumers to discard their clothes quickly. 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 the exploitation of Brandy Melville's store employees parallels the exploitation of those who produce their clothes; the cheap and fast production of their trendy clothing is made possible by the work of Chinese immigrants at their factory in Prato, Italy, a city known for its textile production for many fashion brands—and cases of sweatshop exploitation in its many factories. Likewise, the documentary also sheds light on the human cost of fast fashion by looking to the landfills in Ghana, where textile waste from the west is polluting its bodies of water, something that's increased rapidly since fast fashion became the dominant clothing model.

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The Most Messed-up Findings in the Brandy Melville Documentary

Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion , a new documentary detailing a laundry list of alarming, racist, and possibly illegal practices by Brandy Melville, is showing on HBO. The film, directed by Academy Award winner Eva Orner, centers on the reporting of Business Insider’s Kate Taylor. It features former employees and associates of the fast-fashion retailer, which became a staple among young women and girls in the U.S. in the 2010s. Throughout the documentary, sources highlight allegations of fatphobia, antisemitism, inappropriate conduct with minors, and even sexual assault, most of which lead back to Italian brand founder Stephan Marsan, who continues to serve as the brand’s CEO.

If you’re not familiar with Brandy Melville, consider yourself lucky. For those of us who experienced their one-size-fits-all mentality and obsession with a certain type of girl , it was a place riddled with toxicity. The chain was an odd manufactured oasis that sold a sort of lifestyle to those of us who were young, impressionable, and dealing with the insecurities that often accompany adolescence and young adulthood. I remember it as a Tinseltown of Tumblr paraphernalia, covered with flags and Americana décor and string lights, dotted with beachy wooden signs and staffed with thin, intentionally good-looking, blonde girls. The brand’s bread and butter were, and continue to be, sweaters that look vaguely vintage, baby tees, camisoles, and miniskirts. Many of us, filled with naïveté and hope, wished we could be Brandy girls, too — girls who lived in California and went to the beach after school and stuck their sun-streaked hair out car windows without a care in the world. Too bad a very exclusive sizing system often stood in the way.

Marsan had unspoken policies about who a Brandy girl could be, and he allegedly had illegal practices for keeping it that way. Reportedly, he preferred the white employees out on the floor and the Black and POC employees allocated to the back rooms doing stock. Marsan also allegedly had the employees, who were sometimes underage, send full-body pictures to him every time they had a shift. If he didn’t like the way they looked, he would have them fired, according to the documentary. According to Taylor, former executives and associates of Brandy Melville have filed two lawsuits against Marsan including “serious allegations of racism.” Marsan didn’t respond to the filmmaker’s request for an interview. Below, we detail some of the most seriously messed-up allegations against the brand.

Thin white employees placed at the front of the store, while Black and POC employees worked the stockroom

The filmmakers chronicle alleged habitual racism and body shaming by Marsan through their interviews with former employees and Taylor (and two lawsuits backing up their claims). It was an unspoken rule that the young women and girls hired to work at Brandy Melville were expected to look and dress a certain way, i.e., thin, white, and conventionally attractive. According to the documentary, Black and POC employees often worked in the back while white employees were given roles in the front of the store as the face of the brand. Former employees in the documentary said they were often made to feel insecure of their bodies, many of them noting they had eating disorders while working at Brandy Melville.

One former staffer said she was told she was being let go because upper management from Italy didn’t like her body type. A former vice-president said Marsan would text him and ask him to fire employees if he saw a girl whose look he didn’t like working in a store. Marsan was able to keep tabs on all of his staffers because they were reportedly required to take “staff style” photos, or full-body shots, at the beginning of every shift and send them to Marsan and his right-hand, Jessy, who ran the very popular Brandy Melville Instagram. Many of these girls having their pictures taken were underage and didn’t know where the photos were going. One former employee reported that Marsan had a file of these photos saved, and another said requests began coming in for “chest and feet” pictures. The former vice-president interviewed said management had a group chat for each store where they would receive the pictures from the girls, and if Marsan didn’t like some of them, he’d ask for their termination.

The alleged misconduct didn’t stop at employees. Even customers were asked to have their photo taken if they met Marsan’s standard of looks. He even went as far as to allegedly install buttons at cash registers that would light up, alerting the employees working that he wanted a photo taken of whoever was checking out and a job at Brandy offered to them.

A “one size fits all” sizing system, which has been rebranded into “one size fits most”

Brandy Melville is notorious for not having any sort of sizing on its clothing, which remains true even today. Its slogan used to be “one size fits all” until, after customer backlash, it was forced to change the slogan to “one size fits most.” (Which is still very untrue.) The documentary notes that Marsan allegedly liked having the one small size in stock, as it kept the store exclusive. Some of the former employees interviewed said they often had a hard time fitting into the clothes in the store, even though they were supposed to represent the ideal Brandy customer. Some employees said they struggled with disordered eating habits while employed by the brand. After Taylor’s article on the brand’s malpractices, Brandy Melville didn’t publish an apology and didn’t suffer business-wise. It continued expanding its market, particularly in China. There, the company uses, somehow, even smaller measurements on its “one size fits most” model, perpetuating the same, if not worse, standards on Chinese teenagers. Some are even participating in a viral “BM challenge,” essentially trying to lose enough weight to fit into a tiny skirt from Brandy Melville.

Dealing with young girls inappropriately

Marsan often tried to impose his politics on his younger female employees. Marsan saw himself as a libertarian and reportedly talked politics with his employees, who were typically very young and liberal. He would get mad when he discovered many of them loved Bernie Sanders. According to the documentary, Marsan would often give out copies of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, a book whose central theme includes a defense of capitalism. Marsan even went so far as to name a small private-label offshoot of Brandy Melville “John Galt” after a character in the book and displayed his name throughout the stores on signs— an odd choice for a store dedicated to selling tiny baby tees and miniskirts.

A report of a sexual assault in the “Brandy apartment”

In her research for her piece, Taylor found a reported sexual assault that happened to a 21-year-old Brandy Melville employee. At the time, the 21-year-old was on a visa in the U.S. and needed a place to stay temporarily and was offered the “Brandy apartment,” a spot in Soho, where a few select employees had access. Several former employees who stayed at the residence noted random men would appear at the home, sometimes staying the night. One such case occurred with the 21-year-old alleged victim, who, in a hospital report, said she went out with a middle-aged Italian man who was unexpectedly staying at the home, having two drinks and remembering nothing else from the night. She woke up in the Brandy apartment naked. Her hospital records stated that she was “raped by her boss and didn’t want to report it” to the police for fear of losing her job and being forced to leave the country.

A photo of the founder in a Hitler costume in a company group chat

Two former associates tell the documentary’s filmmakers about a company-wide group chat called “Brandy Melville Gags” that was often allegedly used to send racist, misogynistic, antisemitic “jokes.” One associate described the vile nature of the chat “like a bar.” A former store owner said he was “not surprised” when he saw a photo of Marsan in a Hitler costume sent to the group. Other messages included photos of Marsan allegedly folding a shirt in such a way that the letters spelled out “Hitler” and mocking Black people.

Contributing to the destruction of the environment by way of fast fashion

Brandy’s business model, which sometimes involved asking employees to tell the company where they were buying their clothes and mass-producing near-exact copies, puts it squarely within the fast-fashion complex. Its tags say “Made in Italy,” which is usually a luxury signifier to the American consumer, and Brandy’s clothes are likely made in fast-fashion factories in Prato, Italy. And even though it stocks some garments that are 100 percent cotton, employees and customers alike have made complaints about the quality of their garments, including that they snag and gap easily. The documentary details the journey of many articles of clothing within the fast-fashion ecosystem, including from Brandy Melville, that usually find their way to Acca, Ghana, home of the biggest secondhand market in the world, to be resold or remade.

Brandy Melville isn’t even a real person

This isn’t fucked up as much as it is just plain odd. The store is named after two fictional characters and one made-up story involving an American named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who meet and fall in love in Italy. Strange.

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Review: ‘Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion’ has been a long time coming

In the early 2000s, Brandy Melville gained traction because of its breezy, coquette-style clothing. Soon, the aesthetic turned into a stamp of approval used to brand the haves and the have-nots; the haves being skinny white girls and the have-nots being anyone of a minority or non-conventional body type.

HBO’s newest documentary “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” directed by Eva Orner reveals the chain’s not-so-secret problematic history — one involving racism, overconsumption, toxic work environments and even sexual abuse. With so many fundamental flaws in the company, it was impossible for Orner to fit all them into a roughly 90-minute show. Instead, she used the lived experiences of former employees to comment on larger societal issues of social media influence, irresponsible fashion consumption and environmental waste.

The film begins with clips of 2010 Youtube and Instagram influencers shopping at Brandy Melville and recording hauls. Popular names like Hannah Meloche and Summer Mckeen bring up innocent memories of purple mandala flags, velvet scrunchies and galaxy print. For me, this nostalgia quickly faded upon seeing the endless bags of clothes they were advertising. I noticed the large amount of consumption portrayed, but Orner’s approach may have been too subtle about the destructive nature of consumption culture for a more general audience. There’s no arguing Brandy Melville isn’t built on problematic ideals, but the brand is only so influential because of a much larger, more dangerous beast: social media. Given social media’s undeniable role in launching Brandy Melville’s success, I was surprised that Orner neglected to include video clips of Emma Chamberlain, a large — and perhaps the largest — promoter of the brand during this time.

Orner’s interviews only highlight social media’s ability to manipulate young women more: the conversations with former employees showed how much they prioritized their social media perception. Within the first five minutes of the film, one former employee says that if girls at her school weren’t wearing Brandy Melville they “weren’t as great as [she] was. Maybe they weren’t as pretty. Maybe there was something wrong with them.” The anecdote is only one example of the unforgiving reality of brand-related status. While clearly a superficial concern, it can do real damage to how young women perceive themselves and others.

Orner also uses anecdotal evidence as undeniable proof of Brandy Melville’s racist policies. The CEO and founder of Brandy Melville, Stephan Marsan, was known to be racist and exile workers of color to the stockroom. The only Black former employee found for the film shared that “we all knew it was not right that we were…pushed in the back out of sight,” Lee, another former employee interviewed in the film, also corroborated the racism pervading the brand’s stores, saying “there was an awareness” of these problems among employees.

Beyond Brandy Melville’s deceptively innocent storefronts is another dark reality Orner portrayed in the film — the mounds of fabric waste left on the shores of Accra, Ghana due to the brand’s production methods. Liz Ricketts with The Or Foundation, an organization dedicated to fighting corporate colonialism and promoting sustainable fashion development, said that locals call the fabric waste deliveries “Obruni Wawu, which means dead white man’s clothes,” because they assumed they came from people who died. Brandy Melville’s discarded fabrics are commonly found among the piles.

With the rise of TikTok Shop, fast-fashion brands like Shein and trends filtering through social media faster than ever, Orner leaves viewers with an urgent desire to change their relationship to fashion and social media and avoid polluting more of the world with tons of fashion-related waste.

Brandy Melville’s business model is based on consumers being ignorant and concerned about being left behind in a world where surface-level presentation is seen as determining social status. By ripping away the chain’s charming facade, Orner reveals that Brandy Melville’s customers are playing into a false narrative that obfuscates real issues of racism, social media harm and body-shaming in fast fashion.

Contact Bella Simonte at [email protected] .

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‘Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion’: The Wildest and Weirdest Takeaways

Let’s face it: When any TV show or movie begins with “Due to ongoing litigation, two former NAME OF TERRIBLE THING/PLACE/PERSON associates requested their identities be obscured,” you know it’s about to pop off. And it so does in the new HBO original documentary, Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion , director Eva Orner’s unsettling, multi-pronged look at the utterly bizarre inner workings of the clothing retailer, Brandy Melville.

There are a ton of takeaways from the film, so here are some of the wildest ones. Would you like a bag?

Brandy Melville stayed under the radar on the backs of children.

If you’re sitting there going, “What the heck is Brandy Melville?” we feel ya. Much like dry scooping, Eras tour merch, and mewing, it’s for the kids. Imagine the Stanley Cup of clothing stores. The fast-fashion brand was founded in Italy by Silvio Marsan and his son Stephan in the 1980s, with Stephan heading its expansion into the U.S. with its first store opening in Westwood, CA. in 2009.

Referred to by former customers in the film as hawking “notoriously soft” attire with bows and hearts, “young girl, beachy style,” and “Americana California” (whatever that means), the brand quickly became synonymous with status with teens at just the same time young girls started creating content on IG and TikToks, points out Business Insider ‘s investigative journalist Kate Taylor. All of those “outfit checks” and “OOTD” clips were fodder for Brandy Melville’s social-media rise. As Taylor puts it, this was the “brand that teenagers love, that most adults haven’t heard about.”

Their customers became mean girls.

“You had to have it,” recalls Cate, a customer-turned-employee from Newport Beach, California, of the most in-demand brands among her middle-school classmates. “If you didn’t have it, what were you doing?” Another admits, “I felt so cool and so accepted” after she and her friends got matching Melville necklaces in the 7th Grade, horrifyingly confessing that she used to think “the girls that didn’t wear it, maybe weren’t as great as I was? Maybe they weren’t as pretty, maybe there was something wrong with them.” The. Seventh. Grade!

Later in the doc, ex-employees discuss the copious TikToks mocking the elitist, aloof attitudes of Melville staffers and how spot-on they are. “The energy is kind of like mean-girl catty,” admits a former Soho, New York, sales rep. “You’re not supposed to be rude, but they wouldn’t fire you if you were.” Others copped to previously thinking they were better than the customers because they worked at the store, which is almost as backward as the account of an employee who didn’t know how to use a Swiffer.

The brand’s backstory is baffling.

The company takes its name from two fictional characters created by Marsan: Brandy, who is an American, and Melville, who is British. “They somehow meet in Italy and fall in love,” says Taylor (who yes, is also all of the Quiet on Set docuseries ). “I was kind of confused by this being the name because the backstory isn’t really in line even with the Brandy Melville image at this point.”

Just as confusing: figuring out the corporate hierarchy. Taylor discovered each store is owned by a shell company, but Brandy Melville itself is a trademark owned by a Swiss company. She was told by experts that it’s probably “deliberately confusing” to keep people from figuring out who is running the show. And don’t even get us started on the “Made in Italy” tags slapped on clothing that is churned out of warehouses in China.

Fast fashion is not cute.

Low cost, low quality clothing, known as “fast fashion,” has been around as far back as Chess King and Merry-Go-Round. It’s usually trendy, cheaply made and in the trash before you know it. It’s also addictive. “It needs to be seen as something we can pick up and get rid of… and you can access it so easily, ” explains former Teen Vogue fashion editor Alyssa Hardy, who states that the U.S. and Europe consume around 36 billion units of clothing a year and 85% of that is being discarded. So where does it go? Donation bins! “Most people think they actually are donating their clothes, and that is inherently a good thing,” she says. “But our systems are not in place in order to get clothing to be recycled or donated properly. So they are just ending up somewhere else.”

One of those places is Ghana, which Hardy reveals has become a dumping ground for unwanted fast fashion items. These discards are also known by a term that translates to “Dead white man’s clothes” because when they first started arriving in Ghana, it was assumed that they came from people who had passed away. “Because why else would there be so much of it?”

But now, our excess is Ghana’s existential issue. Their marketplaces are flooded with heaps of used clothes nobody wants to buy, ruining their economy and breaking the backs of women who carry massive bundles of cast-offs through the streets. The U.S. and Europe have imposed these deals upon countries to take our used clothes, and, reportedly, “if they try to fight it, they then hit them with restrictions on their duty-free status,” Hardy continues. “Or they tax them or take away grant money.”

Hiring or stalking?

Exploiting the rabid devotion teen girls had to their brand, the grown men behind Brandy Melville implemented a practice that reeked of grooming and predation. As explained several times in the doc, the very young employees were encouraged to take pictures of equally nubile customers wearing the brand for “store style” walls showcasing how various pieces could be worn together. That would be fine if the workers weren’t also directed to send those photos—OF TEEN GIRLS WHO HAD NOT SIGNED RELEASES—to the company’s adult management and owners, who would then hand-pick which ones should be approached about working at the store.

And because that’s not creepy enough, we also get the tale of Natasha, who was recruited by a total stranger on the street at the age of 15 and offered a job as one of “the 10 girls who were going to be opening a new store” in Palo Alto, California, the very next day. “When I started, I realized they had definitely found the other popular girls in our community,” she recalls.

Exploitation says, ‘What?’

In addition, BM historically used its customers’ Instagrams for its own promotion without proper compensation. Instead of enlisting professional photographers to shoot ads, the marketing of Melville was based almost entirely on reposting pics customers shot of themselves or with friends, all decked out in Melville gear. “A lot of the photographers were teenagers themselves,” notes Hardy, adding that teens taking photos of teens to post on social media created “this whole Brandy Melville extended universe.”

Of course, they took care of some customers. If a celebrity posted wearing Melville gear, you know they got something in return. Even if it was just 20 lbs. of threadbare baby tees. A former store owner, who only appeared in shadow form and claims to have had a 1o-block line outside his Toronto location on opening day, noted that model Kaia Gerber was sent “luggages full of clothes” after posting in Melville garb. Other names shown sporting the brand included Miley Cyrus, Bella Thorne, the So You Think You Can Dance Season 10 cast, Hailey Bieber, and as the shadowy store owner puts it, “the Jenner… Kyla?” But you didn’t have to be famous, just popular. “If you had a million followers,” he continued, “they would DM you and send them boxes of clothes. All you had to do is post them.”

In the film’s final third, there is a section about the secret Melville apartment in New York where an employee who needed a place to stay encountered every woman’s worst nightmare. It is, as Taylor puts it, “one of the most horrifying things I heard about while reporting on Brandy. It took something that was a job and a community for people and turned it into a place where women were exploited… and in this case, assaulted.”

Diversity is not its friend.

Having found only middling success in Europe, the brand really took off once it landed in the U.S. around 2009. According to Melissa, a former employee from Germany, things changed when Stephan Marsan shifted the focus to the “California look… a white, blonde, tall skinny surfer girl” vibe most know it for today. The “Brandy Girl” was suddenly all over the internet, with employees raving about working for the company online and garnering hundreds of thousands of views.

That ad hoc branding, however, revealed the clear bias of Brandy Melville’s image. In a montage of former employees describing what made a “Brandy Girl,” each mentions “thin,” “skinny,” or “white.” Willow, one of the recruited photographers for the brand, remembers that any model she submitted who fell outside of those strictures was refused. And Emily, a part-Asian former employee, recounted that she was asked to send in a full-body photo and all of her social media account info as part of the sales job application. She then discovered she was one of just two POCs on staff. “We were the only ones working behind the cash register,” Emily offers. “What I noticed was that the really pretty model-like white girls got to be the ones to greet customers and to like, be the face of the store.”

It was worse for Black employees. A Broadway store worker named Kali started out assigned to fitting rooms and was then eventually moved to working the stock room. She was never put on the floor and “there were no white people working in the stock room,” she says. “We all knew it was not right that we were all pushed in the back and out of sight.”

And regardless of skin color, if you weren’t wafer thin, you were out of luck. “It’s one size fits all. And that size is tiny,” says Teen Vogue ‘s Hardy, pointing out how, at a time when fashion was trying to be more inclusive, “Brandy Melville just took things in the opposite direction where it says there is one skinny perfect tiny ideal size.” And because employees were required to wear what was selling on the floor, this pressure to be small triggered eating disorders, body shame, and mental-health crises among several staffers interviewed. One who was battling an E.D. even remembers “feeling proud of myself for gaining like, five pounds… and then realizing that if I kept being healthy, I wouldn’t be able to follow company policy and keep wearing their clothes.” After a social uproar over this sizing policy, the company tweaked it to “One Size Fits Most.”

That looks familiar.

If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, Brandy Melville was next-level complimentary. Two employees offer takes on how management either paid to buy personal clothing items they were already wearing or ordered versions online to create knock-offs that wound up on the shelves weeks later. Some even bear the name of the employee whose outfit they were copying. “It was such a weird, ramshackle way to run a business,” says Taylor. “But it worked because they were able to kind of mass-produce what these cool girls were already wearing.”

And of course, there was the racism element.

While reading through a stack of lawsuits that mentioned Brandy Melville, Business Insider ‘s Kate Taylor noticed how “internal postings” and “Brandy Melville Gags,” which was a group chat of text messages between the senior leadership, came up a lot in the filings. And for good reason. “These were some of the most disturbing, vilest messages.” Amid the tasteless memes mocking 9/11, gun violence, gays, women, and people of color, was a pattern of sexism and racism that is downright chilling. Nazi imagery. Auschwitz jokes. Even a photoshopped picture of Marsan wearing Hitler’s uniform. “This isn’t something like, ‘Oh someone got overly offended by something on Twitter,'” clarifies Taylor. “It was shocking how far they were willing to go.”

Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, now streaming on Max

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Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion

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Research on the Use of Social Media to Grasp Consumers’ Psychology and Create Traffic: A Case Study of Brandy Melville

Zheran Liu *

University of Southampton, Southampton Hampshire, UK

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

In recent years, Brandy Melville (Hereinafter referred to as BM), an Italian clothing brand, has gained popularity in mainland China because of the style of its slim tops and skirts, which echos the “freedom to dress” speech that has been popular in recent years. However, BM only produces one size and only girls who are thin enough can wear it. This makes other girls feel that their bodies are not recognized. Therefore, BM is also known as the “creator of body anxiety”. Nevertheless, wearing BM has become a hint to prove one’s “good figure”, and BM’s marketing strategy also cleverly utilizes consumers’ vanity to achieve the purpose of marketing itself. So even though there are a lot of critical comments, BM is still gaining popularity from the public. The purpose of this case study is to explore how Brandy Melville grasps consumers’ psychology and controls their emotions, and how it takes advantage of hot comments and critical comments to build its own image and drive consumers to buy. Through the case study of Brandy Melville and the interview with its audience and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), this paper aims to find out how social media is used to influence and guide the public’s psychology and emotions. Results show that social media can be used to build the brand image, lead the fashion trend, echo hot topics, and create public sentiment to grasp consumer’s psychology and create traffic.

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2023

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‘A very odd and ugly worldview’: the dark side of fast fashion brand Brandy Melville

The successful clothing store is the focus of a new film that uncovers shadowy business practices and a bigger picture of environmental damage

I f you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large swath of gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic but very trend-aware girl.

Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also secretly want.

More recently, the brand has also become synonymous with the environmental scourge of fast fashion and shady, discriminatory business practices. Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, which premiered at SXSW and on HBO this week, digs deeper into a 2021 exposé by Business Insider’s Kate Taylor on the company’s murky, outright creepy management – not just the “opaque minefield” of “sustainable” fashion, as the director, Eva Orner, told the Guardian, but allegations of discrimination, “pedo energy” and sexual assault by company leadership.

The 91-minute film sifts through the appeal of the brand to young, mostly white girls; the exploitative and manipulative behavior of the company, as attested by numerous former employees; and the exploitative nature of the fast fashion industry in general, as evidenced by sweatshops in Prato, Italy, and beaches in Accra, Ghana, buried in piles upon piles of secondhand clothes dumped by western countries. Orner and her team spoke to hundreds of ex-employees, though most didn’t want to go on camera for fear of retribution or diminished future job opportunities. “It’s a very, very odd and ugly worldview coming from that company,” she said.

Unlike most fashion brands, Brandy Melville has no public CEO, no mission statement or top-down brand persona. Every store is owned by a different shell company; the name is owned by a Swiss company. The company’s structure is “designed to be not traceable”, said Orner. In her reporting, Taylor identified the CEO as an Italian man named Stephan Marsan, a shadowy figure with almost no internet presence and precisely two Google image results. “How do you run this business that’s all around the world – there are over a hundred stores – that is all over the internet, all over social media, and this guy has never done an interview? He doesn’t exist. And that’s very purposeful and crafted,” said Orner. Marsan, unsurprisingly, declined to participate in the film.

According to former store managers and several employees, almost all of whom were recruited in-store for their outfits and almost all of whom struggled with an eating disorder while representing the brand, Marsan was a suspicious, vindictive presence. Shop employees, usually girls around the age of 16, had to pose for their “daily photograph” every morning – photos of their outfits, for “brand research”, texted to and kept by Marsan. (Brand research, as several note, usually constituted blatantly ripping off their clothing, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, resulting in several lawsuits.) Marsan reportedly preferred skinny redheads, liked Asian girls and “didn’t want a lot of Black people”, said an anonymous former assistant.

A former employee, who has sued the company for wrongful termination, says he was instructed to fire girls if they were too heavy or Black. “If you’re white, you had to be in sight,” recalls one Black employee relegated, as most people of color were, to the stock room. Another former employee in the New York flagship store recalls how Marsan installed a button at the register, which he would flash if he spotted a “Brandy girl” checking out whom he wanted hired and photographed.

It gets worse – as in, Hitler jokes and anti-Black racist memes worse, sent by Marsan in a text thread with other managers. An alleged sexual assault of a young girl living in the Brandy Melville-rented Manhattan apartment. Marsan, a Trump supporter and self-described libertarian, using his personal copies of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as store props. The brand’s doubling down on its not-so-subtle eating disorder messaging (“one size fits most ”, it rebranded when customers complained about the lack of sizing options), especially in its very profitable expansion into China.

Worse, too, in the company’s dogged pursuit of a business model that, like other fast fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M, prioritizes churn and zeitgeist over quality, clogging landfills and exploiting cheap human labor. Orner and her team visit Prato, Italy, where Brandy Melville is one of several companies to produce quick garments in sweatshops using immigrant labor under the “made in Italy” label, and to Accra, Ghana, a country whose trade deals with western countries strong-arm it into accepting loads of western clothing waste. To drive the point home: a Brandy-typical “made in Italy” tag buried in the sand of a Ghanaian beach, literally knee-deep in tangles of discarded clothes. “Not a lot shocks me,” said Orner, but the sheer amount of western clothing waste dumped in Accra – one worker there suspects the sea floor around the city is now completely covered in clothes – was among the “worst” things she’s ever seen. “We are sending them our trash and destroying their country,” she said. “It’s things they do not want or need.”

Though nominally about a certain buzzy brand, Orner hopes the film offers a larger call to rethink one’s relationship to fashion. The film offers the standard small prescriptions to sustainable fashion: buy natural fibers and secondhand, avoid polyester, recycle and reuse, keep your clothes out of a landfill as long as possible. But also, that “none of that’s going to fix anything”, said Orner. “There are too many clothes on the planet. We overproduce. We make 100bn garments that are produced annually globally. And most of those are in landfill within the first year.”

Brandy Hellville is resolute on keeping the vision trained on the bigger picture, if not particularly optimistic on either the brand’s possibility for change nor turning the tide of fashion waste. Since the Business Insider article triggered social media backlash against the company three years ago, Brandy Melville has soldiered on. Management, from Marsan on down, said nothing. Unlike the case with Abercrombie, the subject of its own 2022 Netflix documentary and backlash to discriminatory practices, there was no acknowledgement, no apology, no brand shift. No admission, just more clothes. Annual sales for Brandy Melville totaled $212.5m in 2023, up from $169.6m in 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal . “It’s a very Trumpian thing to do,” said Orner. “What we need to do is stand up and keep, keep the story going, and not let them get away with it by outsmarting us.

“The power’s in the consumers who don’t buy the product,” she added. “And if we don’t let them get away with it, we have all the power. They’re just making stupid clothing.”

Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion premieres on 9 April on HBO and will be available on Max with a UK date to be announced

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Case Study | Gen-Z Shopping: Separating Myth from Reality

Winning over Gen-Z will be crucial to many brands’ and retailers’ post-pandemic plans: the consumer group currently accounts for 40 percent of global consumers and $150 billion in spending power in the United States alone, according to McKinsey & Company . What’s more, Bain & Company estimates that Gen-Z spending could make up 40 percent of the global market for personal luxury goods by 2035. As this cohort, born approximately between 1997 and 2012, gradually joins the workforce and gains financial autonomy, they are set to power even higher rates of consumption once an economic recovery takes hold.

There have never been more ways to reach young consumers, and they have never been more vocal about what they want and expect from brands. Teenagers are looking to fashion companies, from their favourite resale platforms to influencer brands, to not just reflect their values and beliefs but to act as an extension of them.

Yet Gen-Z is also a misunderstood generation, one that is both underestimated and overrated in equal measure. Companies targeting this next generation of consumer need to be able to see through the stereotypes and challenge received wisdom. Learning how to listen, what to pay attention to, and how to incorporate these insights within your strategy without overwhelming your customers or compromising your offering will become increasingly important in a crowded marketplace — one that has been made even more challenging by Covid-19 threatening the job market, crushing consumer confidence and upending shopping habits.

Using a holistic lens, this case study decodes how to target the Gen-Z consumer by painting a nuanced picture around five “guiding assumptions” about the cohort, or widely accepted characteristics, behaviours and perspectives attributed to the generation, and then uses five companies to interrogate how they have capitalised on those assumptions with measurable success across branding, marketing, retail and business operations.

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The companies analysed — Nike, Brandy Melville, Morphe, Depop and Louis Vuitton — were selected for the diverse and unique lessons they offer on attracting and building loyalty with Gen-Z consumers — from tapping creators and cultivating communities to customising youth-relevant marketing strategies — through distinct approaches that vary from platform to platform and country to country.

While no generation is a monolith, and no single strategy, campaign or message will guarantee success, this case study will break down a range of approaches to examine as you target the next generation of shoppers.

Click below to read the case study now.

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About the Company

If you’re a teenage girl, parents of a teenage girl, or live around teenagers, you’ve probably seen Brandy Melville clothing, even if you didn’t know it. Founded in 2009 by Italian immigrant Silvian Marsan who moved to Los Angeles, Brandy Melville has exploded onto the teen fashion scene with its fast adaptation of trends and signature flowy, semi-vintage aesthetic.

With the proliferation of fast fashion competitors like Shein and Boohoo, Brandy Melville struggled to stand out in the crowded market. The company came to Tontine with two demands: (1) to craft a price optimization strategy that’ll drive additional gross revenue during certain peak seasons like early spring and fall, and (2) ensure that any strategy implemented will not conflict with the brand’s “accessible luxury” positioning. Furthermore, these objectives must be achieved without causing any channel conflicts — since Brandy Melville has a robust brick-and-mortar presence throughout the United States, it’s imperative that they don’t lose the trust of in-store shoppers just because they’re price testing on their Shopify storefront.

The Strategy

First, Tontine’s Price Optimization Experts mapped out the coordinates of every single Brandy Melville brick-and-mortar store, and geofenced the area surrounding those stores so in-store shoppers in the vicinity are “fingerprinted” and excluded from any active online price tests. Next, Tontine’s experts digested sales velocity data from both brick-and-mortar stores and online storefront, and aided by PriceBot, determined that Brandy Melville’s staple products would likely see a 22-27% increase in conversion rate if prices were decreased within a 5-8% range.

The Results

By implementing the incrementally reduced prices, Brandy Melville saw a 25.4% increase in conversion rates (putting it at the upper bound of Tontine’s forecasts) — and just as importantly, they were able to achieve this without discounting their products, thus devaluing their hard-earned brand perception. In order to further mitigate any potential channel conflicts, we also implemented a “containment strategy” centered around testing by zip codes and using Bayesian inferences to slowly expand the test cohorts. Recently, Tontine and Brandy Melville inked a five-year contract — even though we frown upon long-term contracts as annoying and inflexible, Brandy Melville intimately understood one important takeaway from the price tests they’ve ran so far: Tontine is indispensable to the company’s ambitious growth plans.

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"How do you know if you’re charging the maximum customers are willing to pay? You don’t. We certainly didn’t. That’s why we use Tontine."

“Finding the best price for each of our products is a lot faster with Tontine. And in our industry, that means we’re able to bring a product that’s on-trend to market a lot quicker.”

"Working with Tontine is as hands-on/off as you’d like. The Price Optimization Experts ensure they’re consistently delivering value without becoming another burdensome platform to manage."

"When we started working with Tontine, they promised us full control, incredible support, and clear-cut ROI. They’ve delivered. You won’t find a more professional & accommodating team elsewhere."

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“Tontine basically provides the ground truth for any product release, since it starts with pricing. This is a very, very critical piece to the way we operate.”

"Tontine is the best kept secret for Shopify retailers. We can now safely adjust our prices to maximize profit without losing customers, because we have the data to back it up."

"Our D2C channel was a loss leader in our revenue mix— until we started working with Tontine. This was the path of least resistance to growing our revenue without any associated overhead."

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"Tontine helped us test different price points for new products with a group of superfans, so when we released the products publicly, it was at the most profitable price."

“Kudos to Tontine’s team for meeting our extremely strict standards and SLAs. The whole Tontine team stepped up and worked hand-in-hand with us to meet our needs.”

"Tontine is a true partner, rather than just another vendor. We rely on them for strategic insights, competitive market analysis, and most importantly, reliable price test results."

"Truly a no-brainer: Tontine is the go-to solution if you’re trying to focus on your business’ bottom line instead of just optimizing for the top line. For us, this is the most important profit lever we have in our toolkit."

"Our biggest concern was the technical lift needed to integrate with Tontine. Thankfully, their Implementation Specialists handled it all, and didn’t stop working until we were satisfied."

"We haven’t discovered an A/B testing solution that prioritizes protecting our brand integrity as much as Tontine has. The only solution that’s truly compatible with our stack."

“No strenuous integration, no ambiguous data, and no friction working closely with Tontine’s team. This has been a dream partnership.”

“Tontine’s AI engine, PriceBot, is exceptional… the more data it ingests, the better it gets at predicting prices, even for unreleased products.”

“We can’t fathom of an easier or faster way to price test our products and receive a decisive result in just days. Tontine is integral to our merchandising strategy.”

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