Brandy Hellville: Everything that goes down in HBO’s new Brandy Melville documentary

Much like Abercrombie & Fitch, Brandy Melville’s USP has pretty much always been exclusion. Famously, they only sell “one size fits all” stock, which actually fits a UK size 4-8. As such, the basics brand – created in Italy in the ’80s by Silvio Marsan and his son Stephan –  has routinely been entrenched in controversy. And the divisive store is about to come under scrutiny all over again with the coming of a new investigative documentary: Brandy Helville & The Cult Of Fast Fashion.

The documentary, which has been the talk of Twitter since it premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, dives into allegations of racism, sizeism, and the CEO’s notable fascination with teenage girls. So, in case you’re wondering what actually goes down in Brandy Hellville & The Cult Of Fast Fashion, here’s all you need to know ahead of its release on HBO:

Ok, so what actually goes down in HBO’s Brandy Hellville documentary?

Brandy Hellville & The Cult Of Fast Fashion interviews former and current employees, photographers and company executives at Brandy Melville. They’ve ever spoken to some former senior VPs who have (shock) decided to remain anonymous.

Similarly to Netflix’s White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch documentary, it quickly becomes evident that white, pretty, thin girls were plucked out of groups of shoppers to be hired, while anybody who didn’t fit his Cali girl-esque aesthetic were discriminated against.

Black employees were allegedly given tasks in the back rooms of stores 

Regardless of skill or experience, one Brandy employee told the documentary how Black employees were given jobs to do in the back rooms of the store, whereas all white employees “had to be in sight”. Even when girls were evidently useless at their jobs, they claimed they were kept on and placed on the door to greet customers because they were “beautiful”.

“If you were white,” the Daily Beast reports an employee tells the documentary, “you had to be in sight.”

The CEO reportedly had a binder of pictures of young female employees which he flipped through for pleasure 

Much like Abercrombie’s recruitment model, employees were often plucked from crowds of shoppers and encouraged to apply. The store worker who spotted them would be told to send a picture of the girl directly to the CEO. He would then respond about say whether or not to hire the girl.

At Brandy’s New York flagship store, the CEO had an office over-looking the shop floor and he’d push a button when he saw a girl he wanted a staff member to check out. Once, an employee discovered the CEO flipping through a binder of images they’d taken of the 16-25-year-old girls, which he’d kept for no apparent reason.

Silvio Marsan is also accused of sending Hitler and 9/11 memes in a Brandy group chat 

According to the documentary, Brandy’s CEO also had a group chat with other company executives in which he sent memes about Hitler and 9/11. He also reportedly sent other offensive messages which nobody knew how to react to. Nice!

The documentary also analyses Brandy Melville’s impact on the environment and fast fashion practises 

As well as the racism, sizeism and troubling hiring practises, Brandy Hellville & The Cult Of Fast Fashion also sheds light on the brand’s environmental impact and their encouragement of fast fashion style shopping in their consumers.

It also reveals how Brandy allegedly steals other brands designs, with employees revealing some Brandy girls were given credit cards with unlimited limits so they could buy clothes at other stores they liked so Brandy could copy them.

One former employee even said she wore a pair of purple trousers from a charity shop to work one day, her manager took a photo, and within a matter of weeks the same pair of trousers were being sold in Brandy Melville across the country. Not quite the environmental impact she’d intended when she went thrifting.

Related stories recommended by this writer:

• We asked people who *still* wear Hollister and Abercrombie – why?!

• Abercrombie & Fitch was an era – but how did it have a grip on the bleak, cold suburbs of Britain?

• Jack Wills is attempting to appeal to young people, but no one can forget its posh past

Featured image credit via HBO