Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion (2024)

Brandy-Hellville-&-the-Cult-of-Fast-Fashion
Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion

Brandy Melville is notorious for its tiny, one-size denim shorts, cute camisole print, and other sweatshirts with the word “Malibu” on them. These are boys’ brands that cater to young teenagers. But more worrying is the firm’s documented abuse of teenage girls who work for them and the exploitation of young vulnerable girls, as was discussed in the recent HBO documentary “Brandy Hellville And The Cult Of Fast Fashion”.

In the documentary, ex-employees narrate their experiences regarding the endemic racism and sizeism at the stores as well as the impact of the fast fashion model on society and the environment. The filmmakers say that Mr. Stephan Marsan, the company’s moody CEO was contacted several times through emails for a comment, which he never answered.

During an interview last week, filmmaker Eva Orner said that many of the former employees were scared to be recorded because of the long history of being bullied by the company. Those who appeared on the clip had their faces covered and were introduced only by their first names. “I have been in several war zones, dealt with refugees and other life-threatening experiences, and people have been keener to appear on camera,” she said.

The documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ bagged an Academy Award and has an Australian Ms. Orner single-handedly producing it and winning it. Further in an interview, she mentioned that her knowledge about the case was very limited and all that she knew was that Brandy Melville was a case under investigation, however contrary to that she that teenage girls all around the world held up the Brandy Melville company. She cites the likes of supermodels Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner as a few examples.

Brandy Melville says that wearing shirts with such derogatory sayings “is racism, it is antisemitism, it is exploitation” Mrs Orner claims she said. She further criticized saying, “I’m hoping parents are watching this and are horrified”. Their business model bears close designs to Zara, H&M, and other fast-operated garment companies however even with the parallelism Orner said their structure of doing politics is rather a “messy chaos”.

The film says Brandy Melville is owned by a Swiss Company while all its other companies are owned in different countries. Kate Taylor, a journalist who wrote for Business Insider in 2021 to investigate the company in detail, claimed quite the opposite. Place Mr. Marsan in front of any camera and he simply melts away, yet he’s the owner of Intimissm brand that currently operates without an online presence and the brand’s market is based on Instagram.

But this is hardly surprising, as former employees of Brandy Melville, in response to such questions during the documentary, recount how the company’s management asked them to hand over their garments to the company for replication. The company was also accused on social networks of copying other designers’ works and was sued by Forever 21 in 2016 on the grounds of copyright infringement. The court resolved the issues through negotiations and legislation records show there were no troubles.

Typically, the company offers most of its products in one tiny category, which it describes as “one size fits all”. Mr. Marsan stated that such a strategy was required for the brand to remain ‘elite,’ while former executives interviewed for the documentary claimed that the given policy’s further criticism only helped strengthen the brand.

There are even snippets from the movie where clients post on social media that they have lost weight for the sake of the clothes produced by this company. Many of the former staff members asserted that they struggled with eating disorders while working for the company and many others noted that they felt that the expectation to be thin before getting the job affected their self-confidence negatively.

Employees accused the company of purposefully recruiting thin white women, especially in the film, and mentioned that they were often hired on the spot while visiting the store. Other employees claimed that they frequently were asked to take full body pictures of themselves in clothes and email them to Mr. Marsan, who on certain occasions would fire employees for whatever reason as to how they looked.

Ms. Taylor, in her assertions to the firm, made other comments in which she pointed out that there were serious accusations which were contained in handouts given out during two court cases where Masen, serious accusations were actually in fact present. One of the other executives of the company mentioned that Mr Marsan had closed down a store owned by him on the grounds that colored people went there, either in Toronto or Washington.

Lieutenant Ms. Taylor and two of the other documentary executives investigated have observed in the “Brandy Melville gags” group chat, that seniors also posted. One of the former executives of the film further comments that there is one image in which a woman dressed as a jezebel had the caption ‘Miss Auschwitz 1943’ in it.

Ms. Taylor mentioned this group chat I do not know how many times in her article in the Business Insider. Orner said that Brandy “had their evil genius moment (for which) nothing happened” during the exhibition Orner said. They only “turned off the comments section for a very short period of time” and did nothing else. On their website rather the phrase “business as usual” was censorship, and the comment section was turned off but what followed

Because the pillar in John does not mention certain things, many of its garments are produced at a middle-class factory in Prato, Italy, staffed by illegal Chinese immigrants, Ms. Orner stated. The city is one of the centers of many fast fashion brand manufacturers, however, as reported, these certain fast fashion brands have been known to be outlandish in their business operations damaging the city’s image. (He did not address whether this applied to Brandy Melville’s factory.)

A similar discussion did they reach in Ghana, where smuggled clothes from the United States and Europe are dumped and flooded the rivers. Ms Orner asserts that a business model that Brandy Melville pursues can be characterized as producing vast quantities of affordable hardy-style items whose durability will be likened to their waste disposal.

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