The scandal of Brandy Melville– unsurprising, yet disgusting. Still, the brand remains untouchable.
I just watched the new exposé on HBO Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, which while disturbing, was also terribly nostalgic. I, too, owned the dangling star choker, which still has its whimsical and understated charm all these years later. I, too, have had many experiences of facing off at the counter with the too-cool ash blonde a few years my senior that I Instagram stalked on occasion. I, too, bought into myths of popularity and elitism though I recognized immediately, having attended Catholic school, the irony of exchanging one uniform (secondhand Dennis) for another (Brandy Melville). Clean cuts, neutral colors, a New England flare, cozy fabrics, and bold graphics with vague meaning were all the rage (and still are.) I’ve always been a fan of gingham and in need of basics, so I couldn’t resist.
Me & Brandy (A Scorned History)
My initiation into Brandy Melville happened when an older cousin of mine from Florida visited over the summer. I was going into seventh grade and she into her junior year of high school. This was to be a summer of transformation, I explained to an ex-best friend as we rounded a corner of bougainvilleas. We were on one of our daily neighborhood walks in the late afternoon. I could feel the dry California sunshine kissing my skin, the essence of possibility.
“My cousin is like one of those popular girls. She wears makeup and goes to parties and everything. She might rub off on me,“ I warned her. It was wishful thinking anyway.
Is it hard to seem cool to a seventh-grader? My standards were low. Anyone whose boobs seemed to be coming in seemed cool to me. I gazed upon the fleshy orbs of womanhood that belonged to my peers with longing and envy, searching for signs of superiority beyond stiff starched cotton. My dream, among many others at the time, was to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel. I had an obsession with those boudoir/burlesque pop icons of the 2000s, The Pussycat Dolls, Christina Aguilera, etc. They were so fearlessly feminine. And sexy. Sexiness seemed even more aspirational than femininity in the power of its directness, its demand to be taken seriously and witnessed. I think despite being so young, I had wanted all of these things for a very long time and I was approaching an age where to be deemed sexy would finally hold tangible meaning and yield reward in the world. I had other interests– my piano and art lessons, writing, fancy goldfish, pop music, smutty YA books, and the melodrama of the middle school crush, but at the time, honing these skills seemed less useful in preparing myself for being a teenage girl than assimilating to the likes of my predecessors and dressing like them.
Cue that fateful summer: my cousin had never been to a Brandy Melville store and was sold on it by California teen beauty YouTubers. She longed for her slice of the fantasy. I suppose I did too. She bought me a black keyhole halter top and low-rise shorts with exposed pockets (It was 2015). I was ecstatic and eager to embody this new era, so I wore it on a trip to Big Sur the next day. Us and our boisterous parents, Filipino and Puerto Rican raised in New York’s inner cities, piled into the Yukon. We made two short stops and drove back home, spending most of the day in the cacophonous car, but I didn’t care. Once, we had made it to a bluff, looking down at the teal waters. My new clothes, which were indeed racier than anything else I owned, bared my skin to the sun and the breeze, which gave me a sense of renewal and the courage to be seen. I took a photo for Instagram, which I would download that night, tightly sucking in for standing bow pose. My hair whipped in the wind. For a moment, I embodied the image. I was enlivened.
My spiral into disordered eating coincided with glorifying many insurmountable icons of beauty, but there is something about the Brandy Girl that was particularly influential in this during my formative years. Growing up in Silicon Valley, the Brandy Girl was all around me. I was astonished to tangentially know of the employee in the documentary who was interviewed from the Palo Alto location. This fact evoked a vulnerability that still felt so real three years after high school: the shame I felt unfolding from the recognition of some hometown celebrity. Also, the shame of being seen by one of these Brandy Girl types was to be seen as a fraud because of my inability to be the person that these clothes were made for. This became more apparent in high school…dozens of teenage girls in Brandy tops and Lululemon leggings in lines to rehearse in the mirrored walls of Dance PE. Was there no way we couldn’t size each other up? The Brandy Girl had an effortlessness that was primarily characterized by skinniness and whiteness and if you weren’t skinny and white or wearing Brandy Melville or Lululemon, then you were an outcast. There were definite lines drawn in the locker room. If you weren’t with them, you were against them. I was resolute in my decision, in picking sides I had picked the hive mind of the white teenage girl.
The shame of being seen by one of these Brandy Girl types was to be seen as a fraud because of my inability to be the person that these clothes were made for.
I can’t say I picked wrongly. Brandy Melville seemed to be the "safest" decision I could make in an environment where I had to define myself stylistically and every other option seemed so polarizing to the status quo. As a Filipino who grew up in a predominantly White and Hispanic area and a young girl uncertain of her identity, I had limited ideas for who I thought I could be, what I could write about, and what I thought I could be interested in. I'm still limited in my self-perception, less so, but still. I'm learning to open myself up to the possibilities of a life beyond the images I was bombarded with in high school. I'm unlearning that we weren’t all meant to live identical lives, have long hair, be well-socialized, attend four-year colleges, desire to reside in Cape Cod, and be seductive in soft polyester.
Furthermore, Brandy Melville did not aid me in climbing the social ranks, but it was a part of salient experiences that bonded me and my friends. Window shopping, observing and gossiping about the scandalous, but gorgeous older girl pouting at the counter, saving money from our after-school bored-to-tears bookkeeping job to have a taste of the fantasy, accidentally or purposely matching our outfits, standing FOUR HOURS in the San Francisco rain to gorge ourselves at the Brandy Bins…but also, seeing the vision realized and skewed towards one person or another (it is one size, after all), comparing sizes, stomach vacuums, weights, diets (or lack thereof), cleavage, thigh gaps. We were united under our insecurities.
I'm learning to open myself up to the possibilities of a life beyond the images I was bombarded with in high school. I'm unlearning that we weren’t all meant to live identical lives, have long hair, be well-socialized, attend four-year colleges, desire to reside in Cape Cod, and be seductive in soft polyester.
I cringe, but we were all trying our best to come into ourselves with the least amount of awkwardness possible, which proved impossible. Undoubtedly, we absorbed the messages Brandy Melville was sending us, if not the sneaky libertarian lean, then certainly their “one size fits all” ideology. The brand has displayed a blatant apathy for the culture and for human lives in every part of the supply chain. Unfortunately, this ethos has been crucial in numbing young girls to the realities of modern women. I vividly remember a friend of mine telling me that most women have flat stomachs– a Brandy doctrine if I’d ever heard one. Besides making us unfairly scrutinize our own blossoming bodies and those around us, I believe the “one size fits all“ credo seeped into other ways of inflexible and harmful thinking about our experiences. It taught us that we could contextualize ourselves and know who we were by belonging to a genre of people, but there was a more sinister force at hand, a kind of ignominious tribalism. Brandy Melville taught us to assume each other's shared privileges and circumstances, to live in a homogeneous bubble of elitist post-feminism and post-racism, or at the very least, to compartmentalize all of these injustices neatly in a place unseen.
Brandy Melville taught us to assume each other's shared privileges and circumstances, to live in a homogeneous bubble of elitist post-feminism and post-racism, or at the very least, to compartmentalize all of these injustices neatly in a place unseen.
Ironically, the rise of Brandy Melville made everyone more generic than it made them popular. It became a “safe“ option for those who could fit, a marker of conformity and familiarity. You know me, I’m just like you, the girl next door. For many young girls, Brandy makes the world go round. Even the negative publicity acknowledges that their expositions are powerless in stopping the empire of posh and prep and the herds of guileless teenage girls who just want to fit in. In the meantime, I’m sure only a very small percentage of teenage girls are keeping up with Business Insider. What Brandy Girls are watching tell-all documentaries about their favorite brands when they could be buying them?
When giving context to my hometown and who I was in high school during one of my therapy sessions, I described my assimilation to the masses as specifically consisting of wearing Brandy Melville and Lululemon. These brands had woven themselves into the fabric of my story as old dreams of belonging. He then quickly pointed out that I was not, in fact, wearing any of those brands, or types of clothing that day. It was plain and evident as I looked down at my plaid dress, my lagoon-colored wool trenchcoat, the burgundy Chelsea boots that made me feel like a Beatle. Nonetheless, I was relieved in being reminded that today, I had chosen to look like myself.