'Brandy Hellville'
One size doesn’t fit all. Our clothing doesn’t fit on the planet!
If you have ever had preteen or teenage girls you may know Brandy Melville. It’s a fast fashion clothing brand started in Italy that took off when it reached the US. Targeting teenagers, its vibe was southern California and its sizing one size fits all. To be clear, that size was xs/s.
Brandy Melville was early to adopt the influencer marketing model and user-generated content. Teenage girls posted themselves wearing the clothes and then the company used the content on their own site. This had a crazy multiplier effect and the brand grew to 3M followers.
The idea was quick trends at low prices. The company expanded from the traditional 4 seasons to an incredible 52 seasons a year, creating new looks that drove a huge increase in consumption. The film highlights multiple knock-on effects:
Exploitation of the Chinese immigrant workers at sweatshops in Prato, Italy working around the clock to churn out product
Exploitation of the retail sales force of predominantly thin young white girls encouraged to wear and post their photos - and some creepy (to put it mildly) behavior by the older men in the company
Exploitation of the consumer base, who describe trying to fit the “one size fits all” and then the reworked “one size fits most” paradigm, developing eating disorders in an effort to look like the Brandy Melville models they were seeing on Instagram
There is no doubt fast fashion has changed shopping trends. In the US + Europe people are consuming 36 billion units of clothing a year and 85% of that is being discarded. But the term “discarded” is vague. We picture a Goodwill Store or Consignment shop. But the reality is that much of it is ending up across (and in!!) the ocean in Ghana, West Africa.
Accra, the capital of Ghana, is becoming a literal dumping ground for unwanted clothing. The US and other countries make deals with places like Ghana to take our clothing even though they don’t need it. These clothes, purchased in huge bundles, are called “Obroni Wawu” or “Dead White Man’s Clothes” in the Akan language. The Kantamanto Market in Accra is the largest 2nd hand economy in the world, generating 15 million garments a week!
Fast fashion has transformed clothing into weight that just gets moved around the world. Vendors try to make a few pennies off of it and then move it somewhere else. It often ends up in the waste stream. Clothing is burned or pushed down the gutter and washed out to sea.
It is hard not to note the very sad irony of a comment in the film from Liz Ricketts of the Or Foundation,
“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 in cotton fields to make clothes, and now it’s the main port of entry for 2nd hand clothing being sent back here as waste.”
Her colleague at the Or Foundation, Sammy Oteng, adds, “It’s a continuation of colonialism and slavery in another form.”
The inescapable truth is that there is too much clothing.
The solutions that existed a long time ago are the solutions that exist today: buy less. Or perhaps, buy better. Because the question we have to ask about really cheap clothing is: What is the real cost?