The Damaging Grip that Brandy Melville has on the Chinese Market

Linda Li ’24 has a passion for fashion. Anyone can tell just by seeing her walk around campus in style, but if that’s not enough, she also has a fashion Instagram page. But no one would find Brandy Melville in her closet because of their exclusionary and unrealistic standards with their one-size-fits-all-and-that-size- is-a-small model. Linda has lived in multiple countries, from China, to Canada, to the United States. Many Chinese girls take Brandy Melville’s marketing to heart, causing them to go to extremes just to fit into what’s trending.

Brandy Melville, the Italian-owned, California “cool girl” fashion company, opened its first Chinese storefront in September 2019. Soon afterwards, Brandy Melville (BM)’s signature plaid mini skirts, spaghetti-strap dresses, crop tops, and otherwise unremarkable basics became ubiquitous on the bodies of my high school peers. If TikTok were popular then, I’d have made a video with the “She looks like every other bitch!” audio.

Initially founded in the 1980s, Brandy Melville operated beneath the radar until the 2010s, when it seized Instagram’s global appeal to build a cult following for its cheaply-priced one-size-fits-all garments. On Weibo and RED, China’s versions of Twitter and Pinterest, respectively, I watched in dismay as #BM, #brandygirl, and #brandystyle seemingly skyrocketed to popularity overnight. Before anyone could say “fatphobia,” young Chinese women rushed to label themselves a “BM Girl.” What’s fueling the fervent obsession with fitting into clothes that are incompatible with a grown adult’s body structure?

At the heart of Brandy Melville’s explosive popularity is society’s long-standing association of thinness with reputation, success, diligence, and intellect. Although body-shaming and fatphobia are pervasive in America and Europe, women’s bodies are subject to greater public scrutiny in China. Many so-called “beauty challenges” on Weibo have perpetuated unrealistic body standards and promoted incessant self-comparison in the past few years. The #A4waist trend, for example, challenged women to see if their stomachs were as narrow as a piece of vertical A4 paper. The #iPhone6knee challenge had women placing an iPhone on their knees, legs parallel, to show that their legs were the width of a smartphone. Whereas body positivity movements have gained traction in the West, Chinese women have doubled down on pursuing thinness to the extent that they increasingly associate beauty with being underweight.

A woman who fits into Brandy Melville’s clothes is signalling to society that she embodies the ideal female form. Most of Brandy Melville’s tops are labelled XS or S, and their bottoms measure 24 inches around the waist — barely a size 0 in the US — when the average waist circumference of a Chinese woman is closer to 28 inches. As Brandy Melville gained traction on social media, women began circulating a “BM girl size chart” that listed the corresponding heights and weights for women to fit into the clothes. The brand’s absurd sizing has fostered a toxic culture of exclusivity where wearing Brandy Melville has become a badge of honour. Thinness is so ingrained as a cultural virtue that Chinese women further cement the brand’s status as a beauty benchmark rather than reject the discriminatory sizing. Popular memes depicting people who can’t fit into Brandy Melville’s clothes remark that the clothes only look flattering on thin women, reinforcing the notion of an ideal body figure instead of questioning why a clothing brand refuses to make more sizes.

Not only do Chinese women fully embrace the brand’s one-size ideology, but they see no problem defending such practices. Many women falsely equate Brandy Melville’s exclusionary sizing to brands that cater to plus-size women, arguing that there is nothing wrong with manufacturing clothes specifically for thin women. The glaring problem with this argument is that thin women have never struggled to find clothes that fit, whereas retailers across the board have historically neglected plus- size women. In this way, Brandy Melville is even worse than brands that don’t carry above a size XL. They deliberately fuel the “bikini industrial complex” by making clothes only accessible to those with body types deemed desirable by society. Brandy Melville’s supporters also claim that women who critique the brand’s sizing are upset that they can’t be a “BM girl,” thereby implying that women have nothing more worthwhile to do than complain about not being able to wear crop tops and mini skirts. More damningly, this line of defense once more assumes that women are so shallow as to make their physical appearance their sole preoccupation. Give me a break! What’s more, some women simply don’t consider the limited sizing an issue, which shows a lack of awareness of how gender norms discipline women’s bodies and make them constantly feel inadequate.

Unfortunately, the camp of Brandy Melville supporters may have succeeded in propagating the “BM girl” identity into a full-blown status marker. Major Asian celebrities such as singer and actress Ouyang Nana and Blackpink’s Jennie — both of whom exhibit traditional markers of beauty — have been sighted in Brandy Melville clothing, strengthening young Chinese women’s view that fitting into the clothes will align themselves closer with the epitome of Asian beauty standards. In addition to tapping into a well of body insecurities, the company’s marketing strategies coincidentally dovetail with the country’s socioeconomic development such that Chinese women become tethered to a vapid and fuzzy California-inspired lifestyle aesthetic.

Brandy Melville’s Instagram account consists entirely of skinny white teenagers in casual backgrounds such as Los Angeles beaches, Manhattan sidewalks, and their brick-and-mortar stores. The pictures convey an easy-breezy, carefree, endless summer mood that appeals to both teenagers and overworked and overstressed 20 and even 30 year-olds. Based on these photos, one could easily presume that “BM girls” are popular, attractive, and well-off — characteristics that we are conditioned to want as soon as we begin schooling. Brandy Melville has constructed a consumer identity that is theoretically simple to attain but remains out of reach for a large swath of women, creating an elite aura around its ordinary models that translates to an aspirational lifestyle. I posit that this lifestyle is made more appealing by the fact that rarely are the models’ faces photographed. Even though their bodies are clearly white, a Chinese consumer could still plausibly imagine herself as one of those girls on her way to Santa Monica Pier with a group of friends on a warm September afternoon.

Being a Western brand, Brandy Melville already has a leg up over local brands that carry similar items. Since China is the global fashion industry’s manufacturing hub, Western consumers frequently associate the “made in China” label with sweatshop labour and poor quality; by the same token, Chinese consumers are enamoured with higher-end Western brands for their heritage and craftsmanship. Brandy Melville is no luxury brand, but its founders are Italian, and the heavy California influence automatically adds points for distinction in Chinese consumers’ eyes. It doesn’t matter if the California inspiration only draws upon stereotypical aspects like beaches and palm trees, nor does it matter if the media’s depiction of California culture is vapid and annoyingly elusive: whiteness sells, and many Chinese people still eat it up. The Brandy Melville aesthetic is just that: a series of staged images that fail to carry over to the real world because we all have real obligations and cannot always hang out with our friends at the beach.

I am not blaming Chinese women for taking the marketing bait. But there needs to be serious reckoning with Brandy Melville’s toxic influence over girls’ and women’s relationships with their bodies. The clothes we wear reflect not just our personal tastes but the unspoken rules about how women should properly perform their gender under society’s constant judgement. Showing off your midriff is one thing, but feeling pressured to lose weight to fit into bland cotton T-shirts is what happens when rigid gender norms face too little resistance. As it stands, the “BM girl” is the gold standard for young Chinese women. It doesn’t have to be.

SOURCES

Atlantic Press: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Economic Development and Business Culture (ICEDBC 2021), see “Brandy Melville’s Global Marketing Strategies in China”

The Sydney Morning Herald: Chinese A4 Waist Challenge a Paper Thin Excuse for Online Body Shaming of Women

TED.com: Do You Judge Your Own Body? Here’s How to View it with Love, Not Shame

Chinosity: Brandy Melville in China: New Fashion or Just a New Kind of Body-Shaming?

Week in China: One Size Fits All

Lithium Magazine: Outgrowing Brandy Melville