Brandy Hellville and the cult of fast fashion: 5 points to remember

Clothing store Brandy Melville is known for selling small, one-size-fits-all pieces popular among Gen Z: linen short shorts, heart-print tank tops and sweatshirts printed with the word Malibu.

Behind its Cali-girl aesthetic lies a company that mistreats its teenage employees and takes advantage of young women's insecurities, according to Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, a documentary released Tuesday on HBO.

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

Eva Orner, the documentary's director, said in an interview last week that it was difficult to film former employees because many were afraid of the company. Those who were included were identified only by their first name. I've done a lot of things in war zones, with refugees and in life and death situations, and people feel more comfortable in front of the camera, she said.

Ms Orner, an Australian who won an Oscar 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 disturbed she was by the brand's cult 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's racism, it's anti-Semitism, it's exploitation, said Ms. Orner. I hope parents watch this and are horrified.

Here are five of the documentary's main claims.

The company's business model is unclear.

In some ways, Brandy Melville is similar to Zara, H&M, and other retailers operating in the fast fashion sector, which favor low-cost clothing produced in rapid 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 Brandy Melville brand is owned by a Swiss company, Kate Taylor, author of a Business Insider 2021 Company Survey which informed much of the documentary, said in the film. And despite running a brand that has built its success largely on Instagram, Mr. Marsan has virtually no online presence.

Former Brandy Melville staffers said in the documentary that managers would sometimes ask to buy the clothes employees were wearing so the brand could reproduce them. The company was accused online of steal drawings of independent designers and was sued by Forever 21 for copyright infringement in 2016. (The case ended in a confidential settlement, according to court documents.)

He maintained his one-size-fits-all policy.

The company offers most of its clothing in one very small size, which it describes as one size fits all. Mr. Marsan viewed the policy as a way to maintain brand exclusivity, 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. Several former employees described suffering from eating disorders while working at Brandy Melville, and several said the pressure to be thin while they worked there affected their self-esteem.

A former employee said in the documentary that working at the store made her hate her body and generally feel 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 had to take daily photos of their entire bodies which were sent to Mr Marsan, who sometimes fired them if he did not like their appearance.

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

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

Company executives exchanged racist and anti-Semitic messages during a group chat.

Top executives 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. A screenshot shown in the film shows a skeletal woman wearing a scarf reading Miss Auschwitz, 1943.

Mr. Marsan, his brother, store owners and members of the company's production team in Italy were all present in the conversation, according to a former store owner.

The panel discussion featured heavily in Ms. Taylor's Business Insider article. Brandy's evil genius is that when this exposure was posted, they did nothing except briefly disable comments on their Instagram page, Ms. Orner said. They continued as usual.

The company may reflect broader patterns of fast fashion exploitation.

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

The company's supply chain is opaque, but much of its clothing is made in 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 abusive labor practices, Matteo Biffoni, the city's mayor, said in the documentary. (He did not say whether this was true for the Brandy Melville factory.)

The filmmakers also traveled to Ghana, where unwanted clothing from the United States and Europe piles up in piles and clogs waterways. Brandy Melville's business model is to produce trendy, inexpensive items that are likely to be thrown away that way, Ms. Orner said, and ship them in bulk to influencers, in exchange for free promotion.

You can't make a movie about fashion without showing the exploitation of almost everyone, from workers to models to retailers to consumers, Ms. Orner said. Everyone is exploited.

Alain Delaqurire contributed to the research.