Brandy Melville Documentary Details Racism, Misogyny, and Overconsumption in Fast Fashion

In the event you’ve seen one Brandy Melville, you’ve seen all of them — child tees and mini skirts, obscure references to California, libertarian-Ayn Rand references, and, most centrally, a “one dimension suits most” ethos. The model grew standard in America within the 2010s by concentrating on principally highschool women sufficiently small to suit into their explicitly exclusionary dimension vary, and through the use of reposts of younger women’ social media content material carrying the garments to unfold the corporate’s affect on-line. By the mid-2010s, the technique had paid off, with the garments worn by celebrities like Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner.

Behind the scenes, reporting shows that Brandy Melville has been stricken by accusations of racism and sexual exploitation for a decade. Anecdotally, I’ll or might not have labored at a retailer whose identify rhymes with Mandy Smellville for 3 months in 2013 as a school freshman, and I’ll or might not have been advised I used to be fired for wanting depressed. (I reached out to Brandy Melville for remark.)

Now, extra of the story is being advised — and linked to the broader query of overconsumption and style’s fashionable colonial practices in locations like Ghana — with the discharge of the brand new documentary “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion,” launched April 8 on Max. (A movie that includes our very personal Alyssa Hardy, expert on the intersections of labor, style and the setting!)

“The very first thing that was actually stunning [about] making the movie was getting folks to talk up,” director Eva Orner tells Teen Vogue. “Everybody was very younger once they labored there, and now they’re younger girls embarking on careers or of their twenties. Lots of them had been actually scared.” Reporting from Business Insider’s Kate Taylor, who’s featured within the documentary, particulars a tradition of sexualizing younger white women and selling disordered consuming by way of their unrealistic magnificence requirements.

Orner describes the Brandy enterprise mannequin with their younger audience as “a military of younger women doing free promoting for these large multi-million, -billion greenback conglomerates often owned and run by white center aged males who’re older, and there is this military of younger women unwittingly making promoting for them, considering it is cool.”