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[producer] Everyone good?
So, let's start with some easy stuff at the beginning.
How did you first hear about Brandy Melville?
I heard about Brandy first when I was in seventh grade.
Everyone was wearing it at school.
You had to have it.
If you didn't have it, what were you doing?
And, um,
I remember I walked into the store
and I bought the star necklace that was all over Pinterest.
And me and my seven friends wore it.
And I felt so cool and accepted
that I had a piece of Brandy Melville.
And...
I remember, um, thinking that
the girls that didn't wear it, they weren't as great as I was.
Maybe they weren't as pretty.
Maybe there was something wrong with them.
It was like the social norm at the time.
[up-tempo, funky music playing]
Ever since I was like, 13,
I've been obsessed with Brandy Melville.
[woman 1] Fashion is identity,
especially for teenage girls.
This is how you show who you are,
what you believe, who you're friends with,
and I think Brandy Melville encapsulates that
better than almost any other brand.
But there's also a dark side.
[music intensifies]
[woman 2] The fashion industry has always been
built on the back of exploitation.
[woman 3] When it comes to fast fashion,
it often is a story of abuse.
[woman 4] From the beginning of the supply chain to the end,
we're all being exploited by the same system.
[woman 5] You say you care about human rights
and the environment.
What do your clothes say about you?
[woman 1] It's easy to think,
"Who cares a fast fashion brand is bad?
We already know this."
But the story of Brandy Melville is a story
about anti-Semitism,
racism, sexism.
It's a story about this wider system of exploitation
at Brandy Melville
and in the fashion industry globally.
[dramatic music playing]
Hey, guys. I'm back in Brandy. It's because I'm obsessed,
and I wanted to come back and get more things
even though I got way too much already.
It's actually a problem.
But I love every single thing here.
[gentle music playing]
Brandy Melville is probably my all-time favorite store.
So I went to Brandy the other day
and did some damage.
This is the most exciting haul I've ever done.
Ever. Ever, ever, ever.
It's all from Brandy Melville.
Oh! I love it, I love it, I love it.
[woman 6] One day in middle school,
everyone was suddenly wearing Brandy Melville.
Brandy Melville was, like, all the rage.
[woman 7] Feminine, very form fitting.
Like, a lot of the shirts are cropped.
Their stuff was notoriously soft.
This, like, A-line skater skirt
and, like, a T-shirt with a cupcake on it.
[woman 7] A lot of pretty, like, girlie prints.
Like, you see bows, hearts, little cute graphics.
[woman 6] Sort of trendy, like young girl beachy style.
[woman 8] It's like Americana, California.
Brandy Melville was, like, my world when I was a teenager.
[woman 6] The reason why I liked it?
I mean, I think it's just...
because everyone else liked it.
[tender piano melody playing]
[woman 9] It was my sophomore year of high school.
I was 15 years old.
And I went into the Brandy Melville store.
I was immediately approached by one of the workers,
and she asked me
if she could take a picture of my outfit
for "store style," she called it.
Um... And I told her... I told her that she could.
And after she took the picture,
she says, "Oh, thank you,"
asked for my Instagram, then I walk out.
And I had a smile on my face for the rest of the day.
Told everybody at school, told anyone I knew, really.
I told... I told everybody.
Everything about it
was just a dream come true to me at the time.
[mellow electronic music playing]
-[car horns honking] -[traffic buzzing]
[woman 1] I spend a lot of time doing
the day-to-day news of the retail industry.
So a lot of, "What's happening with Gap's earnings?
What's happening at McDonald's?"
And then the last couple of years
I've been able to go deeper on these big stories,
which brought me to this brand that teenagers love
that most adults haven't heard about.
Brandy Melville.
The first thing that you hear about Brandy Melville
is that it's one size fits all...
and that size is tiny.
I was like, this is something that doesn't seem
like it should be happening in fashion anymore.
I love you, Brandy Melville!
[Kate] In the last decade, there's been
more and more pushes towards inclusivity.
We have more plus-size, we have more diversity
in bodies that we're seeing.
Brandy Melville just took things in the opposite direction
where it says there's one skinny,
perfect, tiny, ideal size.
This is something that was
explicitly part of the business model.
Everything I've been learning about Gen Z teenagers today
is that they wouldn't put up with this.
Kind of weird.
[dramatic music playing]
[woman 10] Here's a thing that me and my friends joke about.
We're like, "Fuck Brandy Melville.
I'm never shopping there again. You couldn't make me."
But like, god damn, the baby tees!
They fit so good. They're so small and cute.
[woman 3] I remember when I saw an article
about the Brandy Melville Instagram
and how it was this phenomenon with one-size-fits-all clothing.
[dramatic music playing]
And that was, like, the first time I ever
heard of this brand.
And then suddenly, I saw a lot of stores popping up
around New York City.
When I was at Teen Vogue, part of my job
as the fashion news editor
was to kind of report on celebrity style.
What is Taylor Swift wearing?
How to get the look.
Sometimes, you know, even the celebrity
would wear a Brandy Melville tee,
and that would be an easy, cheap T-shirt that you can also get.
People are buying into not just a white T-shirt.
They're buying into that Brandy Melville lifestyle.
I think it's impossible to talk about Brandy Melville
and not talk about social media.
Don't need a camera or anything. Just use your phone.
Be like, "Hey, what's going on?"
And then they watch it.
[Kate] Brandy Melville started opening stores in the U.S.
at the time that you had a lot of teenage girls
really creating their own content for the first time
without any gatekeepers,
without being filtered through a fashion magazine
or through adults in any way.
-Outfit check with friends! -Gucci, Brandy Melville pants...
[Kate] This was allowing teenage girls to see themselves
and portray themselves the way they want
and push the limits for the first time.
A lot of the Brandy Melville photographers
were teenagers themselves.
All right. We're going to shoot the first look
on the famous white wall.
[Kate] So, it was teenagers taking photos of teenagers
to post on social media.
And it was this whole kind of
Brandy Melville extended universe
where it felt genuine because it was genuine.
That taxi driver right there
just let us take a bunch of photos in his taxi,
and they're so good.
[giggles]
[woman 11] I started to notice like, Brandy, I don't know,
was all over Tumblr. I was a big Tumblr girl.
My nickname in high school was "Door."
That's what my parents called me because I had my door closed,
was in my room all day, just online.
[gentle music playing]
They had this dress. The, like, iconic Jada dress.
I... I don't know if you...
But it had, like, this one, like, band across the back,
and it was kinda open back.
I thought it was kinda cool to show off your back
because then they had this bra
that had all these kind of like strips across it.
Now looking back, I'm like, "I would never wear that."
But I took some, like, self-portrait photos,
which I used to do a lot back in high school,
and I posted it on Tumblr.
And I think that was, like,
the biggest post I ever had on there.
I think it got, like, 100,000 reblogs or whatever
[counter clicking rapidly]
[gentle music continues]
I was following the Brandy Melville Instagram.
They were really into hair moving.
And so was I at the time. I don't know why.
I think that was kind of the photo style that I really liked.
Really natural.
You know, like you're following somebody around,
and they turn back and look at you.
A little bit conceptual.
Very bohemian, like, summertime stuff.
[laughs] But I just loved it.
I was already doing basically
what the Brandy photographers would do with their friends
of, like, get a bag of clothes
and go run around and take pictures.
I thought it looked really fun, kind of like a community.
And one of my friends had a Brandy shirt,
and I was like, "Let me take a couple pictures like this.
Maybe they'll post it or something."
They both had really long, kind of blondish hair,
and they were just shaking their hair back and forth
with, like, some stupid striped T-shirts on
in, like, the Back Bay of Newport Beach,
and that's... that's the picture that they posted.
[gentle tonal electronic music playing]
They flipped it to the side and put some weird filter over that.
It was so random.
And then that's when I got the email.
It was super short. It was, "Hey.
Let me know if you'd like to work together sometime."
There was no email signature.
There was no, "Hi, I'm from this company."
"I really like your work." Nothing.
It just said, "Jessy Longo."
I was like, "Who is this?"
I clicked in, and then I saw @BrandyMelvilleUSA.com.
It was... nuts.
I was around 16, 17.
I was living in Orange County at the time,
and then they had me come to Santa Monica,
and my parents just kind of dropped me off,
and they were kind of just, like, "Okay."
And then I recognized, oh, this was, like, the wall
where they shoot a lot of photos,
you know, in the alleyway.
And then I was starting to put things together,
like, "Okay, so like, it all happens right here."
And that made me really excited.
Then kind of behind the curtain, it's like complete chaos.
[dramatic music playing]
[Kate] "Brandy Melville" is not a person's name.
It is named after these two fictional characters:
Brandy, who is an American,
and Melville, who is an Englishman,
and they somehow meet in Italy and fall in love.
I was kind of confused by this being the name
because the backstory isn't really in line, even,
with the Brandy Melville image at this point.
Everything about this brand gets pretty confusing pretty quickly.
Describing the Brandy business model,
it feels like one of those string boards
where you're trying to connect things
and you look like a conspiracy theorist
because it is so convoluted.
[keyboard keys clicking]
The CEO is usually pretty easy to find
from a quick Google search.
But for Brandy Melville,
there was just nothing there.
No mission statement, no explanation at all.
Like, who is actually running all these stores?
So, as I was digging deeper,
I realized each Brandy Melville store
is owned by a different shell company.
And then Brandy Melville is a trademark
that's owned by a Swiss company.
So, you have all of these different companies.
Kind of trying to figure out how to connect them
can get very, very confusing.
Experts told me that it is probably deliberately confusing.
But on pretty much all of them, the same person is named,
and that person is Stephan Marsan.
There was nothing about him out there.
I was going through Google images
and just scrolling and trying to find anything
to figure out what this guy looked like, what his deal was.
And you start imagining this evil mastermind
wearing, like, Armani suits.
[man 1] Usually, I stay away from Italians,
especially the ones abroad are trouble.
But we got introduced,
and, uh... the vibe was good.
I had a restaurant in Santa Monica,
and they just got here.
[producer] Who are "they"?
Stephan and Jessy.
Stephan is the owner of this brand,
Brandy Melville,
and Jessy was his right hand.
He was able to do everything that Stephan couldn't do,
and also spoke a little bit more English.
Stephan had zero knowledge of English.
We clicked right away.
He became like what in the surface
would appear like a friendship.
He was bald with braces.
The only reason I'm bringing that up is 'cause
once I found out that he ran the Instagram,
it was so funny to me that no one has any idea
that this man, like, in his, I don't know, maybe late 30s,
with, like, sneakers and sweatpants on,
is running the Instagram that all these teenage girls
are, like, fanning over.
Yeah, hopefully Brandy notices me
once I wear their clothes and post in their wall.
Like, that'd be so cool to be known to Brandy Melville.
Love you, Brandy, if you're watching.
[Willow] It was definitely just strange. It was bizarre.
I guess you could call him a creative director.
But I never got an official title
of anyone ever that worked there.
We went into the store for a bit,
and he was just grabbing things, throwing them in bags.
I was also kind of, like, what the fuck is this place?
-Sorry, I don't know if I can... -[producer] No, you can swear.
And then two models showed up,
and it was, you know, not anything like,
"You should style this with that."
It was just a bag of clothes
and, like, kind of, "Show me what you got."
It was a mess.
I was really surprised that they were able to have
such a large business at that scale.
I mean, even their office space was just...
It wasn't an office space.
It was, like, a warehouse with crap everywhere.
It wasn't like a global, you know, brand.
And from day one, I knew that, like, this place
is not your conventional clothing company.
[dramatic music playing]
We want things.
It's kind of like that adrenaline rush.
That endorphin that you get when you find something cute.
Oh, my gosh!
Fast fashion brands have kind of figured out
exactly what you want when you want it,
and you can have it for cheap.
A lot of people credit ZARA as sort of this starter
of the fast fashion model.
In the '70s, they opened their first store.
And then, as the '80s progressed,
they decided to do quicker trends
that they made themselves in-house.
The faster they got them out, the faster people were buying.
So, their whole model was to do quick trends at low prices.
They were dropping new styles every week,
so that was about 52 seasons a year.
Some of the newer brands have gone even further.
SHEIN, for example, advertises
that they drop about a thousand styles a week.
And now, social media advertising has made shopping
so much easier than it has ever been.
[dramatic music playing]
And in that way, it's also changed our shopping habits
because we're often seeing things
we don't necessarily need,
but it's kind of playing into
our nature of like, "Well, I want that."
In order for fast fashion to succeed,
it needs us to see clothing as something
that we can just pick up and get rid of.
And that's why it works.
You can access it so easily
that it's almost like, why wouldn't you?
I got, literally... a whole lot.
[car horns honking]
[former store owner] I remember once
Stephan was bragging about how the store on Saturday or Sunday
did, like, $20,000 or $25,000.
And I'm looking at the numbers, and I go,
like, goddamn,
that's... that's not a bad model.
Stephan said, "Why don't you open store in Canada?"
And I go, like, "With these clothes?
I'm not going to Canada. I mean, Canada is cold."
And he was like, "Just go to Canada."
So, I opened the first store in Canada,
in Vancouver, April 2012.
But the big jump was when I opened Toronto.
I kid you not, I had, like, a ten-block line waiting outside.
[crowd screaming]
It was insane.
This is Brandy Melville, Canada, Toronto,
coming at you live on Queen Street,
opening in five minutes.
[dramatic music playing]
[former store owner] I had stores come and complain to me
because the line was blocking the entrance of other stores,
and they were pissed.
"Who is the owner? What's going on?
What is this?"
Ha, this is success.
Based on what I've heard from former executives, insiders,
it's an incredibly successful business.
[dramatic music playing]
I heard Abercrombie looked into buying Brandy Melville,
and when the bankers looked at the financials,
they were a bit shocked by how successful it was.
[former store owner] Stephan is a very, very, very smart guy.
He understood that the social media
would get the attention of the masses.
Instagram, they had a very efficient impact
on these little girls.
Fourteen, 15, 16,
that's all they did.
As soon as we posted something,
you can see the number of likes scrolling.
Like, one, two, three, four, five, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.
It was, like, so fast.
They never use advertisement.
Their advertisement was Instagram
and was the celebrity wearing things around.
We had so many from the Disney Channel like Ciley Myrus,
Miley Cyrus, or whatever her name is.
[producer] Miley Cyrus.
[former store owner] They had the Jenner, Kyla?
What's her name? Ky...
Well, I not very good with this.
The daughter of Cindy Crawford,
she happened to live in New York
right above the store.
I'm Kaia Gerber,
and I'm going to be showing you what I wear in a week.
[man 2] Stephan loved her.
So, we had literally luggages full of clothes
left with the concierge.
These sweatpants are Brandy Melville.
Shout out, because Brandy Melville
has been a staple in my life
since I was in, like, fifth grade.
[former store owner] They'd have people
scrolling through Instagram and see
if you have at least, like, a million followers,
you would get a private message saying,
"Hey, are you interested?
We are going to send you a box of clothes
for free for you to keep.
All you have to do is post it."
Which is normal. Everybody does that.
I don't know why they gave me all these clothes
but thank you so much, Brandy. So cute. It's so cute.
[dramatic music playing]
The United States and Europe are consuming
around 36 billion units of clothing a year,
and 85% of that is getting discarded.
With numbers like that,
where is all that clothing supposed to go?
Donation bins are pretty common.
I live next door to one, and I can hear it.
Like, every single night, you hear this "Bang!"
and it's going on and on.
I'm seeing these clothing bins get filled to the brim.
I think most people think
they actually are donating their clothes,
and that is inherently a good thing.
But our systems are not in place in order to get clothing
to either be recycled or donated properly,
and therefore, it's just ending up somewhere else.
[ominous music playing]
[crowd chatter]
Ghana is like a dumping ground for our unwanted fast fashion.
We have deals with countries in Africa to take the clothing,
even though they don't necessarily need it.
[man 3] We are currently in Kantamanto Market,
which is the largest secondhand economy in the world.
Kantamanto sees around 15 million garments each week.
And then, just for context, Ghana is a country
that only has 32 million people.
So, if you look at it, that means, like,
almost, like, every Ghanaian needs to buy
at least one outfit every week
for us to consume the amount of stuff
that comes in from the Global North.
So, the U.S., Canada, UK, other parts of Europe.
In Ghana, secondhand clothing is called "Obruni Wawu,"
which means "dead white man's clothes."
The term comes from the fact
that when clothing started flooding in here,
people assumed that it came from people who had died.
Because why else would there be so much of it?
[Sammy] The retailers buy the bales from the importers,
but the retailers have no idea what's in the bale.
They invest huge sums of money
into basically a surprise box.
And the quality keeps getting worse.
This is because with fast fashion
there is no attention paid into quality anymore.
So you go, and the only things that you're finding
are, like, you know, low-quality goods.
[Alyssa] United States and Europe
have sort of forced this arrangement on these countries.
And when they have tried to stop it,
the United States and Europe
have imposed punishments on them.
For example, trying to take away the duty-free status
of anybody that wouldn't take the secondhand clothing,
or taxing them in ways, or taking away grant money.
[Liz] Fast fashion has essentially turned
all clothing just into weight.
It's just being shuffled around the world.
You try to make a couple pennies off of it.
You move it somewhere else,
you try to make another couple pennies off of it.
And you can't escape the truth
which is that there is too much clothing.
[dramatic music playing]
[woman 6] It wasn't until after I worked at Brandy Melville
that I even realized that Brandy Melville
was part of fast fashion,
and how fast fashion was impacting the world
and our environment.
[former store owner] Stephan's father
started the company in Italy.
The father was making T-shirts,
just T-shirts.
[woman 12] In Italy, the Brandy that I knew
when I was a teenager
was these weird sentences that they had on the T-shirts,
like "Stressed, Depressed, But Well Dressed."
[laughs]
When I was 19,
my cousin started to work with Stephan
and Brandy Melville family.
And I said, "Okay. Can I... can I try?"
And I started to work, first in Rome.
I mean, I was 19 years old.
I was basically working with all girls.
It was like the dream for, like, a guy 19 years old.
Brandy Melville was not popular when it was in Italy.
[former senior VP] The girls wouldn't pull their hair off
for Brandy Melville like they do in the U.S.
While I worked there, they had this, like, switch.
[former senior VP] They started focusing all the product
for the U.S. market.
Stephan had moved there and based everything,
like every research into the U.S.
That was... that was his main target.
[dramatic music playing]
I was working at Brandy exactly during that time.
So, Brandy turned to this California girl look.
A white, blonde, tall, skinny, surfer girl
that looked beautiful naturally without makeup.
You could really feel this shift coming,
that they wanted to go in this direction
with this type of girl,
this type of body shape.
[former store owner] They end up opening the first one
by UCLA in 2009, or something like that.
[former senior VP] And that's when
Brandy Melville exploded,
and became what it became.
[former store owner] It was a thing to be a Brandy girl.
I never heard of Chanel girl or, like, a Gucci girl,
or even, like, a lululemon girl.
But this was a thing.
It was the Brandy girl.
So, today I have the opening shift at Brandy Melville.
-On my way to work. -Oh, we're headed to Brandy.
-So now we're at work. -Welcome to my channel.
[Kate] It is amazing how much content there is
from Brandy Melville employees about Brandy Melville.
There are these videos with hundreds of thousands of views
that are just, "A day in my life as a Brandy Melville employee."
I'm on cash today, which is my favorite thing.
[Kate] It was a little bit of, like, a hangout spot.
A place to kind of, like, see and be seen.
These videos are so, so popular.
This is what the behind the store looks like right now.
[Kate] It somehow has become the job
that all of these teen girls want to have.
[dramatic music playing]
[Natasha] When I was 15, I was sitting at a cafe,
reading my summer reading book,
um, and a woman came up to me and said,
"Want to work at Brandy Melville?"
She's, like, "You look so cute.
I think you would look great working at our store."
And I was like, "Yeah, I want to work at Brandy Melville."
Like, I thought it was so cool.
They were opening a store that next day in Palo Alto,
and she wanted me to be one of the ten girls
who were gonna be opening this new store.
When I started, I realized that they definitely, like, found
the other, like, popular girls in our community
to start working at this store.
[producer] Were you even looking for a job?
No, I wasn't looking for a job.
[woman 10] I moved to New York. I had no job, no apartment.
I was, like, 30 pounds lighter.
Just, like, very skinny, blonde.
I walked into Brandy Melville, and I was like,
oh, my God, everyone here is so pretty.
Like, I wanna work here.
They essentially, like, hired me on the spot.
[laughs]
[Natasha] There was a stereotype against Brandy Melville
for only hiring skinny white girls.
That was sort of what everyone knew about the store,
but they shopped there, and it was cool anyways.
Like, "This is what you want to look like. This is your goal."
The white girl, mostly blonde, sometimes brunette.
Cool girl. Like, pretty girl.
A little basic but knows how to follow the trends.
Skinny, small. Definitely young.
She's obviously, like, beautiful.
Thin, blonde hair, blue eyes,
pale, white.
[former store owner] There was a quiet, non-written agreement
where you need good-looking girls at the store.
[producer] Did Stephan tell you that or somebody else?
All the guideline come from Stephan.
In fact, I was even encouraged to pay them more,
even though they were not good at what they did.
[woman 13] I remember one of my assistant managers and I,
when we were closing with another sales associate
who was younger,
she had this, like, Swiffer brush,
but didn't have the Swiffer pad on the Swiffer.
So, she was just, like, plastic to concrete,
just scraping.
So, it's girls that, like, clearly don't have
some key working skills. It's just, like, gone.
A customer just walked in. Should I say hi?
[Kate] There's an entire subset of TikTok parodies and memes,
where it's people talking about shopping at Brandy Melville
and just being ignored.
[nonchalantly] Hey. Welcome to Brandy Melville.
Do you need something? I'm kinda busy.
It's very, like, exclusive.
Like, you're supposed to feel like you're part of a club
if you work there.
Did you try this on?
[Lee] So the energy is kind of, like, mean girl, catty.
I think she heard us.
You're not supposed to be rude, but...
they wouldn't fire you, probably, if you were.
Next time, can you make sure you take this off the hanger?
Just makes it easier for us. Thanks.
I was totally in this vibe, as well.
I remember, like, walking around and feeling like,
I'm, like, different because I work here,
and all the people who shop here are just, like, boring.
And, like, "Oh, I'm going in the secret door in the back,"
and, like, "You can't come back here."
[Cate] I was always looking forward to it when at school.
I'm gonna wear my best outfit.
I'm gonna walk past all the customers,
and they're gonna look up to me,
and their kids are gonna look up to me.
And I felt really special.
[dramatic music playing]
For Stephan, if they were really light-skinned and redhead
was, like, the number one, the top of the top,
which was funny to us because, like,
"Oh, he's doing that because he's a redhead."
So, we would always laugh about him
basically trying to attract only the elite.
Let's call it probably the cool kids in school and everything.
That's then after what all the other girls in schools wanted.
[Willow] It was really hard to find models Stephan would like.
I'd send him so many different kind of models.
I was interested in girls with really unique facial features.
But it was very clear the kind of models
and aesthetic that they wanted.
[woman 7] When I applied,
it was like a shot in the dark for me, to be honest,
because I am part Asian
and a lot of the girls in the store,
they were all tall, skinny, blonde, white girls,
and I was like, "I don't stand a chance against them."
[dramatic music playing]
I remember I had to submit a full body photo,
which was really interesting and also all my social media,
like Instagram handle and everything.
I feel like a lot of the questions
weren't what I was expecting.
I feel like they're asking more about where I like to shop
and, like, what YouTubers I like to watch.
Nothing really about, like, my skills,
nothing really about my work history.
But being 17, and being in love with Brandy Melville,
I was, like, answering whatever they wanted me to say.
I started off as a sales associate.
Me and, like, another minority Brandy Melville worker
were the only ones behind the cash register
and we kind of made a joke like,
"Oh, we're always working together behind the register."
But what I notice is that
the really pretty, like, model-like white girls,
they got to be the ones to greet customers,
to be, like, the face of the store.
[former senior VP] With Asians, after they opened in China
and the store made a shitload of money,
Stephan was happy with Chinese people.
But in regards of Black people,
he...
he didn't want a lot of Black people.
[Lee] When I started working there,
you go down, and you go into the stockroom
and you see all the other people who are working there
who are not white.
Yeah, there was an awareness.
But we all just kind of...
side-eyed it and tried to do our job.
[Kali] I started working at Brandy Melville
when I was probably just turning 16.
I was a minor, of course, so, it's very hard to find jobs
when you're not 18,
and so I was so excited.
[producer] What was your title or role there?
I started off as fitting room,
and then I eventually moved to stock.
-[solemn music playing] -[chatter]
There was no white people working in the stockroom.
If you're white, you had to be in sight.
-[screams] -[laughter]
We all knew it was not right
that we were all, you know, pushed in the back out of sight.
But it wasn't something we were necessarily mad about
because I just loved being around my people.
Like, people of color, Hispanic and Black people.
So, it was kind of like,
you win some, you lose some.
[dramatic music playing]
Fashion has been built on these very racist, colonial structures
and also on the backs of women,
mostly women of color.
The way that the industry gets away with abusive situations
is by dehumanizing this workforce.
[dramatic music playing]
These women are hidden from our consciousness.
We have an existing head-carrying culture,
where we carry buckets of water,
or maybe, like, five-kg items on our heads.
[Liz] Kayayei are female head porters.
It's a term that literally means "she who carries the burden."
In Kantamanto, they carry bales of secondhand clothing
that weigh a minimum of 120 pounds.
So, it's their entire body weight on their heads.
[Chloe] This is dangerous,
and it's literally backbreaking
if you carry 50 kg ten times a day.
That's 500 kg on a woman's body.
[crowd chatter]
A lot of the girls have chest pains.
They have scoliosis from the work.
It's literally crushing cartilage, compressing it.
And some of them, their spines are fused.
They have, like, sharp tips here.
So they're in pain every day.
Once you stop the work
then the deterioration will stop,
but it will not go back to how it was.
Seeing my sisters go through it is...
seeing another human being go through it,
this is wrong.
No one should have to go through this.
[dramatic music playing]
I've been wanting more Brandy T-shirts
because they're such great material
and they're just the perfect oversized fit.
I just love the way my beachy necklaces
looked with this button detail.
They have this little, dainty floral pattern
all over them, which I think is so cute.
I, one day, was wearing a shirt to work
that was a little bit unique.
When it came out on the floor, like, a few weeks later
in a shipment, I was like,
that's the shirt that I was wearing.
[Kali] There was this white girl.
We were friends. She was like, "Oh, my God.
Like, Stephan, he just paid me $100
for the sweater I am wearing." So they could copy it!
One day I come in, the higher ups,
they were like, "We love your pants."
And they're like,
"Where did you get them, and can you show us?"
So, I showed them online, and they bought the pants.
They paid, like, $50 for express shipping.
I didn't get paid for my pants that they stole,
so I am confused.
Where is my $100?
[Kate] It was such a weird, ramshackle way
to run a business, but it worked,
because then they were able to kind of mass produce
what these cool girls were already wearing.
In some cases, the names of these things
on the Brandy Melville website,
it'll be like, "Jocelyn's Shirt,"
and it'll be because the shirt was literally purchased
off of Jocelyn's back.
[eerie music playing]
Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars
developing a brand.
Brandy doesn't do that.
[former store owner] I don't understand these big brands.
They have to hire a guy that is probably in his 40s,
and he has to design clothes for a 14-year-old girl.
What? Why?
Isn't it easier to ask the 14-year-old girl what she likes,
instead of trying to figure out what she likes?
Um, I like these shirts, but not this style.
This is too tight to me.
I like this skirt. I have it.
My friend Phoebe literally was, like,
"Oh, you guys should sell socks."
And then they started selling socks.
[Marta] They would ask me to look up clothes on his computer
and order them, and then they would remake them.
[former store owner] It happen, like, a few times.
We had stuff that had to be recalled
because there was an infringement
of property rights.
And they would get a notice from an attorney,
and so, they would call and tell me,
"Oh, you have to take all the stuff out."
For a little bit, Jessy was showing me graphics
and things, "Do you like this? What about this color?"
"Product research" was what they called it.
[former senior VP] The product research girls,
they were girls that worked there,
and Stephan thought they had, like, uh, really good style.
[girl] Let's pick an outfit.
[former store owner] They give credit cards to the girls
that they consider wealthy,
from Malibu or Calabasas.
Very white neighborhoods, good family.
It's basically the elite.
[former senior VP] It was, like,
"I want that as my top clientele,
to see what they buy, to produce what they want."
[girl] So many clothes. Wow.
They come back with a bunch of bags.
We get in the back.
They try the stuff.
Change a few things here and there.
See how it fits.
And then we do, like, maybe 200 pieces.
We test it on Santa Monica.
If it's a bestseller, we start production.
I am going to China with Brandy Melville
to do a bunch of, like, product research and stuff.
I will be going to Milan, Italy for Brandy Melville.
[dramatic music playing]
The executives would take certain favorite girls
to China or to Italy.
We're flying business class. It is so nice.
[girl 1] We saw the Alps from above.
Guess who just landed in Guangzhou!
[Willow] The girls would go to the factory
where a lot of things are made,
and they would have the girls pick out stuff they liked.
And that was obviously an amazing trip to get to go on.
[girl 1] We got to the factory,
and I looked through a lot of samples
and filtered them out to which ones I liked.
I never finished the vlog yesterday
because we were in fittings for, like, so many hours.
[Kate] It was incredibly competitive
to be invited to be on one of these trips.
We're living very luxuriously,
and I don't want to go home, ever.
They were treated like queen.
Best hotel, best restaurants, best of everything.
[girl 2] I can't wait to see all of the stuff
that we worked on in China
make it to all of the stores worldwide.
It'll be so cool to see things
and be, like, hey, like, I'm the reason
why those jeans are that color,
or I'm the reason why those pants fit like that.
So cool.
[Kate] Brandy Melville harnesses that energy
of "Teenage girls can do anything.
Teenage girls have this amazing design capability.
They have this eye for fashion."
They are paying these people close to minimum wage
to do what, at another company,
the senior leadership might be doing,
to make them extremely rich.
[former store owner] The clothes, let me tell you.
The clothes were not that good quality.
It was a very cheap product.
But Stephan was holding himself as one of the luxury brands.
Some of their stuff was super soft
but definitely thin, wouldn't last long.
You'd get holes in the seams.
Even as a sales associate,
having to put a tag in something,
and just that, like, thin little needle of a tag
would, like, destroy a shirt.
[former store owner] I had shorts that completely open up.
Clothes were just, like, falling apart.
I had entire boxes that I had to throw away.
For me, this was mind blowing.
[Kate] A lot of the Brandy Melville clothing
says "Made in Italy,"
which is, I think in the U.S.,
a lot of people see as this sign of quality and luxury.
[Melissa] Brandy was famous for, like, being produced in Italy.
It's an Italian brand.
But then I started wondering, "Hm, made in Italy, yeah,
but the quality is quite bad."
And sometimes I could hear, like,
the owner talking,
and, obviously, because I speak Italian
and maybe sometimes they forgot that I understood
everything what they were talking about,
I could always hear them talk about
the clothes being produced in Prato
and, like, pickups from Prato and factories in Prato.
I always heard about this city. I was like, what is this Prato?
[dramatic music playing]
[man 4] Prato is the most important textile hub
in Europe.
It's a real long tradition.
For 100 years, we are specialized
in the luxury brand.
People come here from other poor region of Italy to work.
Now we are the biggest in production
for the most important fast fashion brands in Europe.
The first Chinese people in Prato
arrived during the '90s.
Now, they are ten percent of our population.
They decided to work for themselves,
opening Pronto Moda factories.
Pronto Moda, it is fast fashion.
You know, a T-shirt that you use three, four, or five times,
and then you throw away because they are very cheap.
It's cheap. It's very, very cheap.
[in Italian]
[in English] And the rest is history.
And now, the label contains the written
"Made in Italy."
They are made in Italy.
They are made in Prato.
[in Italian]
[former senior VP] When I started working with them,
basically, Brandy Melville
had the biggest factory in Prato at the moment.
Let's say that they need to produce
a certain amount of T-shirts.
There is a machine cutting all the shapes.
And then, all those shapes,
they're given to a Chinese company that come,
take all the pieces, and bring it back.
The part I saw was, like, everyone was pretty happy
because Brandy was getting a good deal
and everyone was making money.
And if you have, like, a company like Brandy Melville
that keep producing, producing, producing,
that's... that's a good perk in Italy.
I think everybody outsources their production
for the most part these days.
I mean, very few companies have in-house production.
Subcontracting happens in every country.
You'll say, "Factory A,
can you produce this product for me?"
Factory A will say yes, but then they will realize
they don't have enough manpower in-house,
or they've got too many orders backed up,
so they'll then go down to Factory B, C, and D
to say, "Can you help me produce this product?"
All of a sudden, you've employed four factories
when you thought you were employing one factory.
Fashion supply chains are really opaque.
[Matteo in Italian]
[reporter in English] For Lina Iervasi,
Head of Immigration at the Prato Police,
raids on Chinese workshops
have become a familiar occurrence.
Several times a week,
she drops by unannounced
on one of over 3,000 small Chinese businesses,
some of which employ workers illegally.
[Matteo] There are a lot of Pronto Moda that are regular.
But sometimes, not always, but sometimes,
we find people that was like slaves.
[in Italian]
[Ayesha] Oh, the sweatshop conversation is not new.
This is an industry that has always
robbed workers of their wages,
and always had unsafe conditions.
[reporter] A dress here sells for just five euros
and a coat for ten.
All the clothes also carry the coveted "Made in Italy" label,
which helps sell them abroad.
[Ayesha] There is this perception, somehow,
that if it's made in Italy that it's somehow better.
The truth of the matter is that
there are good and bad factories everywhere,
and if you want to see sweatshops,
you can see them in Prato,
and you can see them in Los Angeles,
and in the UK.
They exist right here
in the Western Hemisphere.
If something costs very little,
is coming to you in a way that feels impossibly too easy,
impossibly too good,
there is someone somewhere in that supply chain
that is not being paid, that is not being respected.
Why am I in Brandy Melville,
and I'm looking at the sizes, looking for sizes,
and there's no sizes on anything I'm looking at.
And then I find this one shirt, and it says one size fits all.
How is it still open?
How is a shirt one size fits all?
[former senior VP] At first, we had sizes.
At a certain point, all the sizes disappeared.
If you ask someone,
it's like, so basically, you're losing sales,
which is true from a certain point of view.
But Stephan's point of view was,
"We are not losing sales.
We are keeping the brand exclusive
as, like, a goal.
Like, 'Oh, I need to fit in these clothes.'"
[Lee] I realized it on, like, my first shift.
I was like, "Well, like, what about the mediums and larges?"
And they were like, "Oh no, we don't have mediums, larges."
And I was like, "So, it's all small?"
And they were like, "No, it's not small.
There's no size."
[dramatic music playing]
[former store owner] After multiple weeks of complaining,
we went from "one size fits all"
to "one size fits most,"
and we still had complaints
because they go, "So, I'm not even most?"
[solemn, pensive music playing]
[Lee] I had an eating disorder
that was definitely, like, at its worst
when I was working at Brandy Melville.
[Natasha] I was recovering from an eating disorder
for the three years I worked there.
I remember when I was gaining the weight back
to be, you know, like, a very normal-looking person,
like, I no longer had a thigh gap,
at that point, I was very much aware of the pressure to be,
like, skinny.
There was just, like, too much pressure
to be perfect, I think.
[Isabela] Brandy did put me in that mindset
where I hated my body. I hated myself.
A lot of girls suffered with it,
a lot of the girls there.
And I'm still recovering. You know, I'm still recovering.
Eating disorders are gonna stay with you for a while.
[Cate] I do remember one time, there was a customer
who, um, picked up a jacket
and she told me,
"My granddaughter looks like your size,
you know, kind of bigger."
And those words, "kind of bigger,"
sent my entire... my entire shift into a mental orbit
of me thinking, "Am I not thin enough to work here?"
I had already gone through, you know, my troubles
of being ultra-thin,
that's not something I ever wanted to deal with again.
I went to the back, and no one was telling me it wasn't true.
They were just saying, "Don't listen, don't listen."
I remember feeling, like, proud of myself
for gaining, like, five pounds
and then realizing that, like, if I kept being healthy,
like, I wouldn't be able to follow company policy
and, like, keep wearing their clothes.
So, that wasn't good for my brain.
[former store owner] I look to the YouTube,
and I found so many video
that these people were obsessed
with attacking Brandy Melville.
I say to Stephan,
"Okay, did you see these videos?"
And Stephan goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know. Well, guess what?
Our sales went up like 20%, so, who cares?"
That reaction remind me of the famous phrase of Mussolini.
"Talk bad about me, talk good about me,
but talk about me because it's all publicity.
And I don't give a shit if it's good or bad.
Publicity is publicity."
[dramatic electronic music playing]
Receiving those complaints was basically a confirmation
that what we were doing at the time was working.
I hated having so many customers come up to me,
being so, like, sad and hurt
that they couldn't find clothing.
And they would come back again and again and again
and, like, nothing's gonna change with Brandy.
[Cate] We are having trouble fitting into pants here,
when the store is meant for us,
when we're supposed to be the examples.
There needs to be more sizes.
[producer] What do you think drives Stephan?
I think what drives him is try to improve
and always aiming for perfection.
It's ironic how he was, like, so picky with his customers.
If you see the way he dress, he's not perfect either.
His body, I mean, he would not be a Brandy customer.
He dress like a bum.
He have very strong political views.
Even talked about that with his employees,
and his employees are, like, very young.
In California, they are mostly liberal.
So, at the time, I think they were, like,
talking about Bernie Sanders.
And he goes, like, "I can't believe these little girls,
they didn't do nothing all day,
their father is rich,
and they are talking about Bernie Sanders.
Can you believe how fucked up is this country?"
He was, like-- he was so mad.
[producer] But his father was rich.
That, that's exactly his point.
"How you can come from a wealthy family
and then you want to vote for this communist, Bernie Sanders?"
[former senior VP] He is libertarian,
and, uh, he hates taxes.
He tries to do everything to avoid them.
And it worked out pretty well so far, I mean, for him.
They had, like, a lot of, like,
libertarian, like, bumper stickers.
I would see those around. I don't know who it was,
Ron Paul, or whatever the name was.
He liked for people to know that he was libertarian.
[Kate] In the early Brandy Melville stores,
I heard from former employees,
Stephan Marsan would give
his personal copies of Atlas Shrugged
to display in the stores.
This Ayn Rand novel, Atlas Shrugged,
is the foundational text for libertarians.
It's referenced a lot by people who have
these strong anti-taxation beliefs,
anti-regulation more generally.
I've heard people call it the bible of Brandy Melville.
[Willow] And they had the other store, John Galt.
And I had remembered even asking people in the company,
I was like, "What is this name?"
They're like, "Oh, it's from some book or some story."
[Kate] John Galt is a character in Atlas Shrugged.
It's not uncommon for brands
to have these private label sub-brands.
What is a little bit weird is that it's called John Galt.
This is a store for teenage girls,
where they're going to shop for T-shirts and miniskirts.
This is not some libertarian social club.
I don't know what happened.
At a certain point, Stephan started to care more about money
and way less about people in general.
[Kate] I was reading through all the lawsuits I could find
that mentioned Brandy Melville.
And as I was looking through the exhibits of one of them,
something that is mentioned is text messages
between the senior leadership at Brandy Melville.
This group chat was called "Brandy Melville Gags."
And these are some of the most disturbing,
vilest messages.
We had a group chat.
It was really cheap humor, I'll say.
[former store owner] It was someplace where everybody
would get in touch and say hi, or "Happy Birthday,"
or every time they found something funny
on social media or on Facebook, or on Instagram
or wherever they found it,
they would post it there with a comment and laugh.
It was like a virtual bar.
[producer] Who was on that text chain?
[former store owner] Everybody. Everybody.
Everybody from Stephan, Stephan's brother, me,
the production in Italy.
Everyone.
[Kate] These men are just sending the most vile,
sexual, racist jokes possible to each other,
again and again and again.
[producer] Did you think it was funny,
or were you surprised by some of the content?
Well, you know, when you see something once,
okay, then it can be funny.
Then it becomes a little bit worrisome.
I think he enjoyed the juvenile jokes.
[Kate] This isn't something that is, like,
"Oh, someone got overly offended by,
like, a joke on Twitter."
It was shocking how far they were willing to go.
[producer] Do you think he was anti-Semitic?
I don't know. I don't.
I mean, when I saw him wearing a Hitler outfit,
I wasn't surprised.
[dramatic music playing]
Store style photos were taken every day.
[Natasha] The second you came up to your shift,
whoever was in charge that day would be like,
"Time to take your store style."
They would take a photo of you
and send it to Stephan and Jessy.
Another weird thing.
Like, why did they need to do that?
"Time for your photo.
Like, go stand against that wall and pose
so I can text it to the founder of the company you work for."
[Sheridan] And for me, it was, like, a very quick,
"Let's just get this done, and I'm over it,"
but some girls would be gone for 20 minutes of their shift
because they're doing a full photo shoot in the back.
We were kind of told, you know, "The photos
are potentially if we want you to model for us."
[Emily] At first, it was only full body photos.
And then, they started requesting
chest and feet pictures, which I was like, what?
[Sheridan] And you're, like, okay, now, wait,
where are all these photos going of me
in, like, a crop top and a little skirt?
[producer] What was the rationale behind it?
Um... I don't really know what.
[Cate] One time, we were closing,
and I asked, "Where do these photos that we take go?"
And it went dead silent.
And one of the older girls said
that we're not allowed to talk about it.
And that's when I went, oh, no.
There's something going on that I don't know about,
and I don't feel safe anymore.
So, I put in my two weeks, and I left.
[dramatic music playing]
[mellow, funky music playing]
[former senior VP] For each store, we had a group chat
with the managers, myself, and Stephan.
We received the pictures from our girls,
and if Stephan didn't like some of them,
he would have sent it back to me privately
and say, "Fire her."
[producer] Did Stephan hire and fire people
based on their looks?
Of course he did.
[producer] What kind of reasons would you say?
Because you can't say it's because you're ugly or fat,
because that's illegal.
What would you say?
They're, like, 16-year-old girls.
You can find, like, 700 different reasons to fire them.
Like, it's too easy.
Like-like, that... that wasn't even fair.
And then, day after, we were hiring other people.
I was basically being Stephan's eyes,
making sure the store was perfect,
up to standards.
[Melissa] When I was working in Berlin,
some Brandy Melville guys from Italy
came to the shop and observed us,
made weird comments about us and our bodies.
From one day to the other,
they told me that I have to leave,
and I was so shocked.
And there was this woman,
she was the one that I also had the initial interview with.
I asked her, I was like, "Can you please tell me
the real reason why you're firing me,
because I cannot believe that I have done a bad job."
She told me that one of these managers that came to the shop,
that he did not like my body type.
He did not find me, like, physically attractive,
and that I'm not a typical Brandy girl.
My colleagues were,
they were so shocked from that day
that they also quit.
[solemn music playing]
I was told that if I see a girl shopping in the store
that has, like, Brandy style,
that I should take a-- ask to take a photo of them.
We were told to go up to them, um, compliment them,
kind of, like, sugar them up and, like, get them talking.
I would say, "Hey, do you mind if I take a photo
of what you're wearing? It's really cute.
We do this for market research,
and it's just gonna get sent to leadership,"
and they would be, like, normally, pretty flattered.
Then I would just send it like a regular employee store style
to Stephan and Jessy.
Quite often, they would respond and say, like,
"Hire her right now," um, if they really liked her.
[Kate] One of the former employees I talked to
said that she was working in the New York flagship store,
and she came up behind Stephan
and she looked over and he had a folder.
In the folder was every single one of the photos
that she'd sent over the years for this daily image.
She said that, looking back, that was
such a chilling, eerie thing to realize,
that these photos were being kept by Stephan.
[Marta] Stephan's office was, like, sort of a bird's nest
overlooking the registers.
And that's where him and other people that were high up
would hang out.
Like, one day, I came into work,
and there were these clear buttons
with sort of, like, electrical system setup
right next to every register.
It was a system that Stephan used
to inform the person working at the register
that they should take a photo of the girl that's checking out.
The red button goes off
and then you're supposed to take a photo
and also offer them a job as well.
[producer] Did you do that?
Yeah. Sometimes, we would ignore it
because, I don't know, we were kind of rebellious
with a couple of our friends and we didn't want to do that.
Um, but yeah, we had to.
[Lee] One night, we were all leaving
and I see this girl, like, getting an Uber.
And I was like, "Oh man, I wish I could afford Ubers."
She's like, "Oh, I'm not paying for this."
I was like, "What do you mean?"
And she was like, "I, like, have, like, the company Uber."
She referenced an apartment in New York,
and she made it clear that, like,
if you didn't know about the apartment,
then you wouldn't know about the Ubers.
[dramatic music playing]
[Willow] I had never, ever been to New York before.
And Jessy had talked about, "Oh, we should have you
come out to New York for the summer
and shoot for Brandy."
I was like, "Yeah. Sounds amazing. I'd love to."
He said, "We have an apartment and you can stay there."
It was in an amazing location in SoHo.
It was really close to both of the stores that they had.
There was really nothing in the apartment
when I first got there. I didn't even have a blanket.
There were times where people would just show up.
Like, I remember walking downstairs,
and it was dark, maybe, like, ten o'clock or something,
and, like, turn the light on,
and there was a girl asleep on the couch.
And that was, like, she scared the crap out of me
because I thought I was home alone.
I remember one day, this guy showed up.
Had no idea, like, who this person is.
They're like, "Oh yeah, he does
stuff with the store, this and that.
He's gonna be staying in this room."
I was, like, "Okay." But it was definitely strange.
It was strange to be living with a man,
like, in his 30s, 40s, I don't know how old he was,
when I was, like, still a teenager.
[Kate] An employee who I spoke with, she was here on a visa.
She was 21 years old.
She had been working at Brandy Melville for a few years.
This employee told me that she needed to stay
in the Brandy apartment in New York
for a couple of nights.
To her surprise, a middle-aged Italian man
who was involved in Brandy Melville
was also staying there.
He took this 21-year-old out.
She remembers having a first drink,
a second drink.
Then she doesn't remember anything.
And she woke up the next morning in the apartment,
naked with this man.
Her hospital records at the time, which I've read,
say that she said that she was raped by her boss,
and that she does not want to report it to the police
because she doesn't want to lose her job
and be forced out of the country.
She kind of sucked it up and just lived with it.
This was one of the most horrifying things
that I heard about while reporting on Brandy.
It was the worst parts of Brandy,
where it took something that was a job
and a community for people,
and just turned it into this place
where women were exploited,
in this case assaulted.
It-it's... Yeah, it was horrifying.
There was a sense of competition between all the girls.
And you... you really wanted to look your best
every time you walked in there.
You want to feel like you have a relationship with Stephan.
I was so scared to ask them for a raise,
because I was just, like, I don't want to get fired,
or I don't want them to kind of hate me
or be on their bad side. Um...
[producer] Were you a bit scared of Stephan?
Yes. [laughs]
Like, it was all part of, like,
some members-only club
where the best and the favorite got the perks.
Um, I did not get the perks.
[laughs]
The Brandy account only followed,
like, six people or something like that,
and it was always, like, a big deal
that they followed you. It was this elite thing,
That's what it felt like for me. Don't know if it meant anything.
But, um, I remember one day realizing
that they unfollowed me.
And it was just kind of like a, "What the fuck?"
Like, "What did I do? Did I do anything?"
I remember texting Jessy and asking him,
like, "Did I do something wrong?
Like, I don't, like, I don't know what's going on."
He was, like, "Instagram means nothing."
[dramatic music playing]
But clearly it does.
Instagram is your entire business.
How can it mean nothing?
[Kali] It's a cult.
Like, people are obsessed
with this idea of Brandy Melville,
and there's always going to be this Brandy Melville
look and mold.
I just wish someone had kind of, like,
stepped in and, like, made us realize, like,
this isn't okay, this isn't normal.
This isn't how jobs are supposed to be.
[dramatic electronic music playing]
Fast fashion has created an industry
that's completely unhinged from reality,
and it addicts people to buy more and more clothes
every single season.
People are overconsuming,
and all this excess leads to the waste crisis.
[crowd chatter]
[Sammy] With our research, we've found out
that about 40% of the garments
that come into Kantamanto Market
goes into the waste stream.
[Liz] There's no landfill. Most of the clothing is burnt
or ends up being pushed into the gutter system
where eventually it washes out to sea.
[grim music playing]
[Chloe] Like, everywhere you walk, there's fabric,
textile waste everywhere
with tentacles as long as, like, that.
Even more, and I'm a little person.
[Liz] We've dug down over eight feet
and still haven't reached the end
of some of these tangles and mounds.
Eventually, it makes its way out to sea.
And so, we believe that the sea floor around Accra
looks exactly like this,
if not much worse,
because all of the stuff has sunk.
[solemn music playing]
[Chloe] And this is not something that we did.
It's not something that we caused.
[dramatic music playing]
[man 5]
[dramatic music playing]
[Chloe] From the beginning of the supply chain to the end,
we're all being exploited by the same system.
When you look at the women who farm,
you know, who pick cotton,
when you look at garment workers,
the kayayei women are being exploited.
You know, their bodies are being exploited.
The retailers are being exploited.
A lot of them are women.
Some of them have no idea the impacts of it.
[Liz] Ghana's coast was the main port of exit
for human beings who were trafficked as slaves
to North America to work,
many of them on cotton fields to make clothes.
And now, it's the main port of entry
for secondhand clothing being sent back here as waste.
So, that is a continuation of colonialism
and slavery in another form.
[solemn music playing]
[Kate] In the course of looking into the Brandy Melville story,
I found these two lawsuits
that were essentially against Brandy Melville
from former executives.
These are very, very serious allegations
of racism here,
which the company denied in preliminary court filings.
I had the Brandy Melville store close to Toronto,
where there is, like, a big Indo-Pacific community,
lots of Indians, lots of Pakistani,
a lot of, you know.
Stephan start to say that the place was "ghetto,"
and, "How do you open a store like that?"
And I go, "Well, very easy.
I'm making $300,000 a year in this store.
What do you mean?"
And he said, like, uh, "Are you serious?
You have all these brown people,
and this is not our target customer."
[producer] Was Stephan directly telling you to close down,
or was it somebody else?
No, it was Stephan.
He say, like, "You are going to have to close,
and that's it."
He actually told me that.
"It's either you close the store,
or there is no more merchandise."
[former senior VP] I received a picture back from Stephan
of the manager of Newport, saying...
[speaks in Italian]
[in English] Which means she's, like, a communist,
alternative girl, like, with the piercings.
"She's gonna hire people like her,
and she's going to destroy the fucking store."
That's what he said.
I wouldn't fire her.
And then, he said, "No, no, fire her."
I couldn't let her go. So I didn't.
And, uh, after, like, a couple weeks of this,
like, retaliation, and I was like, "No.
If you're trying to change my words,
deal with my lawyers."
I mean, if you only like to go and shout in the street
you don't like Blacks, you don't like Jews,
if it's that, it's different.
But when you are in position that controls a company
that hires thousands of people,
then, uh, that is not cool anymore.
He need to be punished, or at least brought to justice.
[gentle, solemn music playing]
[Kate] This story took over my life for a summer, basically.
I published,
and then, almost immediately, people who had worked
at Brandy Melville started reaching out.
People had even more stories to share.
They all fit into this just wider story of exploitation.
It was really overwhelming.
[Willow] I remember seeing it on Instagram from diet_prada,
which I feel is where everyone else found out about it.
But I was reading the article and I was shocked.
I was shocked about the Nazi stuff that came out.
I was like, what?
It's, like, you knew he was not necessarily a good person.
But reading the article,
I... I was... I was honestly blown away
by some of the stuff.
I was shocked, but I was not surprised at all.
I also felt disgusted having worked
for a company like this.
I had so many feelings.
I was like, "I have to comment."
[Lee] It was definitely satisfying
to read all those comments.
I was like, finally, someone's talking about it.
Maybe this will be the time
that people rip the veil of,
you know, elitist aesthetics and all of that,
and expose them for just being a really shitty brand
that makes money off of young girls' insecurities.
[Kate] Social media is what made Brandy Melville,
but it was social media that provided the opportunity
to take down Brandy Melville, as well.
Now it's our time to shine.
If you still support Brandy Melville,
you absolutely shouldn't, and here's why.
Saying racism and sexual exploitation run rampant.
Someone who used to be the store manager there,
I got some stories of my own.
I printed out pages of the article,
and I went around SoHo hanging them up.
I had on a wig so I wouldn't be, like, spotted easily.
And some of my friends, they were helping me out.
They put it in the store, all around the store for me.
[lumbering, dramatic rock music playing]
[Emily] I talked to my manager, and I was like,
"Hey, like, I can't do this anymore."
[all] Fuck Brandy!
[cheering]
I just... I just never showed up again.
I sent an email to my hiring manager and was like,
"I'm not gonna be working my shift today,
and I'm not going to be coming in again, ever."
And she was just like, "Okay."
Um... "Bye."
There's no reason to believe this has hurt
Brandy Melville sales at all.
[former store owner] When Business Insider
come out with the story,
I was pretty shocked that it didn't get anywhere.
I was, like, wow.
That's weird because everybody talks about,
you know, the social issue and this and that.
They make a big deal out of it politically.
But then, at the end, when something comes up,
people have a short memory,
or they just... they just don't care.
I was in touch with one of the people that still work there,
and they were telling me the numbers,
and they are doing amazing.
[former senior VP] Brandy Melville got hit, yeah.
But for how long?
For a day? Two? A week? That's it.
They come back to business as usual.
[producer] They've made a lot of money, right?
Oh, yeah. Like, hundreds of millions.
[dramatic music playing]
[Kate] There is no reason to believe that Brandy
has changed its internal strategy in any way.
They did not even publish an apology on social media.
Most companies would say "We messed up, we'll do better.
We're going to make these changes.
This executive is going to be fired."
The only thing that happened at Brandy Melville
was that they stopped letting people comment
on their Instagram for a couple of weeks.
I am relatively pessimistic about corporate leadership
and how much they really believe in inclusivity.
But for a CEO to not even pretend to care
was so brazen.
By never admitting they did something wrong,
they can kind of continue keeping the business model
exactly the way it is.
Brandy Melville still is able to find people
to work at these stores
and to appear on their Instagram.
Brandy Melville still is able to tap into the worst impulses
of being a teenage girl--
wanting to be the coolest girl at your school
and, like, wanting to do anything to be that girl.
We know that Stephan has always said,
"I don't need to be politically correct."
We know that Brandy Melville, from the beginning,
has said, "One size fits most. This isn't for everyone."
So, by not apologizing, they're not hypocrites
because they are exactly who they say they are.
They are just racist, sexist pigs.
[dramatic music playing]
[Claire] I don't think we expect businesses to be good anymore,
which I think is seriously problematic.
I mean, labor issues and the fashion industry,
they go hand in hand.
[Ayesha] Make no mistake, this is not an industry
that has any kind of commitment
to ethical commercial practices.
You know, fashion,
particularly when it comes to human rights
and the environment, is very unregulated.
The footprint of a product,
the footprint of the industry is very opaque.
You know, this is an industry that gets to set its own goals,
and then if they don't meet those goals
they just change the goalposts.
I have a lot of empathy for the end customer
who's trying to do the right thing
and is thoroughly confused, you know?
You have a lot of greenwashing out there.
Brands that are essentially co-opting people's interest
in sustainability
and essentially selling that back to you.
And if a company's only talking about environmental goodness
and nothing about the face and the humans behind it,
then that is also a form of greenwashing.
This is not a poor industry.
It's worth three trillion dollars.
You're telling me an industry worth three trillion dollars
can't find solutions?
[birds chirping]
[gentle music playing]
[Claire] We know what we need to do.
The solutions that existed a long time ago
are the same solutions that exist now.
They're just not being scaled.
[Matteo] One hundred years ago,
before the climate change,
before the-the greenwashing,
we started to recycle material here in Prato.
Uh, it was a tradition.
[man 6 in Italian]
[man 7 in English] We are a textile company based in Prato.
Myself and my brother are the third generation,
and we are continuing
what my grandfather started in 1941.
[male interviewer in Italian]
[Marco in English] There is no use of chemicals,
only a mechanical process.
[Matteo M.] The durability of our fabric's very important.
We are doing the fabrics that they can pass
from father to son.
But also recyclability of our fabric is endless.
[man 8 in Italian]
[dramatic music playing]
[Sammy in English] Kantamanto is one of the perfect models
of sustainability, if you'd ask me.
I mean, from the outside it may only look like
people who just retail secondhand clothing,
but it's a whole ecosystem of sustainable practices.
The people that work here
have to deal with whatever trash, literally,
that comes their way.
So, you have people who are screen printing,
we have people who are mending, people who are embroidering,
people who are resizing.
So, these people are using basics
like a sewing machine and a pair of scissors
to recycle 25 million out of the 60 million garment
that comes through the markets within a month.
If you'd ask the people that work in the market
"What is sustainability?" they might probably not know
because what they are doing is out of culture,
not out of a trend.
[crowd chatter]
Ghanaians like to repurpose things.
Ghanaians like to give long life to things.
Swapping and upcycling is a culture
that has existed with us for a very, very long time.
[man 9 in Twi]
[Liz in English] Sustainability is a language,
and, here, people still speak it.
It's a way for people to deal with a system
that is exploiting them, that has dumped stuff here
that then they can't get out of.
You know, if we want to solve the problem
of fast fashion consumption,
then we need to listen to the people
who still do speak that language
and-and can help us learn.
Rebellion! Rebellion!
You know, one of the only tools that activists like us
would have in our toolbox
used to be that you campaign
and you create scandal,
and then you hope conditions get better.
But there's almost become an immunity to this
because there are so many scandals in this industry.
There's a sense that we can get away with it.
And as long as sales are humming and people are buying,
it doesn't matter.
And Brandy Melville is another example of just a blip.
You have a scandal,
and then it's just business as normal.
Brandy Melville has only expanded more.
Their China business, in particular, is booming.
[grim music playing]
From what I've heard from sources,
it basically takes the worst parts of Brandy in America
and plays them up.
[dramatic music playing]
It's even more toxic and more disturbing.
The sizes are smaller.
There was something that went viral
on Chinese social media called the BM Challenge.
Can you fit into this tiny Brandy Melville outfit?
You have Chinese teenagers
who are starving themselves to fit into the clothes.
How small can you be?
It's replicating the story in the U.S.,
just in a different market,
and it's created an entire wave of fashion in China.
[Liz] Fast fashion brands convince you to buy so much
because they convince you that you are not enough.
You can never have enough. You will never be enough.
But instead, we could realize,
oh, wow, this thing called clothing,
check it off of humanity's list.
We've made plenty.
Now all we need to do is be creative with it,
and we could actually enjoy that
instead of consuming things for the sake of consuming them.
[Ayesha] Almost a hundred pair of human hands
touches a garment before it reaches you.
I think about, gosh, if we had a label on our clothes
that told that entire story,
how you treat your garment workers,
how you treat your retail workers,
would our relationship with our clothes
be fundamentally different?
[solemn music playing]
[Sammy] We are a part of the problem,
no matter where you live in the world.
The fact that it's not in your backyard
does not mean it's not your problem.
Just because you are not seeing, you know,
a beach as dirty as the one we see here in Ghana
does not mean it does not affect you.
So, like, the question we need to ask,
where do I stand in this problem?
What can I do to make an impact?
[Willow] These clothing companies will
keep getting to get away with it
and making money, and people keep buying it,
and I... I don't understand why.
But so many other things are upsetting
and don't make sense right now.
So, I... I don't really know.
All I know is I don't do any kind of work
with fast fashion companies,
and I haven't since I worked with Brandy.
[Sheridan] I always try my best to think about
where things came from, is it gonna end up in landfill,
could I do something better, is there a better alternative?
[Lee] I only thrift now.
I mean, there is literally no reason not to thrift.
[Ayesha] This is not a sprint.
This is going to be a lifelong fight.
Think of the fashion as a service
and a reusable service
rather than a disposable product.
Let's normalize culture to say,
"Yeah, you saw me yesterday wearing the same thing,
and that's just fine."
[Claire] I mean, the future is not shiny without real change.
It's pretty grim.
There's a lot of people that think
that this is too hard to solve,
and it's just not.
The solutions exist.
But to me, the best we can do right now,
we just have to buy less.
[dramatic music playing]
-[music fades] -[sea birds squawk]
[funky, dramatic electronic music playing]
[music fades]