The Most Popular Girl in Soho Is a Brandy Melville Employee
Whenever Allegra Pinkowitz is working a shift at the Brandy Melville store in Soho, rehanging rows of low-slung sweats, pointelle camis, and caps that say NANTUCKET, she feels the stares beaming in on her. Little groups of younger girls — she says that “they’re usually in eighth grade, maybe freshmen” — stop short at the sight of her and start whispering. “I try to smile — like, ‘I don’t bite!’” she tells me on a recent Wednesday afternoon, gripping a Celsius at a Joe & the Juice in Soho. It used to rattle her. But now Pinkowitz understands that all these strangers want is a photo with her, or a compliment on their outfit, or even just to come up and confirm what they and their friends all know: “Are you that girl from TikTok?”
Pinkowitz is 17. She just finished her junior year. She lives in Brooklyn with her mom, a fraternal twin she says she’s not close with (because “he’s a boy”), and a little sister who wants to use her makeup. She likes hanging out at a friend’s house and making TikToks of herself dancing and lip-syncing in the subway station on her way to school — which is what made her famous with middle-school girls. Her followers like her style (tiny shorts, tank tops, baby-doll dresses, and a gold A-initial necklace), the fact that she works at one of their favorite stores, and, more broadly, that she lives in the city. “A lot of the comments are like, ‘Oh my God, you live in New York,’” says Pinkowitz. “It doesn’t really have anything to do with what I am doing. It has to do with where I am doing it.” Now she posts a video like that nearly every day, often with a Stanley tumbler or a huge Starbucks drink in her hand. “A lot of people from other states follow her because they kind of associate her with New York,” says Eleanor Broadman, a 14-year-old who lives in Manhattan. “They’re like, ‘Oh, New York is all trains and Starbucks.’ And I think that’s really cool.”
In front of the camera, Pinkowitz shimmies and hams it up; in real life, she is shy. “I’m an awkward person,” she admits as she fiddles with her giant iPhone. Back in 2022, she was struggling to recover from the isolation of pandemic lockdown and reengage with school and friends, so her parents sent her away for a year — first to a remedial wilderness camp in the South, then to boarding school. (She says she’s not mad at them for this; it helped her.) She started her TikTok about a year after returning to New York, posting “get ready with me” videos modeled after the ones made by her favorite teen makeup influencer, Katie Fang. “I wasn’t too consistent with it because you have to think of something to talk about every time, and I honestly had nothing,” she says. But in May 2024, she got hired at Brandy Melville after applying “like 20 times.” (This made her mom “so happy,” she says, “because it meant I wouldn’t spend her money.”) She posted a video of herself lip-syncing to Sabrina Carpenter in a subway station above the caption “i’m working late cause i’m a singer (it’s my first day working at brandy).” And the comments went nuts.
It has been widely reported that Brandy Melville relies on the enthusiasm of its young, mostly female employees and young, mostly female shoppers to promote itself on social media. The brand has often been accused of hiring exclusively pretty blonde girls, which may sound bad to anyone who isn’t that but makes it a status job for a lot of teens. “How does it feel to live my dream,” one person responded to Pinkowitz’s post. “THE WAY I WANNA WORK THERE SO BADDD,” wrote another. A customer approached to talk to her about it in person later that day. “I probably had not even 1,000 followers, and some girl came up to me and was like, ‘Oh my God, I just saw your TikTok.’ All the girls I worked with were like, ‘What?’” Pinkowitz says. “That is a core memory for me because I was so surprised.” By the beginning of this year, Pinkowitz had nearly 100,000 followers, and more and more girls were showing up at the store asking to take a photo with her. She was afraid all the visits would get her in trouble with her boss. “At first, I was definitely concerned, but then I was like, What’s the difference if your friend comes into Brandy and starts talking to you?” Pinkowitz recalls. The difference is how many “friends” come in: Since Pinkowitz went viral, one of her co-workers estimates that 20 to 30 different groups of tween girls approach her in every weekend shift. Pinkowitz says the Brandy security guards are both confused and amused. “The other day one of them was like, ‘Are you an actor?’” she says. “Sometimes they’ll laugh and ask, ‘Can I have a photo too?’” Her manager doesn’t mind — she often volunteers to take the photos herself.
A few days after we first meet, I visit Pinkowitz at work. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and I have to wait on line to enter; inside, the store heaves with shoppers. “It’s not that crazy today,” Pinkowitz says, refolding a pile of sweatpants. I wander off to look at a sweater. When I find Pinkowitz again, she’s managing three groups of strangers who want to pose for selfies with her. (“She goes to school with my camp counselor!” one excited 14-year-old tells me.) Pinkowitz looks like she has the situation under control, but later she tells me she still doesn’t think she’s good at meeting new people. She feels she only recently learned how to “interact” — in part because TikTok fame forced her to. As a self-diagnosed former people pleaser, she believes daily posting is like exposure therapy; she’s opening herself up for feedback. She got a lot of that when she posted about being sent away for a year, describing one of the hardest experiences of her life in hopes it would resonate with someone else. “It’s hard when you think you’re the only one in a bad mental state, and I wanted to show I came back from it — like, it is possible,” she says. “Only people I know were kind of rude about it, like tagging each other in the comments. I brush it off, like, I didn’t post that for you.”
Right now, posting is not a job for her. Brandy Melville is. Even though her managers know she’s a TikToker, she says they’ve never pushed her to make videos about the brand. She just got her first offer for a paid ad deal from a different company that sent her clothes and asked her to make a video with it. Would she want to influence full time? “I mean, I would,” she says. (One day, though, she hopes to become a therapist.) She doesn’t have a manager, and frankly, she’s not sure how all that works. In L.A. or Miami, a teen influencer might get corralled into a hype house or signed by an agency. In New York, Pinkowitz doesn’t even meet many other influencers her age, and she has theories why this is so: “People are kind of judgy in the city. They aren’t as willing to risk the embarrassment.” Pinkowitz is willing. Recently, she spotted a celebrity at Brandy whom she describes as a “nepo baby,” the daughter of a supermodel, and asked her for a selfie — a request she would personally never turn down. But the nepo baby said “no.” “She was just standing there with sunglasses and socks covering her face,” Pinkowitz says, miming holding up socks. Pinkowitz found this rude. She also found it ridiculous. As she puts it, “Why’d you come to Brandy Melville on a Saturday if you don’t want people to go up to you?”
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