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Since opening its first US store in 2009, Brandy Melville has built a cult following among teenage and young-adult shoppers and expanded to more than 100 locations worldwide. It has done so around a proposition most competitors would regard as commercially reckless: narrow sizing, restrictive returns, little corporate communication, and, in June 2026, the reported closure of fitting rooms across stores in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Many of the brand’s garments remain available only in a narrow XS/S size range, while its US policy gives customers limited remedies for in-store purchases. The model appears hostile to the customer. Its success suggests the hostility is part of what customers are buying.

The same pattern runs through the business. Brandy Melville asks the customer, and, it is alleged, the employee, to conform to a narrowly defined image. The size range, the returns policy and, by former employees’ accounts, the hiring criteria stay put; the adjustment falls on the person. For department stores, the question is what they take on when they host a brand customers clearly want and many cannot wear.

What Brandy Melville built

Brandy Melville was developed in Italy, but its US expansion gave it the California aesthetic that came to define it internationally. After opening in Westwood, Los Angeles, in 2009, the brand built a recognisable visual language around collegiate graphics, cropped basics, muted interiors and young customers who reproduced the look online.   

The commercial logic of one size 

Brandy Melville’s narrow sizing is both part of the image and part of the assortment strategy. Its US site still lists numerous garments in a single XS/S option, including the $16 Zelly Basic Top. Fewer size variations mean fewer size-specific SKUs to allocate and merchandise. They also make the brand visually consistent across product pages, stores and customer photographs. The same decision limits who the assortment can serve. Every retailer curates: finite floor space, price architecture and brand selection inevitably exclude some choices. Brandy Melville pushes that principle further by making bodily fit one of the most visible filters of participation. 

The social-media feedback loop

Brandy Melville built a global youth following without a visible advertising campaign. Store atmosphere, employees, customer photographs and word of mouth did the work. Customers bought the clothing, photographed themselves and hoped to be reposted; the brand selected images that showed the next group what participation looked like. The sizing model made that loop efficient: a narrow size range produced a consistent look across thousands of customer photographs.

When the image became the employment system

Alleged hiring and workplace practices

The sharpest criticism of Brandy Melville concerns hiring rather than marketing. The 2024 HBO documentary Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion brought those allegations to a wider audience. Former employees described being recruited because of their appearance and required to submit full-body “store style” photographs. Several alleged that hiring and firing decisions were affected by weight, race and conformity to the “Brandy look”. Black employees said they were disproportionately assigned to stock rooms or other less visible roles, while thin white employees were favoured for the sales floor. These accounts remain allegations from former employees rather than judicial findings. Stephan Marsan, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, declined to participate in the documentary, and the company did not issue a comprehensive response.

A separate California wage-and-hour case ended in a $1.45 million settlement in 2022. Former employees alleged unpaid off-the-clock work, missed overtime and break violations. Brandy Melville denied wrongdoing. The case concerned pay and timekeeping rather than the discrimination allegations raised in the documentary.

If those accounts are accurate, Brandy Melville’s preferred customer image did not stop at advertising; it influenced who customers saw working in the store.

Governance through silence

Brandy Melville makes few public commitments and has little visible executive communication. Public court records show that the brand’s intellectual property and US operations sit across separate legal entities, including Swiss-based Y.Y.G.M. SA and Nevada-based Bastiat USA. The structure has also produced disputes over who controls distribution. In a 2025 Ontario case, Canadian licensees that operated Brandy Melville stores alleged that Y.Y.G.M. SA had breached the exclusivity provision in their agreements by selling Brandy Melville merchandise through Canadian Nordstrom stores. The licensees said the sales continued until May 2017; Y.Y.G.M. said they had stopped around 2015. The court dismissed Y.Y.G.M.’s motion for summary judgment on limitation grounds, holding that the disputed timing required a trial, and made no finding on the alleged breach. A customer never sees those contractual boundaries. A department store buying the brand has to, because they decide which entity supplies the stock and which one answers when standards are questioned.

Brandy Melville’s silence means there are few explicit promises to measure the company against. As IADS examined in its Exclusive, Everlane, Shein and the price of convenient transparency, Everlane followed the opposite approach: product cost breakdowns, named factories, and sourcing disclosures made transparency part of what customers were buying.

Everlane’s disclosures gave customers a standard, and that standard was used against the company when its culture was questioned. Brandy Melville’s silence offers no such standard.

For some retailers, the debate over whether to keep using the letters “DEI” is secondary. Companies can rename or quietly integrate inclusion programmes, but the test is what happens inside the business: who is recruited, who advances, whose bodies are accommodated, who appears on the shop floor, and whether employees can challenge power. The 2025 IADS White Paper drew the same line at sector level: inclusion becomes meaningful when it is embedded in leadership, operations, governance and measurable outcomes rather than applied as a communications layer.

As IADS has also examined, Abercrombie & Fitch provides the closest historical comparison. Its earlier model also linked a narrow customer ideal to the appearance and placement of store employees. The company eventually changed leadership, broadened its imagery and product offer and rebuilt around a more inclusive public identity. The reset was rewarded, but slowly: in fiscal 2023, roughly a decade into the turnaround, the company reported net sales of $4.28 billion, up 16%, and an operating margin of 11.3%, its highest in fifteen years. Brandy Melville has made no such change public.

Where the model transfers risk

Customer risk

Brandy Melville has not publicly explained the June 2026 closures. Employees said they had been told it was linked to theft and damage, including customers using chewing gum to hold poorly fitting curtains against walls for privacy. Shoppers tried garments over their clothes or left without buying. Either way, the fitting room disappeared while much of the assortment remained narrowly sized.

Marks & Spencer illustrates a different response to the same store problem: it has retained fitting rooms while adding payment capability and staff oversight inside the area, with the model planned for more than 100 stores by 2028. Faced with a choice between adapting the store and asking more of the shopper, Brandy Melville chose the shopper. 

Production risk

Brandy Melville’s “Made in Italy” label, which the documentary also questions, tells customers less about production than it appears to.[1] The company’s US site currently lists several Italian-made cotton tops at $16–$18. On the same site, similarly priced garments are manufactured in China and Albania. Price alone is not evidence of exploitation. The label does not say how many subcontractors sit behind a garment, what workers were paid, how long they worked or who monitored their conditions.

Reuters has documented serious labour abuses hidden inside subcontracting chains serving major fashion companies. Those cases concerned luxury groups rather than Brandy Melville, but they show that abuse can sit several tiers below the supplier a brand names. After similar scrutiny of its Italian suppliers, Dior created a dedicated industrial function reporting directly to the chief executive. Brandy Melville has not said who oversees its production.

The Gen Z paradox

Values in theory, belonging in practice

Edelman found that 92% of Gen Z respondents regarded some level of shared values as necessary before using a brand. 

Brandy Melville entered South Korea despite the documentary, the employment allegations and longstanding criticism of its sizing. Its first store there opened in Seoul’s Seongsu-dong district in January 2025, drawing large crowds and long queues. Within weeks of the opening, Korean coverage questioned the brand’s lack of size inclusivity; seventeen months later, Brandy Melville closed fitting rooms across its US, UK and Canadian stores. Queuing for a brand with that record is not simply hypocrisy. The Robin Report calls the pattern “situational ethics”: customers separate the clothing and the identity from the company’s conduct. Values compete. Research on the sustainable-fast-fashion paradox finds that environmental concern operates alongside other identity motives, including status, hedonism and the need for uniqueness.

Brandy Melville offers those competing motives an unusually clear object: the product signals identity and belonging immediately, while employment or sourcing concerns remain distant from the purchase.

The department-store question is not hypothetical. Nordstrom carried Brandy Melville in the mid-2010s and, in its annual report for fiscal 2015, credited the brand, alongside Topshop, Madewell and Charlotte Tilbury, with strengthening its younger customer-focused departments and attracting new customers. Department stores are not exempt from the charge of exclusion; what distinguishes Brandy Melville is how visible the criterion is, and how much of the brand’s appeal depends on it.

IADS has examined versions of this tension in earlier case studies. Everlane showed that a compelling ethical proposition does not remove the need to examine internal culture. Abercrombie & Fitch showed that a powerful identity can be rebuilt when the customer ideal becomes commercially limiting. American Apparel showed how cultural relevance and organisational weakness can coexist, until debt and governance failure drove it into bankruptcy. The distinction that matters is between exclusivity, which can make an experience distinctive, and exclusion, which makes participation conditional on characteristics customers or employees may be unable, or should not be expected, to change. Brandy Melville’s continued appeal points somewhere less comfortable: exclusion is not necessarily a temporary defect that customers eventually punish. When it creates status and visible belonging for the people admitted, it can reinforce the proposition itself.

A department store has an option Brandy Melville’s own stores do not: it can carry the brand for the customers who want it and, on the same floor, dress the customers Brandy Melville turns away. That makes the decision one of access. Carrying it means hosting a brand whose appeal depends on who it leaves out, and answering for its employment, returns and sourcing practices. For department stores, the queue proves demand, yet it does not answer whether the brand meets the retailer’s standards.

Credits: IADS (Maya Sankoh)