Have you ever been caught in a moment and felt you looked like you were in a Brandy Melville Instagram post? It happens rarely, but when it does, it rocks. For me, it was a while ago, when my best friend Amy and I were strolling down the main shopping street in Delray Beach, Florida. For those who aren’t familiar with this small, quirky town—a bit bohemian, considerably monied, swaying between the two identities like the palm trees that line its Art Deco boulevards—it’s a real All-American dream. A Stars Hollow-meets-Venice Beach kind of beat, if Gilmore Girls had Cubans and Los Angeles had Republicans.
The colored Urban Outfitters bags slung up and down our tanned arms, bumping bottoms with whatever tourist-shop lifeguard shorts we thought were cute. We decamped to a Starbucks. I twirled my iced coffee, and it reminded me of a Tumblr post I liked years ago. A Harry Styles song was playing as we discussed how excited we were to check out Brandy Melville. We were in the States, after all—and in a cool beach town at that, where all the young people looked beautiful and blissful. Well, Delray Beach asserts its credentials by having its own Brandy tee. We bought matching maxi skirts and twirled in them to the pining vocals of the Gracie Abrams song the store was playing. A decade ago, the White Girl bible The Perks of Being a Wallflower gave us “and in that moment, I swear we were infinite.” Brandy haul slay.
This summer has undoubtedly been one not just for the pop books, but the pop scrolls. Charli! Olivia! Kelela! MADONNA. The church of pop has expanded, and its current conversational—and subsequent international zeitgeist—power rests with the hyper-pop congregation, a welcoming overlap with electronic and gay pop. We’ve donned rave shades to Brat parties; we’ve slicked back our hair for Addison and Slayyyter concerts. One day, our children will ask what it was like hearing Lorde and Charli tear up Girl, so confusing live the way we romanticise ’80s New York and ’90s London.
Less dissected, but just as ubiquitous—if not even more so—is the more traditional line of singer-songwriter pop. It’s still going hard. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” undoubtedly a Song of Summer, has ruled supreme on the radio so long she’s probably eligible for chart citizenship; across the pond, Olivia Dean and Sam Fender’s “Rein On Me” is the longest-charting song in British history. Similarly, Taylor Swift’s return to country-pop, her Toy Story 5 single “I Knew It, I Knew You,” will assumedly win her an Oscar. It would be well deserved! She’s stopped trying to battle it out with the aforementioned new generation of pop girls and has returned to the studio with an acoustic guitar. Taylor sounds all the better for it. I was listening to it the other day. Once again, It Happened. I felt like I was in Brandy Melville world. Not the shop itself, obviously. But the realm of the lifestyle it sells with every vintage slogan T-shirt.
It’s a subgenre of pop that tips its sequined cowboy hat to the Californian breeze of ’70s Laurel Canyon rock-pop and the emotive nostalgia of American country. It sprawls beyond just singer-songwriter, but its DNA is emotionally singer-songwriter because, crucially, these songs are about Feelings, pulsed with a catchy guitar melody. At its best, it stretches from Taylor’s folklore and evermore to Maggie Rogers and HAIM. At its funnest, it is Audrey Hobert and Suki Waterhouse. And it’s not just women. Noah Kahan, ROLE MODEL, and Harry Styles are examples of today’s Brandy Melville sound, a three-minute escapism in which romance isn’t contained within the constraints of a relationship, but a daydream of a blue-skied, sun-kissed, blessed and beaming All-American life.
The fodder of Brandy Melville Instagram posts. If last century’s cool girls Alanis Morissette and Carly Simon soundtracked the urban rom-com films of the ’90s, then the likes of Gracie and Taylor are similarly providing sonic aspiration that shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty take full advantage of. Belly Conklin is, of course, patient zero of The Brandy Melville Girl. The cultural signifiers may have changed, but the fantasy of young womanhood has not. Confident in her soft cotton minimalism, she lets her big eyes and bright teeth speak for themselves; suburban but city-facing, she engages with cosmopolitan culture without necessarily rushing to leave behind the pool parties and handsome jocks that define her teenagehood.
Because Brandy Melville Girls party! They’ll be the first to acknowledge they got White Girl Wasted. They know all the lines to Miley Cyrus’s We Can’t Stop; they’re just not necessarily in line for the bathroom, trying to get a line in the bathroom. Effy Stonem and Chloë Sevigny aren’t the mood board, but Romy Mars and Kaia Gerber are instead. And lest I depict the Brandy Melville Girl as the fodder of viral sorority rush videos: they own white tops and light denim barrel jeans, sure; but, as the Brandy Melville sound dictates, they also have Pinterest boards zealously dedicated to Daisy Jones & The Six. If they do look Christian Girl Autumn, well, that wasn’t the intended look.
To listen to music and relate is one of the purest ways our inherited human story of consuming art continues today. And to listen to music and escape is an otherworldly experience that knows no bounds of genre. For multitudes of young women across the world, especially in the States, Brandy Melville Music provides auditory comfort in its warm vocals, its relatable lyrics, the acoustic play that feels both intimate and expansive. And yet the world-building of this subgenre is staggeringly aspirational because it packages these lived experiences into something so beautiful in its femininity, so unapologetic in its simplicity. We can’t help but return to this golden ambience, again and again. Its success isn’t promising a life of glitzy urban party-girl messiness, but rather the beauty of making everyday life feel deservedly cinematic.
And of course, the sensitive duality of romanticism and escapism from the mundane that music can provide returns back to the mall. More often than not, the suburban mall is the first port of any young person’s journey in individualism. It’s not just the clothes, or just the music, but these ultra-curated spaces, the lifestyle they’re offering for anyone who is—importantly—buying. For a generation, it was the mall that allowed them to decide who they were. Fall Out Boy playing in Hot Topic; over in the UK, it was indie sleaze dominating the Topshop changing rooms. For a generation that now turns to the internet for identity formation, Brandy Melville is one of the few brands offering its predominantly teenage-girl and young-women clientele the same community of aspiration through accessible fashion.
Stepping out of Delray Beach’s Brandy Melville, we saw a cluster of tanned, handsome guys our age, outfitted in vintage T-shirts and backwards caps, hanging out. We spotted them immediately. “God,” Amy said. “If our lives were a movie, we’d be heading back to some big American house party with them tonight.” And a Taylor Swift song would play over the montage.
Photography courtesy of Getty Images
