Everybody wants to be a brat now, but nobody can tell you what exactly a brat is. Is brat girl summer a $1000 pair of super baggy fit jeans, as ELLE recommends? Or, as Pitchfork posited, is brat girl summer…dead?
We think that brat girl summer is very much alive. It’s an important part of popular culture at the moment. Recently, British pop singer Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” about presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Suddenly, Brat burst out of dance clubs and into the mainstream. What in the world is brat girl summer? How did it start? Why do people care? You’re not alone in wondering.
Charli defined a “brat” as: “…that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.”
Listening to Brat Girl Summer: “It’s progressive, smart, clever, and real.”
What could get lost if you give that OG definition too much credence is that the album that brought brat to the fore is more varied and nuanced than just partying. “So I,” a track from Brat, is about Charli grieving the loss of her friend Sophie after her sudden death in 2021. “I think about it all the time,” is about anxiety around her decreasing fertility with age. “Everything is romantic,” is about seeing the beauty in the small things. Brat also delves into the complexities of female friendship on “Girl, so confusing,” about Charli’s relationship with fellow singer Lorde. Lorde then responded, and the two worked it out on a remix of the song in a moment that felt almost too perfect.
While some have discussed brat’s aesthetic of self-acceptance and messiness in contrast with the “clean girl” trend, there’s a danger in categorizing women based on good or bad habits. Charli says it herself, in the plainest words possible: “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.”
Electronic musician 2020k, a fan of Brat who sees inspiration for his own music in its aesthetic, told TABLE that “To me, brat is about embracing the more gritty, complicated parts of life, something that I constantly strive to authentically explore in my own life and art.” He also relates to the album as a queer person seeking innovation in the music industry. “A lot of what Charli talks about on this record is substance that’s desperately missing from music. Brat is not just beats. It didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.” (This a reference to a meme-able Kamala Harris quote about seeing things in the context in which they developed—further proof of the bizarre permeability of brat as a concept.) “It’s progressive, smart, clever, and real.”
Seeing Brat Girl Summer: “A shocker, surprising, tart-tongued.”
Beyond the album, its cover “brat green” (also known as Hex #8ACE00), is now the talk of the town in the design world. Callie Holterman of The New York Times went as far as to say “If Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster of Barack Obama was the lasting design of the 2008 election, the Brat album cover may be its 2024 successor.” Brent David Freaney, from the team behind the Brat cover at Manhattan-based design firm Special Offer, told Holterman “This is not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive.”
Kathy Hattori of Botanical Colors, a Seattle-based natural dye company, developed a natural dye protocol to achieve Brat green. It uses mordant, weld extract, and indigo to create the color. “I was fascinated that a color and a word could represent such a reset for the election,” she said.
Hattori admitted that while she didn’t understand the trend, she saw an opportunity to do something new with the color. “I see brat as a bit of a shocker, surprising, tart-tongued, a familiar and a literal twist on what was a very dull and predictable situation,” she told TABLE. “It has energy, and also a strength with its indigo base. I was thrilled that we could recreate this shade in natural dyes and explode the [limiting] myth of ‘soft,’ neutral and organic colors.”
Live the Brat Girl Summer Lifestyle: “It’s an exciting time to be alive.”
Writer and critic Pria Dahiya—a real Gen Z youth, at the supposed core of the brat demographic, by the way—said to TABLE: “I can’t stop thinking about Brat and talking about it. [Charli] is talking about body image in really new ways. She’s talking about stopping her birth control. She’s talking about becoming a human product. This is really interesting and psychologically engaging material.” Dahiya also urged people to think about brat girl summer as not just a trend, but as a a celebration of an interesting and new cross-section of fashion, design, and music. “Are y’all really listening to this album, to the crazy things that are being said on popular tracks listened to by billions? It’s an exciting time to be alive, from an art historical perspective as well as a purely personal one.”
“Apple” is one of my favorite songs on brat, an upbeat bop about the push and pull of a relationship—”I guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree / I’ve been looking at you so long that I only see me.” If you want to feel a little bratty with a cocktail recipe, try a Last Word. Its green chartreuse and lime juice gives it a tongue-twisting tang, and its name promises a conversation…or possibly a little argument.
You can have a lot of fun with the brat aesthetic, whether by trying Kathy Hattori’s natural textile dyeing methods or by thinking about brat green in food, drink and lifestyle choices like absinthe, zucchini, or green accents in furniture. Whether you love it or roll your eyes at it, Brat is everywhere.
Listen to the album for yourself!
Story by Emma Riva / Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records and Kathy Hattori
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