Libertarian Commerce

 “Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion,” a documentary by Eva Orner, 2024

No matter what you look at under capitalism, something is going wrong.  Such is the issue of clothing.  Teen fashion brand Brandy Melville (BM) is the poster child for dysfunction. It is advertised on Instagram, Tumblr or TikTok by teenagers posing with Melville’s bland, cheap clothes that are considered the height of cool-girl junior and senior high-school threads.  It has attained a ‘cult-like’ status among some young people. The brand relies heavily on social media featuring popular and slim ‘white’ girls, who are also their target market and many of their front-line employees.  How fucked up is this company?  Let me count the ways.

The owner, of course, is a libertarian bro, Stephan Marsan, whose roots are in Italy.  The clothes did not sell well there, so Marsan moved to locations in Los Angeles, California for that breezy, beach girl look and found gold.  The clothes say ‘Made in Italy’ but they are manufactured in Prato, Italy by Chinese contractors working virtual labor slaves in sweatshops.  So the location is accurate, but the quality of the clothes is poor – thin material, bad seams, disposable designs. It’s throwaway stuff and cheaply priced.  It’s not Gucci or Versace in spite of its ‘Italian’ origins.

This is where the ‘fast’ part comes in.  BM copies designs from other companies (and has been sued for that) or asks hired teenagers and employees what styles they like and then cranks that out to see if it sells.  There is no painstaking ‘designing’ or couture here. When the kid gets tired of the bare midriff t-shirt with a puppy on it, it gets discarded.  Like other fast fashion brands – Zara, Uniqlo, Topshop, Primark, Shein, H&M, Gap, Old Navy and most mall brands – the clothing gets dumped into places like the Atacama Desert in Chile or the markets, waste dumps and beaches of Accra, Ghana.  This is usually because of a political agreement between a central capitalist government and the clothing’s endpoint in Africa, Latin America or Asia.  Overproduction of clothing is standard operating procedure for a ‘market economy’ more interested in selling commodities than providing real use value.  You might think that textiles can be easily recycled, but there is no requirement to do so.

Oddly BM sells only one ‘size’ that they claim will fit ‘most’ – S or XS.  Slim, young girls and women are able to fit into their flirty stock, so you can imagine the ‘body positivity’ issues this brings for teenaged girls.  This is their cheap way around manufacturing clothing that fits other teenagers.

Marsan, the Libertarian dude, has a sub-brand called “John Galt” – yes, the capitalist hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  Ron Paul and anti-tax stickers were plastered on this store’s walls.  Marsan himself is a 40-something out-of-shape, dumpy-dressed CEO.  He heads an internal group chat for managers that features sexist and racist jokes, Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and the kind of crude humor some 14 year old boys might engage in.  BM under Marsan asks customers and employees if they can take their pictures in ‘store style’ and most say yes.  Marsan stores the pictures in a vast pedo photo database and he will hire or fire girls he likes or doesn’t like based on these photos of their looks.  Other pics go to social media.  Black and Latino girls get shunted to the basement stockrooms. This is labor discrimination which has nothing to do with skills, reminiscent of how they used to hire stewardesses.  Thin suburban blondes rank high for this early Fox News rehearsal or Berlusconi bunga-bunga invite.  A few of these girls get promoted, featured in social media or sent on trips to China and Italy to look at and recommend styles as ‘product research.’  There is an allegation of rape of one young girl at a ‘stopover’ apartment in New York by an older Italian man so far.  But the overall public vibe is ‘girl power.’ 

Thrown-away clothes on the beach in Accra

The pattern across the whole industry is the use and abuse of women and girls –for growing the raw materials or in manufacture, in advertising, in retail work and in the distribution of the waste clothes. They are the final target of the sales effort too.  It is a proletarian feminist issue.

If you’ve wondered why so many people in Africa or poorer countries are wearing logo t-shirts from the United States or Europe, now you know.  Clothing has actually come to the point where it is so cheap to manufacture that it could be almost free – though the full environmental or labor effects are not shown in this documentary.  It features many interviews with former young employees at BM, a reporter, an activist, a photographer and two former executives.  The BM employees finally realized what a toxic environment they were working in.  Marsan refused to be interviewed of course.  His brand has 3 million followers on Instagram, 36 locations in the U.S. and 94 locations worldwide so his fast and cheap fashion is still riding high and he can afford to ignore critics.

The solution given in the documentary was not to buy so many clothes.  That might be a start but tell that to the next young teenager you meet… though their parents might agree.  There is no regulation to this out-of-control capitalist market, no requirements for recycling or second-hand circulation, no environmental or carbon controls and few labor controls.  Private enterprise is still king and public ownership or public input is off the table.  It is a source for vast wealth, as the Spanish owner of Zara is one of the top billionaires in the world.  It is clear that more than consumer actions are necessary. 

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion” and “Stitched Up,” (both by Hoskins); “Fashionopolis,” NPR’s 1A,” “Shopping World,” “Inconspicuous Consumption,” “Worn,” or the words ‘fast fashion.’ 

The Cultural Marxist / May 13, 2024