As every party girl comes to learn one day, the afters never last forever. Brat summer: it’s been the rager of a lifetime, but, I’m sorry to say, it’s time to call it. Why? Well, for me, all it took was seeing this image in the cold light of a Monday afternoon. Having corrected my vision after my eyes rolled back so far I thought I’d have to seek medical advice, I took a moment to ponder what, exactly, I found so perturbing about it. Sure, it was in no small part the intrusive thoughts upon seeing Kamala Harris become the surprise third in the longstanding open relationship between Charli XCX and the Fire Island gays. After getting past my own brain rot, I decided that this was the very moment the apple rotted right to its core.
I will caveat what follows by saying that I don’t blame Charli for any of it. I was, and still am, as brat-pilled as they come, and believe that everything that has unfolded since the first minute of Aidan Zamiri’s masterful music video for “360” amounts to a watershed moment in pop cultural history. A vignette of what The Last Supper would have looked like if Jesus and his disciples were modern-day It-girls, it tripped a switch in the minds of anyone who’s ever harboured aspirations of becoming one.
Beyond Gabbriette, Julia and Chloë, the remit of Charli’s fandom – AKA her angels – has expanded to include anyone who’s: felt fierce taking tipsy mirror selfies, felt deep insecurities about someone in their circle, stalked their local high street-like it’s a Miu Miu catwalk, walked an actual Miu Miu catwalk, mulled over slowing and settling down, and so on.
Brat’s far-reaching impact and appeal don’t bear digging into. It’s common knowledge that, with it, Charli has zeroed in on the zeitgeist with an authenticity, acuity and degree of nuance that’s diamond-rare. Counterposing bratty bolshiness with unflinching vulnerability, she’s stepped up as the self-possessed, shamelessly messy anti-hero we need in times when the cultural mainstream is increasingly conditioned by stifling puritanism. As FYPs dominated by “Apple” dances, Duolingo and Flixbus’s competitively unhinged brat-marketing, the UK Green Party vote canvassing campaigns and IG Stories of Lime bike rides soundtracked by “Everything is romantic” can attest, brat has resonated far and wide.
While I find this kowtowing to algorithmically-spurred trends a bit bleak and annoying, I also self-identify as a Scrooge too crippled by the fear of coming off as basic to allow myself the carefree joys it seems to bring other people. Yes, this is something I speak to my therapist about. Where I started to feel that my cynicism was more justified, though, was upon the arrival of corporate colonisers to brat summer’s sticky shores.
A bold analogy, granted – and, to be fair, it took a bit of effort from all of us to get to this point. After all, in this age of .com media, people like us have a role in shuffling trends along the curve from bubbling up to booming to eventually fizzling out. Starter packs, trend pieces, POV confessionals… they’ve all become key fixtures of a strategy to refract things that are simmering away organically in pop culture for a broader audience to consume. That’s content, baby!
But there did come a point where it all got a little… desperate? As the insightful Lucy Maguire, senior trends editor at Vogue Business, reported, everyone from Flannels to Boohoo, Beauty Bay to Kate Spade has released brat summer shopping guides, with one legacy media outlet going as far as to send out a vegetarian cooking newsletter of “Brat Summer Green Cooking”. “Chilled zucchini soup, buttermilk green goddess slaw and cucumber agua fresca are lush, vegetal and so Julia,” its subheading read, making it immediately more likely that I would eat a full head of my 4b curl pattern hair than any of these dishes.
It’s against this backdrop that the Kamala-fication of brat summer dropped, pulling the plug on a trend already on life support. As you’ll probably have seen, a direct endorsement of the incumbent VPOTUS from Charli on X (formerly Twitter) triggered an official embrace of brat’s viral branding on Kamala Harris’s campaign’s official X account. This, in turn, has spawned not only a glut of earnest think pieces unpacking this left field rebrand, but also a barrage of extremely online responses – from the aforementioned Fire Island gays in the brat-ala crop tops to comments to the tune of “I’m everywhere, I’m so Kamalaaa”.
Apart from the last one, most responses don’t trigger my ick – I quite enjoyed this deranged edit, actually. In fact, neither does the logic that underpins brand-abetted brat appropriation in and of itself. What is a little galling, though, is seeing it applied by parties that, fundamentally, feel pretty antithetical to the messages at the heart of brat. I’m not too sure, for example, if many of the brands now proclaiming to be “so Julia” would have gone out of their way to book Ms Fox on a campaign prior to the release of “360”.
Of course, such is the nature of modern-day marketing – and, ultimately, the only people there are to blame for brat summer fatigue are, well, all of us who bought into it. Bleak as that is, what isn’t these days? Even if we may have precipitated its decline, we’ll always have our half-empty bottles of NYX lip oil and cropped white tank tops as mementos of this most gleefully ratchet of seasons. And to be honest, even if brat summer’s done, brat winter’s still in with a fighting chance, with the album’s official tour kicking off in November.
