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

If 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.

Related: ‘Discrimination was their brand’: how Abercrombie & Fitch fell out of fashion

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