Inside Brandy Melville's Sketchy Universe
How the toxic founder brainwashed an entire generation of teenagers...
The first (and last) time I stepped foot inside a Brandy Melville was in 2014. The brand was suddenly featured on everyone’s YouTube channel (remember Bethany Mota or Eva Gutowski), and although I was never drawn to the style, a vague sense of curiosity made me walk into the Broadway store. Groups of skinny teenagers were in line, sporting the very clothes they were waiting to buy. Brandy Melville popularized a look I always found basic: simple cropped tees with Tumblr quotes pasted on them, tiny denim shorts, and flowy Coachella-ready dresses. These were clothes for people who couldn’t bother with fashion because the weather is nice all the time. No wonder California was where they opened their first store in 2009.
Dressed in a blue cropped denim bustier and a green pleated midi skirt, my outfit was at odds with the aesthetic being sold. Inside, people were taking photos, touching everything and crowding the fitting rooms. The ambience was young and trendy, but the experience was that of just another apparel retailer to me—with clothes you could find at PacSun, Forever21 or American Apparel. I didn’t buy anything and left the store feeling out of place. I wasn’t the Brandy Melville customer, but as evidenced by the never-ending line throughout the day, they had garnered a cult fan base.
I had since blocked the brand out of memory until I came across the HBO documentary, “Brandy Helville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” this month. The 90-minute film is set in the United States, but takes viewers to Italy (where the clothes are made), Ghana (where they’re most likely dumped), shedding light on the brand’s obscure origins and exposing their toxic company culture and unethical labor practices. Tapping into sustainability experts like Liz Ricketts, Alyssa Hardy and Ayesha Barenblat, the film painfully details the devastating impact of fast fashion, providing poignant visuals of polluted oceans, decimated landfills, and most notably, the invisible women who are the victims of waste colonization.