Conclusion

This past week, I watched a documentary on Brandy Melville, the infamous clothing brand for young tweens and teens. The documentary sparked my consumption-focused brain, leading me to include some of the brand's most notable marketing techniques and consumeristic drawbacks within this capstone project. 

The Brandy Melville brand, well known and adored during my teens, built themselves on niche marketing techniques - highlighting youth, fragility, and feminine spirit. While these can be intriguing focuses for marketing, it took the teen demographic by storm, jolting everyone into wanting this new, top-tier aesthetic that the brand supplied. This began a frenzy of idealism created within fashion, lifestyle based consumption, and of course, fast fashion caused by over consumption. 

During my middle school and early high school years, Brandy Melville was all the rage. Living in the middle-of-nowhere Kent City, MI, we didn't really have a huge Brandy store near us, but with the rise of social media and online shopping, Brandy Melville was not only the coolest, but it also justified some cross-country shipping as well. When girls got the coveted Brandy Melville clothing, it was an identifier of the "cool," while the rest who did not have Brandy Melville clothing became somewhat inferior. 

Although it wasn't always glaringly obvious who was in and who was out fashion-wise, you simply knew the people who did wear Brandy - the skinny, beautiful, and most popular. This became the root of Brandy Melville's marketing techniques, pushing their clothing as the only option for a plausibly cool and beautiful teen. Coming from a small town, I didn't fully understand this high level marketing technique, but I did realize that I wanted to wear Brandy, but I couldn't fit into most of their clothing. 

I didn't much keep track what size I was in middle school, but when it came to Brandy Melville, I simply couldn't make the squeeze. However proposturouse this felt, I minorly shrugged it off at that age. As the bargain hunter I was and am, I knew I could most likely find an alternative that could fit me, as well as resemble the same aesthetic I was going for. 

This was not apparent for everyone though, as the Brandy Melville clothing line began a huge trend of not only propelling a certain type of idealistic fashion wearer, but also an exclusive size category. In the documentary, it was shown how Brandy Melville marketed their clothing as  "one size fits most", focusing on sizes that truly aligned with XS in comparable fashion brands. This created a culture of exclusivity based on Brandy Melville consumption, one of the most highly-used fashion marketing techniques. In the same way, this resulted in high consumption due to needing the coolest, most up-to-date pieces that Brandy Melville had in stores. 

Playing into the unfavorable culture of the company, clothing from Brandy Melville is produced rapidly, similar to most fast-fashion websites. Brandy Melville continually pushes out new, trendy clothing, rather than quality materials and unique pieces. This happens each and every day at Brandy Melville, and it does for other fast fashion companies as well. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, nearly 50,000 new garments are produced from Shein, a well known fast fashion website, every day. This is assumed to be a gross underestimate, as the workings of these companies and their processes are often not publicized due to their unassumingly negative nature. While these pieces continually are sold and created at stores each and every day, they are not always sold to actual consumers. 

Another hot topic and relevant focus in the documentary was Brandy Melville's assistance in creating clothing waste. Ghana, home to 33.4 million people, is also home to one of the most popular locations in which the U.S. sends excess clothing. Not only is this an unnecessary act in order to clean up the U.S. from its over consumption issue, it is literally burying the people who live in Ghana. 

While U.S. consumers and large profiting companies, such as Brandy Melville, continue to produce at a rapid speed, we as consumers are not able to wear anywhere near the amount of clothing being produced. The more pieces someone has from popular chains that market lifestyle consumption, the greater societal pressure that ensues for consumers to purchase them. While the social pressure to consume them is immense, the reality of consumption ends in major clothing waste. It is then dumped onto other countries, cyclically forcing them to deal with creating our over consumption products, as well as dealing with our over consumption repercussions. 

While fast-fashion brands continually focus on producing more while simultaneously instructing us that we must buy them for the idealistic social status, we are left with feelings of hurt, distaste, and cheap, unsatisfactory clothing. Brandy Melville still survives, throughout a series of additional scandals, due to their consumption and lifestyle based marketing. With specific techniques to fuel lifestyle consumption and fast fashion processes, we as a society are once again tricked into consuming more than we need.

So, what is our main goal for consuming things? This is a big question, as it can differ from person to person or goal to goal. Overall, we as a society seek to consume experiences. From trying a new flavor of Skittles for the first time to opening a gift with our family on Christmas, we are all seeking new life experiences, rather than the specific items we tend to consume. While we consume endless ads from mega companies profiting off of our sales, purchases, and word of mouth, we must sit back and think - is this what we are truly seeking through consumption?

Our constant focus on having new and more and faster can weigh heavily on our purchasing power, pushing us to over consume, rather than rack up on new and exciting opportunities in life. I currently attempt to consume fashion out of experience, rather than purchasing more for sheer quantity. While looking for the next big clothing purchase, we must all take the time to consider if it is worth the real cost. 

In the eyes of sellers and marketers, we are an end to a means. An end in which they collect our cash, find what we want to see next, and repeat. With little care about the consumer’s experience from the heads of major companies, we are left to fight for ourselves in a consumerist society. From working to find time for a wellness break to saving up for a singular purchase we have been dreaming of, our focus must be shifted away from the cloud of messaging that we are surrounded by. 

In each of our own ways, we must work towards not letting marketers dictate what we like and what we will consume. We as a society must see behind the dollar sign and look towards what would actually make us happy to spend time doing. If we keep needing to escape from daily activities to find peace, maybe we can shift these areas of our lives to be prosperous without over consumption. 

While innovations have led us to new and exciting products and experiences, over consuming them has thrown us into a doozy of forgetting what we really wanted all along. While I love to consume yummy foods and large amounts of fun and fashionable clothes, you may also know by now that I am very hesitant of a consumerist lifestyle. Can these be true at the same time? I would argue, yes. 

In a world where things are often seen as black and white, I think we can enjoy consuming new things without falling prey to consumeristic logic. We can be maximalist without consuming more than we can handle. We can work towards focusing on the real things we crave to experience, rather than the items and products we are tempted to purchase at each turn. We all must choose to be unconscious or conscious in our decisions to consume.