Being 13, going to Brandy Melville was a day-out treat with your friends, spending your saved pocket money on the Californian girl aesthetic whilst blissfully unaware of the negativity the brand was imposing on our vulnerable minds. A woman interviewed in the recent documentary ‘Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion’ said ‘it taps into the worst impulses of being a teenage girl,' so it seems strange that a brand so backwards does so well.
For a brand targeting young teenage girls, and in a world where eating disorders are becoming an everyday battle, why are we allowing this brand to encourage staying skinny? One size here simply means one body - the body of a prepubescent girl who is skinny enough to fit into clothes that she'll hopefully grow out of in a year or two. And what seems so wrong is that if you fit into these clothes, a sense of pride comes over you. You feel accepted and cool.
All you want to do is grab your item, pay, and run.
Even the architecture body shames. Only Brandy Melville could start a ‘skinny door’ trend on TikTok, promoting the idea that if you don't fit through the store's door frames, you need to leave. As soon as you walk in, you are surrounded by skinny white models who silently seem to promote the image of the brand. All you want to do is grab your item, pay, and run.
To further make the situation worse, the company has no public CEO or brand ambassadors, so there is no way to understand why the business is run in this way. It all seems quite sketchy for a multi-million dollar business, especially when the company runs off of social media to advertise its brand, making unrealistic beauty standards a norm. All things considered, I think it is fair to say that Brandy Melville has had its heyday, and now it's time to say goodbye.
