What is Brandy Melville and who founded the company?
DESPITE its All-American, California cool girl aesthetic, fast fashion brand Brandy Melville was originally founded in Italy in the 1980s by a father-son duo.
After opening its first US store in 2009, Brandy Melville quickly became the go-to clothing and accessories retailer for "popular" teenage girls nationwide, ultimately leading to some devastating consequences.
What is Brandy Melville?
Brandy Melville is an Italian clothing and fashion brand for young women, primarily teenagers.
The brand's aesthetic includes easy, breezy, beachy fits, combining elements of coquette fashion with the "Malibu teen" trend.
Brandy Melville has over 100 locations worldwide, with most stores open in Europe, the United States, and Italy.
Storefronts feature muted color schemes, bleached wood, and an overall "clean" feel, equal parts relaxed and put-together.
Customers can also shop for clothing and accessories online at the brand's website.
While the brand has been around since the 1980s, Brandy Melville slowly began its rise as a fashion staple in 2009, when it opened its first store in the US.
The first US store was located in the Westwood area of Los Angeles.
The brand's rise can be attributed to its successful use of social media as a marketing and advertising tool.
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Brandy Melville's US Instagram account boasts over 3.1 million followers, while the brand's TikTok hashtag, #BrandyMelville, has over four billion views.
The brand's success can also be attributed to its use of teenage employees, often serving on the company's product research team.
Employees are often asked to provide input on the brand's clothing and accessories, take photos of customers they believe best "represent" the brand, and give their honest opinions and feedback on new or upcoming trends and styles.
Despite its popularity, the brand has also faced controversy for being one of the largest and most popular non-inclusive brands worldwide.
Unlike other similar brands, all Brandy Melville clothing is made to be "one size fits all."
While some of the brand's clothing options may have some added stretch to "fit" multiple sizes, most of its inventory is geared towards the smallest sizes among conventional ranges.
Most clothing is made between a US size 0 to 2, while the brand's jeans can only be found in small and medium sizes, as reported by Fashion United.
The brand has also received its fair share of internet memes and trolls, with many users commenting on the narrow doorways used as the storefront's entrances. Some say this is to prevent "overweight" clientele from entering stores to browse for items.
Like some fashion brands that came before it, including Abercrombie and Fitch, Brandy Melville has also faced criticism for its hiring practices.
Younger, skinnier, and so-called "prettier" employees – usually white teenage girls who fit the brand's "aesthetic" – work "front of the house," as cashiers and store associates.
Most other employees, including non-white, non-thin, or employees who otherwise don't meet the store's "image" are relegated to the stockroom or work overnight shifts, out of sight of customers.
Who founded Brandy Melville?
Brandy Melville was originally founded in Italy in the early 1980s.
The fashion brand's founders were Silvio Marsan and his son, Stephan Marsan.
In a 2021 interview with Business Insider, ex-store owner Franco Sorgi, who opened the first Brandy Melville store in Canada in 2012, said that Stephan Marsan, Silvio's son, had a "specific vision for his ideal customer."
According to Sorgi, Marsan told him that "overweight or Black customers would ruin the brand's reputation."
Sorgi said Marsan preferred "good-looking rich little girls" as customers, aiming to "win over the most popular high school girls as customers."
Dozens of current and former Brandy Melville employees told Business Insider that the company's "hiring and firing practices were influenced by race."
They reportedly said that in "Marsan and other executives' minds, the most beautiful and coolest teenagers were almost all white and thin."
The inappropriate, racist practices didn't stop there.
"Marsan's friends and coworkers [also] exchanged memes featuring the N-word, and referenced Hitler at least 24 times" in a private group company chat.
Surprisingly, Marsan didn't have a digital footprint before the Business Insider exposé, preferring to stay out of sight and out of mind.
To further the brand's mysterious allure, employees were reportedly prohibited from discussing the company's history or its founders with anyone—from customers to fellow coworkers.
In reality, however, Marsan was pulling many of the strings behind the brand's scenes, and his leadership skills were far from exceptional.
"Marsan was so involved in every area of the business he would even ask for full-body pictures of girls — some as young as 14 — before he would green light store managers to hire them," as reported by the New York Post.
Once hired, employees were "expected to keep sending full-body pictures to Marsan whenever they were at the store," which Marsan claimed was "because he wanted to keep an eye on fashion trends."
Brandy Melville's toxic culture and workplace – and Marsan's role in shaping it – are explored in even greater detail in the documentary, Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion.
How can I watch Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion?
Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion is a documentary that explores the rise of the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville and the toxic culture hidden beneath its trendy clothing and accessories.
The 90-minute HBO original documentary premieres on HBO on Tuesday, April 9, 2024, at 9 pm ET/PT.
It will also be available to stream exclusively on HBO's streaming service, Max, the same day at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT.
Participating individuals include former Brandy Melville employees and executives, fashion editors, investigative journalists, and fashion industry experts.
The documentary will reportedly "reveal a troubling toxic work environment and discriminatory recruiting methods at the company and shed light on the inner workings of a business that flourished by setting impossible beauty standards on social media and in real life for its customers and employees," according to a Warner Bros. Discovery press release.
The doc will also examine "the far-reaching reverberations of mass-produced fast fashion by Brandy Melville and other mainstream fashion brands, as well as the consequences of the collective increase in consumption and production of cheap clothing."
Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion is directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Eva Orner and produced by Emmy Award-winning Jonathan Chinn and Academy Award-winning Simon Chinn.
Orner previously worked on the documentaries Untold Desires, Strange Fits of Passion, and Taxi to the Dark Side.
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Brothers Jonathan and Simon Chinn are the co-founders of Lightbox, a multinational media company focused on creating quality non-fiction programming.
They previously worked together on the 2023 documentary The Mission and the 2021 TV series Curse of the Chippendales.