Brandy Melville's Unattainable Figure

Brandy Melville is a popular Swiss apparel brand aimed towards young women. They are one of my favorite brands to shop at and I have spent more money than I am proud of shopping on their website and in their stores. They are a brand that has a generally positive connotation in my mind, I think of their products being of a generally high quality, and their website and stores are very put together and sophisticated. Aside from all of those positive thing about the brand, though, I do have a big problem with the company's advertising. And I don’t mean the pop up ads they pay for other websites to display or the influencers that they send packages to to show off their new products, I mean the models they use to display their clothes.

Brandy Melville tends to use a wide range of girls on their website to model their clothes and then they will have influencers or models send in pictures of themselves wearing Brandy Melville outfits to post and promote their Instagram page. Again, it is not this that I have a problem with, I have a problem with the fact that Brandy Melville almost exclusively features minors or very skinny models for their posts to their website and Instagram page. There are maybe one or two models on the entire website that feature girls who are not incredibly skinny, and I don’t just mean slim, I mean very skinny. There is nothing wrong with being extremely skinny, because I am an active supporter for body positivity and supporting all body types (as all people should be). However, I do not think that a brand that caters to an age group that are heavily influenced by what they see and who are the most likely age to feel the most compelled to do whatever it takes to fit in should only show an almost unattainable size all across their advertisement.

Brandy Melville’s clothes are generally one size fits all aside from some pants that come in two or three different sizes, so I can understand where they are coming from by using similarly sized models. The thing is, though, a large portion of the girls who actually wear their products are not that size, leaving them feeling left out or not represented when they are looking for what they want to buy. They don’t know if or how anything will fit them, and returns are an absolute nightmare. I am not by any means saying girls who are extremely skinny have bodies that aren’t beautiful and don’t deserve or shouldn't be able to be represented by a clothing line. I just think that all body sizes that can fit into the one size fits all clothes which Brandy Melville sells should be advertised. I know from stories of influencers, stories of anonymous people posted on activism pages, and from some of my peers that eating disorders are a huge problem with girls my age. Despite the huge surge of self love and body positivity making its way through social media as of late, many girls are still not feeling confident enough in their own bodies due to advertisements like this brands. Unhealthy patterns develop in many girl for the rest of their young adult and adult lives stemming from how they viewed themselves and treated themselves from an early age and it will probably be that way forever until something real changes. We think we have changed things but in reality, until everyone is on board and ready to be kind and accepting to everyone regardless of how their body looks or weighs, there will be no real change. But hopefully, with this new generation of young men and women inspired to rise up against unjust social standards or norms, this kind of stress put on young women to be something better, will all but fade away and lead to stability within the fragile minds of young adults throughout the world.