Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion

This ambitious documentary contains important messages and has generated buzz with its expose of a popular fashion brand, though it doesn't fully reach its own goals.

Shines a harsh light on the Brandy Melville fast fashion brand, from the exploitative practices to the damaging effects of its popularity. It's a wake-up call for consumers that should have us all thinking twice about the brands we choose to support.

Brandy Hellville: and the Cult of Fast Fashion is a discerning documentary that showcases several complex issues through a clothing brand for young women and Gen Z girls.

It’s a true crime view of a serious and disturbing series of issues all rooted in the massive consumerist drive to pursue endless profit and clout, while dehumanizing and exploiting the least powerful.

While there’s no easy fix to fast fashion, perhaps after learning about the deeply disturbing company practices at Brandy Melville, we can collectively eliminate at least this one brand from that scene.

While Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion makes strong points, it does so with a relatively generic shooting style. In this case, the message is more important than the filmmaking.

But that’s always been the vibe of Brandy, a handful of employees and, photographers claim, older men—sometimes with braces, sometimes European—who appear out of nowhere and control the entire company.