Brandy Hellville & the cult of fast fashion
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It may be the best-selling love story of the past decade. When the American Brandy and the Englishman Melville meet each other on holiday in Rome, they immediately fall in love. A very sweet, but above all completely fictional Italian romance. The only Italian element in this marketing myth is Stephan Marsan, the CEO of clothing giant Brandy Melville. Brandy who?
If you know or are not a teenager, you have probably never heard of the popular fast-fashion brand. Brandy Melville was founded in the 1970s by Italian textile giant Silvio Marsan. It was a mediocre success in its own country for years. Until son Stephan took over and made Brandy Melville Gen Z’s favorite.
A beggar on a mountain of money
Stephan Marsan is not the kind of company leader you would suspect a clothing tycoon would be, as an ex-employee testifies in the HBO documentary Brandy Hellville. “He dresses like a scruffy bum.” Then a very fortunate bum. “He doesn’t want to be known because he’s sitting on a mountain of money,” thus franchisee Franco Sorgi in Business Insider. Marsan is an untraceable shadow figure. Over the past fifteen years, from the shelter, he has lured millions of teenage girls to pursue their dream lives on Instagram, Tumblr and Tiktok. Brandy Melville’s social media profiles are a showcase of the California vibe. An attractive utopia where the sun always shines and most of the days are spent on the beach. The lifestyle is bohemian. The extras are quite homogeneous. The ideal Brandy girl is like the playground queen from ’90s teen movies: white, blonde and slim.
Not for everyone
It is an aesthetic with which Brandy Melville consciously excludes different body types. In universal size charts, crop tops, mini shorts and short skirts never extended beyond an (extra) small. Because “One size fits all”, was the motto. After mounting criticism, this later became “One size fits most”. No idea that Marsan would increase the offer. “Brandy Melville was never meant for everyone,” said the anonymous ex-employee.
What Ambercrombie & Fitch was to millennials, Brandy Melville is to the younger generation. “Everyone wore it. I felt so cool and accepted wearing something from Brandy,” says Cate. As a teenager she worked in one of the 97 branches. “Working at Brandy really felt like a great honor.” Especially because as an ambassador she was able to welcome customers. Staff of color were given a less visible position in the stock area. Because Marsan “didn’t want too many black people,” says a former assistant.
Those who belonged to the select club of it girls also did a lot to remain in good graces. Almost all ambassadors who testify in the documentary struggled with an eating disorder at some point. Among them was Lee, who, once on the mend, realized that a healthy weight was incompatible with her job at Brandy. Cate then remembers how she panicked when one day she couldn’t close her pants button. A former store manager was repeatedly instructed to fire people if they became “too heavy.”
An ugly worldview
Like many fast-fashion brands, Brandy Melville is built on a system of structural exploitation. Cheap items are produced by Chinese sweatshops in the Italian city of Prato. It illustrates how ‘Made in Italy’ is no longer a guaranteed quality mark. Marsan borrows from other brands for the designs. Items in the Brandy collection are often named after the girl who provided the ‘inspiration’. “If a T-shirt is called Josslyn, it’s because they bought that design from her body,” says investigative journalist Kate Taylor. Shop girls had to have their picture taken every working day. “For market research,” they said. Another witness tells how Marsan had a button installed at the cash register that flashed when he saw a potential Brandy girl who needed to have her photo taken. Ultimately, all those Polaroids ended up in a private folder of Marsan, as a former right-hand man testifies.
Brandy Melville is the result of “a very strange and ugly worldview,” according to director Eva Orner The Guardian. In a WhatsApp group, Marsan shared racist and sexist memes starring Hitler and Donald Trump almost every day. The CEO may have been invisible, but he was by no means absent. Like a shrewd cult leader, he kept a stranglehold on his direct employees. “No one dared to contradict him in that group. People laughed at his jokes out of fear,” says the ex-assistant.
However, it is not the first time that Marsan has been discredited. Four years ago, several employees denounced his toxic leadership. Tiktok is teeming with videos of teens turning their backs on Brandy Melville. And yet Marsan doesn’t seem to want to eat anything less. According to The Wall Street Journal Brandy Melville’s annual turnover in 2023 was more than 212 million dollars. In 2019, that was $169.6 million. Or as an ex-employee concludes: there is no such thing as bad advertising.
