Brandy Melville Documentary Details Racism, Misogyny, and Overconsumption in Fast Fashion
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If you’ve seen one Brandy Melville, you’ve seen them all — baby tees and mini skirts, vague references to California, libertarian-Ayn Rand references, and, most centrally, a “one size fits most” ethos. The brand grew popular in America in the 2010s by targeting mostly high school girls small enough to fit into their explicitly exclusionary size range, and by using reposts of young girls’ social media content wearing the clothes to spread the company’s influence online. By the mid-2010s, the strategy had paid off, with the clothes worn by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.
Behind the scenes, reporting shows that Brandy Melville has been plagued by accusations of racism and sexual exploitation for a decade. Anecdotally, I may or may not have worked at a store whose name rhymes with Mandy Smellville for three months in 2013 as a college freshman, and I may or may not have been told I was fired for looking depressed. (I reached out to Brandy Melville for comment.)
Now, more of the story is being told — and connected to the broader question of overconsumption and fashion’s modern colonial practices in places like Ghana — with the release of the new documentary “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” released April 8 on Max. (A film featuring our very own Alyssa Hardy, expert on the intersections of labor, fashion and the environment!)
“The first thing that was really surprising [about] making the film was getting people to speak up,” director Eva Orner tells Teen Vogue. “Everyone was very young when they worked there, and now they're young women embarking on careers or in their twenties. A lot of them were really scared.” Reporting from Business Insider’s Kate Taylor, who is featured in the documentary, details a culture of sexualizing young white girls and promoting disordered eating via their unrealistic beauty standards.
Orner describes the Brandy business model with their young target audience as “an army of young girls doing free advertising for these big multi-million, -billion dollar conglomerates usually owned and run by white middle aged men who are older, and there's this army of young girls unwittingly making advertising for them, thinking it's cool.”
The film traces the issues of fast fashion via Brandy from the young girls hired in their U.S. stores, and the workers of color pushed to work backstock; to the fast-fashion production in Italy; to Ghana’s largest secondhand market, where 7.5 million pounds of tossed-away clothing arrive weekly from the States. In Accra, the clothes often end up in landfills or in the ocean, at the same port, the documentary notes, from where enslaved Africans left for the U.S. during the slave trade.
As Chloe Asaam, Ghana operations manager for The OR Foundation, says early in the documentary, “From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we’re all being exploited by the same system.” The only way to opt out, “Brandy Hellville” argues, is to just stop buying.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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