When she spots one of many painted picket indicators outdoors a Brandy Melville retailer, filmmaker Eva Orner stops in her tracks. “Since I started doing the documentary, I always sneak in and check out how many people are in there and what they’re selling,” she tells Vanity Fair. What she sees, she says, is “horrifying. I think ‘cult’ is a word that is bandied around a lot, and we were very careful when we decided to use it.”
Orner is referring to the title of her newest documentary, Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, which debuts on HBO on April 9. In it, the Oscar winner (Taxi to the Dark Side) unspools the darkish internal workings of a quick vogue firm that targets teenagers and has been worn by the likes of Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner. According to the doc, beneath mushy baby-tees emblazoned with sayings like “Stressed, Depressed, But Well Dressed” is a shadowy operation that each preys upon and earnings off feminine insecurity. The phrases “antisemitism,” “racism,” and “sexism” are tossed out inside the first three minutes of the movie concerning sure executives, a harbinger of darkish deeds to be revealed. Brandy Melville didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
“Most companies maybe do one bad thing,” says Orner. With Brandy Melville, “something bad happens, and then something worse happens. And it just keeps going. By the end, your jaw is on the floor.”
Orner, an Australian who drives an electrical automotive and has adopted a vegetarian food plan, was launched to Brandy Melville by Oscar-nominated producer Jonathan Chinn (Black Sheep) and Oscar-winning producer Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man). As the movie reveals, the shop presents itself as much less of a label than as a way of life. Brandy Melville hires stunning women who appear in style—sometimes skinny, white, and below the age of 18—who are sometimes recruited whereas procuring within the retailer, the doc claims. Candidates are requested to submit full-body photographs and provide up their social media handles within the place of any skill-based {qualifications}, stated one former worker that Orner interviewed.
Staff members of coloration are employed however are sometimes relegated to working in inventory rooms, ex-employees informed the filmmaker. Those who work at a retailer’s entrance—all of whom should match the “one size fits most” garments the corporate carries—are required to take every day “store style” photographs which can be despatched to Brandy Melville’s enigmatic founder, former employees within the doc defined. Employees could possibly be—and reportedly have been—employed and fired primarily based on such pictures. “They’re like 16-year-old girls. You can find, like, 700 different reasons to fire them,” one nameless firm worker says within the doc. “Like, it’s too easy. It wasn’t even fair.”
All of this info was unearthed earlier than Orner started engaged on her movie by lawsuits introduced towards the corporate and reporting by Kate Taylor, an investigative journalist at Business Insider. (Brandy Melville denied all wrongdoing in a 2022 class-action lawsuit introduced by ex-employees. The firm settled for $1.5 million.) But the revelations haven’t made a lot of a dent in Brandy Melville’s income. “There has been an exposé on this company. A lot of young girls know that the company’s not great, but they still shop there,” Orner explains. “And I find that really disturbing. There comes a point in your life where you have to [decide], What kind of person do I want to be? When a brand’s been exposed as being really shit, you can get clothes elsewhere. The fact that people are so locked into this brand is really surprising.”
Orner got down to make a movie that will contextualize the corporate’s moral points inside a bigger environmental panorama. Her cameras traveled to the far reaches of Prato, Italy—the place Brandy Melville’s clothes is produced in crowded factories—and Ghana, which has develop into a dumping floor for heaps of undesirable clothes. In the documentary, former workers members stated that higher-ups would purchase the non-Brandy shirts off their backs so they might replicate and mass produce their design—a observe that has led to copyright infringement fits towards the model. (After being sued by Forever 21 in 2016, Brandy Melville’s guardian firm settled out of courtroom.)
“The level of exploitation against women is staggering,” says Orner, particularly when it’s additional enabled by social media platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok. “You are being exploited by companies and doing their work when you make videos promoting them and [don’t] get paid,” she explains. “There are these armies of young girls advertising for these evil companies who are just laughing all the way to the bank.”