merelyrantsforu-blog

[merelyrantsforu-blog]

the brandy melville mess

ah, brandy melville. if you've never heard of them, here's a laconic (i hope) tour d'horizon of brandy melville and their velitations:

• a pellucid lack of diversity among their models, if u would take a quick gander at their instagram feed @brandymelvilleusa

• tendentious sizing issues, to keep it succinct, it means that 99.9% of every brandy melville model is a size 0

first of all, let's talk about their incredibly erroneous lack of diversity. if we take a look at @brandymelvilleusa on instagram, we'd see 99.9% of these instagram models featured on their posts flaunting their newest pieces from brandy melville on, u guessed it! their white skin. so to keep it succinct, it means that most models for brandy melville are svelte and white. but we'll tap into the issues on their figures later (p.s there's no bodyshaming here whatsoever in case that sentence misled u).

sprinkled among their thousands of posts starring white women, there's the occasional chinese women with the same figure as the others, donning one of their latest pieces. u see, the matter at hand is that it is clearly tokenistic, to compensate for the very conspicuous lack of people of colour on their page. sure, some people have defended the successful italian brand, saying that since the page is named "brandymelvilleUSA", it'd mean that they'd only feature women from the usa. ah, but recognise that no other women of different skin tones are included in their posts. sigh, this is just like the 2019 white dotechella controversy all over again, except this time it has translated into an online medium.

we don't see black women, nor any asian americans in there because only the white girls catch their eyes. let's note for instance, their post on 8/6/19, featuring a chinese woman who's culture was definitely a salient part of her identity. but more crucially than that, she was surrounded by other posts of white girls, being the only anomaly in their feed.

2nd issue: the models' lack of what should be considered the norm such as ur average tummy pooch, love handles or a muffin top on an adolescent body who's growing conveys really egregious ideologies about what a female body should look like. there's no harm in being skinny, or being proud of ur body because u worked out <3 but because the brand's target demographic is petite girls, it alters a girl's perception of what the perfect body is (which is non existent bc ur all gorgeous 🥺) i've seen a few points of refutation circling around: they're catered to small sizes and get chastised, whereas when plus sized brands are created they get praised which = double standards. but even as a previous fond consumer of their products, i'd like to mention that there's a lot more stigma surrounding plus sized individuals, so even if this were to be considered "double standards", it wouldn't exactly be the case.

rihanna is a good example, she uses curvy mannequins at her fenty beauty pop up stores, and fans all over the world are all lovin that </3

@brandymelvilleusa we 👏 want 👏 black 👏 and 👏 asian 👏 representation 👏 ( at the very least because im still on the fence about the double standards idea)

[merelyrantsforu-blog]

vanity ;

this came to me a few minutes back when i was preoccupied with living the millenial life, the gen z life, (not to say that every adolescent does this because i respect ur choices and didn't mean to trivialise u with my seemingly nihilistic nihilism) snapping a deluge of selfies when i had a hard hitting epiphany :o

individuals in the status quo don't exactly think off these types of people as part of the norm, they think that it's okay and perfectly run-of-the-mill to restrain urself from showing how much u care for and appreciate urself. in fact, they categorise these people as hubristic egomaniacs, which frankly, to tell u the truth, i used to believe in too.

sure, self care is such a huge component & an issue of paramount importance in 2019 but beneath all those superficial concepts that u think is all that self care is, like face masks, there r still a couple of sentiments that still reckon people who can love themselves r merely (rantsforu sorry it was a good opportunity) pompous simpletons.

like how there's this prejudice blondes have to face bc they're classified as dumb blondes LOL

a system that tells u who u r is a travesty and sometimes it may be hard bc ur just another "dumb blonde airhead" but ultimately u have the last laugh. u go out there & show them what u got, u believe in urself & i do too! go show the world that u love urself & ur rockin it ! <3