If I said that brat summer 2024 was well under way, your mind might well turn to all the riots roiling across the UK. Not our TikTok and Twitter addicts, however, our Gen Zs or millennials and so on, who will not associate the word “brat” for a second with spoilt children, or pot-bellied tattooed racists attempting to torch asylum hotels with flaming wheelie-bins. No.
Brat summer to anyone on social media means the singer Charli XCX, her lime green album — called Brat — smoking cigarettes rather than vapes, wearing the same dress every day, smudged mascara, unwashed hair, but over to the OG brat girl herself: “You’re that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes,” Charli, pictured, told TikTok series Off the Record. She also told the BBC’s Nick Grimshaw that brat basics included “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.
So that’s brat. Other current instant seasonal TikTok trends and memes, I should warn you, are trad wives and Childless Cat Ladies. The former I can dispense with quickly.
Trad wives — a viral lifestyle trend that has suckered in the entire globe — are young, often Mormon, women in prairie dresses who appear to make cheese from curds, cook all family meals from scratch, homeschool their many tow-headed children on ranches, and post the results to their millions of followers to monetise their lifestyles, while boasting how satisfying it is to stay home all day and submit and serve their “man”. Just Google or search Ballerina Farm, the account of trad wife Hannah Neeleman, for a handy primer.
We’ve had the summer of love, rat girl summer, hot girl summer, clean girl summer... it’s all nonsense of course
A reminder at this point that very few summers in recent memory escape spurious branding. We’ve had the summer of love, rat girl summer (where you lived like a rat, for some reason I cannot fathom), hot girl summer (where you looked hot, went to festivals and drank Aperol spritz), clean girl summer (you bought leggings and a yoga mat), summer of 69 (I made the last one up). It’s all nonsense of course — an online trend that influencers can jump on, an article creation scheme, like this one, which is why I would merely point this out.
Only one of the trends of 2024 picked up by hacks like me will be remembered by historians. It’s not brat summer, which is just another iteration of rock’n’roll, hippies, free love, teenage rebellion, punk etc, and will have passed by the time next August rolls around. It’s not trad wives either, who have been around the year dot if you think about it and trad-wiving/domestic drudgery (staying at home to cook, clean and look after the house, children and husband on a loop) remains the lot of most women around the world.
As a fashionable trend, trad wives have been presented as feminine and desirable — mainly by those who have rich or royal husbands — since, well, the 18th century when Marie Antoinette moved out of the Palace of Versailles into the Petit Trianon with its “hameau” or shepherd’s hut and wandered around with flowers in her hair, in straw hat and muslin slip dresses, as lambs and small children tumbled about her, a bit like mother-of-eight Neeleman does in her 320-acre estate in a fertile valley in Utah.
There is nothing new under the sun, so the only one historians might footnote of all these so-called “trends” (which are in fact just upcycled old ones) is this: JD Vance calling women who don’t have offspring “childless cat ladies” and saying they don’t have a stake in the future of the United States. It was possibly an election-losing mistake, given the narrowness of the US presidential race. Why would you insult childfree women (Vance doubled down since his 2021 comments, saying “I have nothing against cats”) when they are such a powerful voting bloc?
A 2023 CDC study found that nearly half of American women under 45 are childless, but the survey unfortunately didn’t break down that statistic to tell us how many of them had feline “fur babies” instead, but my guess is plenty. American women and fellow childless cat ladies are already rallying to and for Kamala Harris, so this looks like a quip that could help lose several swing states, and thus the presidential race, for Trump-Vance.
We’ve had trad wives and brat girls and childless cat ladies forever. We’ve just called them different things, like “ladettes” and “witches,” depending on the era. Only the childless cat ladies could change history.
