Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Brandy Hellville: The Cult Of Fast Fashion’ on Max, A Compelling Takedown Of One Of The Most Toxic Brands In Fast Fashion

Brandy Melville is a fashion brand that has been embraced by teenage girls who want to project an aesthetic of casual fun. But behind its effortlessly cool exterior is a culture of racism, sexism and abuse under the watchful eye of an elusive CEO. The new documentary Brandy Hellville: The Cult of Fast Fashion, airing this week on Max, reveals the origins of the brand that caters to thin, white girls with cash to burn, and the way that the exploitation of the company’s own workers mirrors the exploitation of those who are left to clean up the mess left by fast fashion.

BRANDY HELLVILLE: THE CULT OF FAST FASHION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A disclaimer appears onscreen reading, “Due to ongoing litigation, two former Brandy Melville associates requested their identities be obscured. They are portrayed by actors reading from their interview transcripts.” The first interviewee then details how they first heard of Brandy Melville, the fast fashion brand that gained massive popularity in the 2010s among the teen set, and details the cultural caché of owning clothing and jewelry from the label.

The Gist: If you’re not a Gen Z young woman, chances are, you may not know of the Brandy Melville fashion brand, and you’d be forgiven for that: you weren’t the target audience. In the 2010’s the brand exploded in popularity thanks to a massive social media presence (primarily Instagram), promoting it’s casual, skimpy line of clothing that became hugely popular with teen girls. But Brandy Melville was a brand shrouded in mystery and controversy from the get-go. First, there was the uninclusive sizing – every garment produced for the brand is only available in one tiny size. There was also the “non-written agreement” that the store’s employees be primarily thin, beautiful, young white girls. Then there was the fact that all of its stores were run by different shell companies, and its actual CEO, a man named Stephan Marsan, was nearly impossible to identify or find online. Marsan was an enigma, but he also managed to push not just a culture that promoted unrealistic beauty standards, but one that fostered a culture of racism, anti-semitism and, an Ayn Rand devotee, he was known to push his own anti-taxation libertarian views on his young employees.

As the brand’s popularity exploded, it churned out thousands of new garments on a weekly basis, something that’s common among fast fashion brands like Zara, H&M, and Shein. The documentary provides a shocking look at a second-hand market in Accra, Ghana, the largest of its kind in the world, which receives millions of pieces of discarded fast fashion clothing a week, far more than anyone in the country needs. If you thought you were being nice by dropping your old clothes in one of those metal donation bins, what you were really doing was making your clothes Ghana’s problem, because they don’t want the western world’s low-quality castoffs.

In addition to revealing where all of Brandy Melville’s discarded clothing ends up, the film reveals the underworld of fast fashion sweatshops located in Italy, of all places. Brandy Melville, despite its American-sounding name, is an Italian company and proudly labels all of its clothing as “Made in Italy,” but the big reveal here is that there is one major clothing production hub in Italy, in a town called Prato, where thousands of Chinese immigrants have moved and opened fast fashion factories. The mayor of Prato somewhat proudly discusses how his town is a hub of industry, and a major revenue stream, while simultaneous acknowledging that the majority of what comes out of his town is disposable garbage and many of the workers are treated as “slaves” (his word) who emigrated there, but labor under the optics of Italian-made couture.

The focus toggles between the creepy and possibly criminal abuse of the “Brandy girls” employed by the company and the destructive nature of fast fashion, and the documentary is a disheartening look at a brand that is beloved in spite of those things.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Brandy Hellville combines aspects of The True Cost, an exposé of the fast fashion industry, with White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, the Netflix doc about another brand whose racist, sizeist employment practices led to its downfall. The thing is, Brandy Melville hasn’t fallen from grace in the public eye and it is, in fact, as strong as ever.

Our Take: I found a thread on Reddit that was populated almost exclusively by Brandy Melville devotees denouncing this documentary (before it had even come out), with many fans defending Brandy Melville and claiming they’re not nearly as bad as brands like Shein and Temu when it comes to disposable fashion, and they had no plans to stop shopping there. But the global harm caused by fast fashion as an industry is only the half of it; I can’t help but think that maybe the film’s subtitle might do it a disservice because this film is also the story of a brand marketed to (and willing to exploit) young women and girls, by one mysterious man with a toxic agenda.

The film attempts to make a connection between colonialism and the exploitation of marginalized people at the heart of fast fashion, with the capitalism and exploitation of young employees at the heart of Brandy Melville brand. Ultimately, it does feel like this could have been two separate movies, one that focuses on the hell of working at Brandy Melville, and one that exposes fast fashion for what it is.

As you walk away from the film though, it’s not hard to piece together that what links the two stories together is that despite all of our collective awareness of environmental, social, and political injustice and harm, we are all willing to put up with that for a shiny new shirt or necklace. We know fast fashion is evil, but as long as a few people at the top are profiting from it and promoting it to the hungry masses, it will never go away. And now, thanks to this film, we know that Brandy Melville is also kinda evil, run on a business model that rarely benefits its workers and is outright hostile to anyone it doesn’t want wearing its brand, all for the benefit of one man. We know all of these things, and yet we aren’t doing anything about it.

Parting Shot: “There’s a lot of people that think this is too hard to solve, and it’s just not,” Claire Bergkamp, the chief executive of Textile Exchange, says as we watch scores of clothing washing up on a beach in Ghana. “The solutions exist, but to me, the best we can do right now, we just need to buy less.”

Memorable Dialogue: “From the beginning of the supply chain to the end, we are all being exploited by the same system,” Chloe Asaam, an activist with The Or Foundation, explains, and it’s a stark realization that so many of those exploited by fashion are also its target audience: women. When it comes to fashion in general, women are the primary cotton pickers, seamstresses, shopkeepers, and, in Ghana, the ones who carry the loads of second-hand clothing to the market on their heads; on a global scale, across dozens of countries, we are all being harmed by this system.

Our Call: STREAM IT! This film is essentially about two vicious sides of the fashion industry, and the one brand that represents the worst of both. Even though many of us know in our hearts that fast fashion is bad news, the film puts faces to its victims and clearly illustrates just how wasteful and destructive it is. While there’s no easy fix to fast fashion, perhaps after learning about the deeply disturbing company practices at Brandy Melville, we can collectively eliminate at least this one brand from that scene.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.