purity

1. I watched the not particularly sophisticated but interesting and intelligently organized documentary Brandy Hellville a few weeks back. 

from The Cut's description of it:

Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, a new documentary detailing a laundry list of    alarming, racist, and possibly illegal practices by Brandy Melville, is showing on HBO. The film, directed by Academy Award winner Eva Orner, centers on the reporting of Business Insider’s Kate Taylor. It features former employees and associates of the fast-fashion retailer, which became a staple among young women and girls in the U.S. in the 2010s. Throughout the documentary, sources highlight allegations of fatphobia, antisemitism, inappropriate conduct with minors, and even sexual assault, most of which lead back to Italian brand founder Stephan Marsan, who continues to serve as the brand’s CEO.

and this: 

If you’re not familiar with Brandy Melville, consider yourself lucky. For those of us who experienced their one-size-fits-all mentality and obsession with a certain type of girl, it was a place riddled with toxicity. The chain was an odd manufactured oasis that sold a sort of lifestyle to those of us who were young, impressionable, and dealing with the insecurities that often accompany adolescence and young adulthood.

 

I first became aware of the brand when it showed up as a preferred mode (?) of clothing for The New Right's NYC fascist girls (Leni Reifenstahl combined with Edie Sedgwick, according to the piece, which spends some time with secret fascist hard right/Catholic/It Girl/actress/podcaster Dasha Nekrosova, who was, weirdly, the star of a viral video in support of Bernie Sanders--"you people have worms in your brain" . . . do you remember it?) in a Vanity Fair piece--very good long-form journalism, here, that ties together the most insidious forces, the people really in charge: What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right | Vanity Fair:

Women wear clothes from Brandy Melville, which you can hear described ironically as fashionwear for girls with “fascist leanings,” and which named one of its lines after John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Ew.

Then--because I became obsessed with this slice of The New Right and its link to Catholicism (though of course you both know I'm not a practicing Catholic, you may or may not recall I am, culturally, a Catholic and interested in how those structures inform my sense of self and time) and the way that the rich kids/young adults in NYC wear Trump hats both ironically and not and the way that, especially through the VF piece, I can see the horrific web of ideologies working in support of the overturn of Roe and what is quite possibly a full-on fascist takeover happening in November and increased dystopian experience that favors screen-based living over physical reality while still offering the most resources and pleasures of physical reality to people with the ability to pay for them, etc. etc. etc.--I mentioned the brand (previously unknown to me) to another friend, whose daughter had just asked for a shirt from said store and likely had received the transmission of this desire via the evil web described above. (This family most definitely would never choose to identify with The New Right; I'm talking about the insidious forces, again--the way that the tentacles of fascism can, indeed, reach into your own damn kid's electronic device and pitch them some clothing that only comes in one size--guess what "size" it is????). 

This brand and its whole schtick is wrapped up with trad wives and eating disorders explicitly produced by patriarchal culture and Amy motherfucking Coney Barrett.

The documentary is wise to also posit this corrupt and slavery-favoring brand as a symptom or participant in fast fashion environmental destruction. & Daniel Woody just sent me this:

Castoffs to catwalk: fashion show shines light on vast Chile clothes dump visible from space | Global development | The Guardian

So, like Lenu and Lina in the Ferrante books, I feel sick with the vision of it all. 

I often feel like the still-human people in the original Pod People (something's wrong; can you not see it?), or like the Soylent Green humans screaming their revelations. It's the fucking patriarchy! It's racism, it's setting the earth on fire so that we can put tweens in midriff shirts, it's "the stench of human corruption" and it's "more than I can bear." It's fucking poisonous screens; I'm on one, now. It's everywhere. It's pure fucking horror. I'll probably rewrite this paragraph later because I can't get enough distance at the moment to say it right.

2. I want to return to the clothes of this fucking evil brand. (There are LOADS of labor issues and outright illegal practices, but I'm kind of trying to think through the overt surfaces of the clothing, as a space where an ideology is getting enacted and projected.)

From what I saw, they are basically a kind of Abercrombie & Fitch sort of garbage. Sorority girls. Very skinny and white. 

(Kat, you are maybe too young for this term, but, Em and I and our friends of the 90s called the boys of this type "white hatters." I'm so interested in how this world, the preppies of the late 90s, has been even further corrupted by its association with overtly fascist people; oh back when I thought those people were *simply* Bush voters! Again, I fucking knew it: when we called those people white hatters and sorority girls as a way to diminish and as a short cut to "fascists," we were right. They are.)

It's obvious that a one-size-fits-"all" brand and lots of overtly feminine casual stuff suits trad wife goals. But I'm trying to figure out how the specifics get cooked up:

In some ways, I am not opposed: plain, soft, almost cheesy-looking stuff: privileging the casual (is that a luxury class kind of signal, though?), the soft, the plain, the easy.

(Context matters, of course; if this fashion were to appear on a different kind of body or gender-performance, I'd likely find it charming.)

In all the ways of knowing the company's practices and associations, of course I am appalled.

In the way that they style and market the clothes, I'm terrified.

Go to the website, and you'll see many clavicles: Brandy Melville USA – Page 5

In the film, some former/current customers suggest a kind of teen-girl-mania: lines around the blocks outside of stores, an obsession with buying even the littlest item from the brand so as to have some access to its cultural cache.

It's impossible to separate it from the internet marketing (these girls all seem to access the information via social media), but, also, this same shit was, I guess, being peddled to girls like me and Em and there was no internet. I guess the "Mall" was a kind of medium for information, though, as a city kid (Em, too, just a different city), I knew of no malls that had this kind of thing. Now, of course, they're all more uniform/closer to being uniform. I'm unclear on how this works, or: It's very hard to see the map of people who would be influenced by such garbage.

(OMG: I did not even yet comment on the name and its absurd but clever strategy: to posture this combination as the vibes of Americana: maybe referencing "Brandy, you're a fine girl" (Looking Glass - Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) (Official Audio) (youtube.com)) and one of the greatest American novelists, who would surely feel disgust at the whole lazy allusion. Man, the stench of human corruption is more than I can bear.)

Ultimately, I guess the whole brand is peddling in PURITY. 

Which is nothing new.

I am kind of just reporting, here. I have no claims. 

Maybe later. 

Tell me what you know, what you think.