Silvio Marsan

I know less about Silvio Marsan than about any other founder in this library, and I think that is a fact about him rather than a gap in my research. He is Italian, he started a small clothing business that most accounts date to 1970, and he named it after two invented characters — Brandy, an American girl, and Melville, an English boy, who meet in Rome — a story the brand still tells and has never elaborated. There is no biography, no long-form interview, no photograph in wide circulation. The company he built is held through private entities in Switzerland, Italy and the United States, publishes nothing, and has refused almost every request to talk for fifteen years. The Marsans do not attend fashion weeks and do not appear on rich lists, although a business estimated at around $300 million in annual sales with no debt and no outside investors would qualify them.

The visible part of the record begins in 2009, when Silvio and his son Stephan opened a store near the UCLA campus in Los Angeles and, in the version of the story that former employees tell, split the roles: Silvio the founder and owner, Stephan the operator who runs the company day to day. Under them Brandy Melville did four things at once that no rival was doing — one size, no advertising, an Instagram account of its own teenage staff, and a store-opening pace slow enough that each new location was an event — and by 2014 it was the fastest-growing brand among American teenage girls. Whether the one-size policy was Silvio's decision, Stephan's or an accident of the Italian range is not on the record. What is on the record is that it was never reconsidered.

The contested part is everything Business Insider reported in 2021 and HBO's documentary repeated in 2024: that Stephan Marsan reviewed photographs of store staff and directed who was hired and dismissed on the basis of their bodies and their race; that a group chat of senior figures shared racist and antisemitic material; that teenage employees were exposed to older men connected to the company. The reporting concerns Stephan and the executives around him more than Silvio directly. But Silvio owns the company, and an owner who says nothing after two such accounts has made a decision of his own. I cannot tell whether that silence is a strategy or a temperament, and I have decided the distinction does not matter much.