The Exclusivity of Race

One who is familiar with Brandy Melville’s brand, may have one thing come to mind when the name is brought up, a "basic white girl". This is to no fault of the person themself, but has everything to do with how Brandy Melville notoriously caters to white people by only using white models and posting white people as the majority on social media. Since they opened in the U.S. in 2009, they have created a “Brandy Melville aesthetic” that has and continues to exclude all people of color.

All from Brandy Melville Website

Brandy Models

For a person of color, representation is always scarce, but Brandy Melville is on another level. Brandy Melville is an Italian brand founded by two Italians, and Italy is not shy of racism. In an article by a black Italian writer, she states that, “Those of African, Arab and Chinese descent in Italy barely exist in politics, films, books, newspapers. Society excludes them and sets limits.”(Scebo 2018) This exclusion in the country that Brandy Melville was founded shines through in the brand. The models on Brandy Melville’s website are white. If they did have any racial ambiguity, you could not tell because all of their faces, which is where you might be able to see foreign features, are not shown. There is not one model with dark skin. It seems like, on purpose, models are found that fit the criteria of skinny, and may appear white. This is an insane lack of representation for people of color, causing them to think that they don’t belong and shouldn’t be shopping on this website or in their stores.

The "Brandy Girl"

The #brandygirl is an aesthetic that was curated by Stephan Marsan himself, to deliberately exclude people of color. The Brandy girls are the type of people expected to shop at their stores and represent Brandy Melville. We can deduce from what we’ve already seen that this majorly excludes all people of color. Scrolling through the #brandygirl on instagram, we see that the way this company has marketed themselves has transcended past just their website and brand, and become a popular trend, with people using this hashtag for their own personal posts. The “Brandy girl” consists of a pretty young girl, usually white, with long straight hair, wearing an outfit that consists of Brandy clothes. The brand has no shame in advertising only this type of girl, subtly saying that these are the girls that should be shopping at our stores. In the media we see a lot of criticism towards women of color, especially black women, for being not conventionally attractive, or looking “manly”. Serena Williams has gotten criticized for this since she was a teenager, with her muscle and body type being something that people do not like to see in a women. The fact that she is black makes this criticism inherently racist (Manno 2023). Brandy is doing nothing to stop this criticism, but instead doing the opposite by rejecting women of color from being a part of their pretty and “feminine” aesthetic.

Brandy Melville Employees

Recently a documentary was released called “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion”. In this documentary, they highlight how the racist ideals of the company extended to how they ran their stores and what employees they hired. Brandy Melville is notorious for hiring young teenagers to work in their stores. In the documentary people of color recount being put in the back doing stock, or behind register, while the white girls were seen by customers on the sales floor, and greeted customers as they walked in. There was a stark difference between the people in the backrooms and the people in the front, and there was an unspoken awareness of it. This seems to be another way that Brandy Melville established there brand, which includes leaving out women of color.

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