Brandy Melville is building a store at Reston Town Center, The Burn reported on September 30. The store would take about 4,600 square feet in the space Apple left when it moved next door into a larger store in 2020, and it would be the brand’s first location in Virginia.
The Burn, a Loudoun-based news site, broke the story. The company has not announced an opening date, and as of October 1 we found no Fairfax County building permit filed under the Brandy Melville name for the space, so construction may not have started yet.
The brand sells mostly to teenage girls and young women, and its stores hire heavily from local high schools. It has a loyal following and has also drawn several years of public criticism, both summarized below.
The store fills the former Apple space at Reston Town Center
Apple opened its first Reston Town Center store in 2009 and moved into a space roughly twice the size next door in 2020, as The Burn also reported at the time. The original store, a little over 5,000 square feet, is the space Brandy Melville is taking.
Until now, the closest stores for Northern Virginia shoppers have been in Georgetown and at Pike & Rose in Rockville. The Rockville store opened on May 15, 2025, at 11804 Grand Park Avenue, and the student newspaper at nearby Walter Johnson High School described steady crowds and a wave of student job applications that spring. A Reston store would sit a short drive from South Lakes and Herndon high schools.
The store will join a stretch of Reston Town Center that has added tenants steadily over the past two years, including Paris Baguette at RTC Next and Dogfish Head Alehouse, which is close to opening.
Brandy Melville started in Italy and grew in the U.S. through Instagram
Silvio Marsan and his son, Stephan Marsan, founded Brandy Melville in Italy in the early 1980s. The name comes from a story the founders invented about a romance between an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville. Stephan Marsan runs the company today.
The brand opened its first U.S. store in 2009 in Westwood, near the UCLA campus in Los Angeles. It grew mostly through social media rather than traditional advertising. The company posted photos of young women wearing its clothes on Instagram, reposted pictures shoppers took of themselves, and built a following among teenagers that spread from California across the country. According to The Burn, Brandy Melville now runs more than 100 stores in 24 states and Washington, D.C.
The clothes are simple and casual: fitted tops, sweatshirts, sweatpants, skirts and basics. Teenage girls and young women make up most of the store staff, according to both the 2021 reporting and the 2024 documentary described below.
Most of the clothing comes in a single size
Brandy Melville sells most of its clothing in one size, which the brand describes as “one size fits most.” In practice, that size runs close to a U.S. extra small or small. Shoppers who wear larger sizes will find little that fits in the store.
In 2024 the company opened stores under a separate name, St. George, that carry the same style of clothing in more than one size, according to Glossy. Nothing in The Burn’s report suggests the Reston store will be anything other than a standard Brandy Melville.
The company has faced criticism over fast fashion, body image and race
Since 2021, news reporting and a feature documentary have made allegations about how Brandy Melville makes its clothes, treats its employees and presents itself to customers. The company has not responded publicly to most of them.
Insider’s 2021 investigation reported racist and antisemitic messages among executives
In September 2021, Kate Taylor of Insider, now Business Insider, published an investigation based on interviews with former employees and on roughly 150 screenshots of a group chat among male executives, including the CEO. Taylor reported that the chat contained racist and antisemitic jokes, including repeated references to Hitler. A former store owner told Insider that Stephan Marsan had said he did not want Black people shopping at his stores. Former employees described being hired, assigned and let go based on their appearance. Dazed summarized the findings when the story ran. The company did not issue a public apology.
HBO’s 2024 documentary expanded on hiring, body image and labor
Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, directed by Eva Orner and built on Taylor’s reporting, premiered at South by Southwest and was released on HBO on April 9, 2024. Former employees in the film alleged that white employees were placed on the sales floor while employees of color worked in stockrooms, that staff were asked to submit full-body photographs that were sent to company leadership, and that employees were judged and dismissed based on their looks. Several described struggling with eating and body image while working there. The film also includes an allegation of sexual assault at a company-controlled apartment in New York.
TIME reported that a former executive described the one-size policy as a deliberate way to keep the brand exclusive, and that the brand’s social media accounts featured models who were young, thin and white. According to TIME, Stephan Marsan does not appear in the documentary and Brandy Melville did not comment.
Critics also point to fast-fashion production and textile waste
The documentary’s title places Brandy Melville among fast-fashion retailers, the term for companies that produce large volumes of inexpensive clothing quickly and replace it often. The documentary followed production in Prato, Italy, where it reported that immigrant garment workers sewed clothing under poor conditions. It also traveled to Accra, Ghana, where large shipments of discarded clothing from wealthy countries end up resold, burned or dumped on beaches.
A California wage case ended in a settlement
In November 2022, a Los Angeles County court approved a $1.45 million settlement of a class action brought on behalf of about 4,000 hourly employees who worked for the company between 2012 and 2021. The suit alleged unpaid hours, missed meal and rest breaks and inaccurate time records. The Fashion Law reported that Brandy Melville denied the claims and settled without admitting wrongdoing.
The brand kept growing after the criticism
Brandy Melville has opened new U.S. stores since the documentary aired, including Rockville in 2025 and its first suburban Chicago store, in Naperville, this summer. In Jacksonville, Florida, the county issued a building permit in March for a store at St. Johns Town Center. Reston would add Virginia to that list.
A county permit or an opening date comes next
A tenant build-out of this size needs a Fairfax County building permit, and those filings usually name the tenant. A sign permit typically follows shortly before opening. We will update this post when either filing appears or when the company announces an opening date.
For anyone weighing a move to the area, Reston Town Center keeps adding stores and restaurants within walking distance of its condos and apartments and a short drive from the single-family neighborhoods around it. If you want to talk through what that means for a home purchase or sale near the Town Center, reach out to us.
See something missing or wrong? Email us at [email protected] and we will check it and update the post.
