When Raya Kessel was referred through a friend to a Brandy Melville hiring manager, she expected an interview or at least an application. However, all she was required to submit was her Instagram profile, a photo of herself and her email address. Before she had even started, it became clear to her that the store prioritized a narrow beauty standard over actual job qualifications. Unfortunately, the hiring process is only strike one in a series of absurd abuses of power and prejudicial rhetoric ingrained in the marketing of the fashion empire that is Brandy Melville.
In case you missed it, Brandy Melville is a clothing company that skyrocketed to popularity among teenage girls in the past 10 years. A major factor in the criticism against Brandy is its “one size fits most” sizing system (that size being small, and only recently joined by a medium option). Needless to say, “one size fits most” is objectively untrue, and the explicit messaging that there is a set human body type — and those who don’t fit it don’t deserve to be accommodated by the fashion industry — is extremely psychologically damaging. For me, Brandy Melville is the trigger of all triggers when it comes to my body image issues, and it’s so easy to feel alone amid a culture that buys into its skinny-style aesthetic unabashedly.
As consumers, many of us know the insecurities that Brandy’s sizing system and marketing image can exacerbate, yet we keep buying it. Brandy’s twisted culture is built upon a pyramid of exploitation, and our own insecurities are just the tip of the iceberg.
To get a glimpse behind-the-scenes of Brandy’s empire, I spoke to Kessel, a former employee who worked at its Pacific Palisades location for a year when she was 17. I also watched (and highly recommend) the documentary “Brandy Hell-ville and the Cult of Fast Fashion,” which sheds light on the circumstances in which the clothes are produced and includes interviews with former employees and store managers.
Brandy Melville was founded in the early 1980s in Italy but originally found little success until its current CEO, Stephan Marsan, expanded the business to California, and the brand image to that of the white, skinny Southern California girl. Brandy Melville’s American expansion coincided with the rise of Instagram and social media as a marketing tool, tying into one of the brand’s main advantages: its advertising strategy. Brandy Melville advertisements aren’t placed on TV, but are rather more subtly and subconsciously ingrained in mainstream culture, be it through celebrity endorsements, influencer hauls or employee vlogs.
“Brandy Melville was one of the first brands to really use social media marketing and influencers, … which gave them a competitive edge,” Kessel said.
But there is more than meets the eye when it comes to the store’s Americana aesthetic. The documentary reveals that the store wasn’t always “one size,” but store managers recall Marsan intentionally eliminating sizing, saying he was “keeping the image exclusive.”
Kessel also discussed a prevalent eating disorder culture in her workplace, revealing that reports of an openly bulimic coworker were not addressed nor acknowledged by her superiors. Employees interviewed in the documentary shared similar sentiments, discussing the atmosphere of self-hatred that Brandy Melville cultivated and the ways they are still recovering.
Kessel encourages shoppers at Brandy Melville to bear in mind the inconsistencies of their sizing even within the “one size fits most” framework. During her time working at the store (before the medium tag), she and her coworkers would take the same exact product from a box shipment and compare the clothes’ measurements.
“It was not by a lot, but every single article of clothing they make is a different size,” Kessel said.
But the implications of these inconsistencies go far beyond consumer inconvenience. These mishaps are rooted in the fact that Brandy Melville relies on exploitative labor and fast fashion practices to adjust to turnover of algorithms and trends.
These labor practices also result in the fact that its clothes are simply poor quality. Many shoppers see Brandy Melville as luxury items due to their “from Italy with love” brand image, but a location in Italy does not automatically correlate to higher-quality clothing. If it seems too good to be true — cute clothing at low prices — then it is. Someone, at some point in the journey of this garment to you, was not given adequate recognition, be it through wages, medical care or any other form of humane treatment.
One of the most shocking revelations from the documentary was the total sexualization and predation upon Brandy Melville’s teen girl employees from the higher-ups. In addition to being overworked and underpaid, every worker was forced to send a whole-body photo following every shift, and soon, chest and feet pictures became required as well. There was a sense of mystery over where these images went, but eventually, it came to light: Stephan Marsan himself was receiving them. He had employees fired if he didn’t like their appearance or body type, which got him in legal trouble, and he even kept a folder of one specific girl’s photos.
“What we were told was that [the photos were] to make sure that the employees looked like we’re wearing the clothes in a stylish way, or to get style inspo.” Kessel said. “But it’s objectively this group of Italian guys who have been exposed in the documentary about being, you know, predators, and then every single night, girls ages 14 to 18 sending [whole-body photos].”
The commodification of the female body and hypersexualization of youth is hardly new in the fashion industry, but perhaps no brand embodies it as well as Brandy Melville.
But wait — there’s more. Marsan has been accused of serious and highly disturbing acts of racism. He allegedly forced a former store manager to close down a Brandy Melville store near Toronto due to the area’s large Indian and Pakistani population. Employees of color are allegedly forced to work behind the register, in fitting rooms or in storage. It’s disturbingly clear that whiteness is intrinsically linked with Brandy Melville’s narrow beauty standard and public image.
Brandy’s exclusive image and eating disorder-adjacent culture have only been reinforced by its growing market in China, where the “BM challenge,” in which customers lose drastic weight and often starve themselves in hopes of fitting into Brandy’s minuscule size, quickly went viral.
Despite the integration of the new medium tag, Kessel doesn’t believe the nature of Brandy Melville’s business model has changed.
“The company is still run by the same people it’s been run by the entire time, and I think that every seemingly positive step is not genuine,” Kessel said. “They’re solely profit-driven. They don’t do sales, they’ve never donated to charity … and they don’t really have a brand identity, outside of a cheap, trendy store for skinny people.”
When taking the brand’s history of discrimination and exclusivity into account, it’s clear the medium tag is just the store’s latest avenue for profit.
“It’s not because they have listened to their consumers — it’s because they listen to their shareholders,” Kessel said.
It’s time to stop handing so much money, power and status to a brand built off of a supply chain of exploitation, an aesthetic built off of racism and sexism and a CEO embracing it all. I hope I’ve been able to shed some light on the brand’s empire of exploitation, but please know that there are countless more stories of fear, of hatred and of women devalued and commodified at every point in the Brandy Melville supply chain.
The option to ignore it is a privilege. As a teenage girl, I know that Brandy Melville is an unavoidable staple of culture — but that’s exactly what makes a boycott so necessary.
I hope you’ll join me.
