It is, as younger people on the internet keep insisting, the beginning of a long, hot Brat summer. If you were hoping to still hold sway with last year’s “Tomato girl” stylings — Sophia Loren sexy cotton sundress paired with a Jane Birkin basket bag (itself a permutation of the Covid-cottagecore-era), this may be alarming news.
The chief arbiter of the movement is Gen Z pied-piper Charli XCX, who played at Glastonbury on Friday night. The term was announced with her new Brat album cover, plainly written in a basic Ariel font on a Lime bike-green background, the soundtrack to the summer in which your aesthetic aim should be “being really hot but in a scary way”. Or as she puts it in her song Mean Girls, “She’s kinda f***ed up but she’s still in Vogue”.
