Welcome To The New Era Of The Brit It Girl
You may not have seen the film, but you definitely saw the looks. For the Twisters press tour earlier this year, Daisy Edgar-Jones cemented herself as a star not so much on the rise but one that's very much risen. There was draped, chocolatey goodness courtesy of Vivienne Westwood for the film's European premiere, there was clean and crisp Gucci for its Los Angeles premiere and finally there was decadent navy Victoria Beckham in London. If there's one thing the press tour of Twisters immortalised, it was Edgar-Jones' appeal.
She's not alone. No matter which way you might have turned this year, it feels like there have been British woman of note on every cultural corner. From Edgar-Jones and Raye to Charli XCX and the second-coming of the OG It Brit, Sienna Miller, 2024 has been defined by a handful of homegrown faces.
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But what makes an It Brit girl today? The beauty of the revival lies in the fact that the rulebook of yesteryear has been torn up entirely. Gone are the days when the only prerequisites were a sample size body and an over reliance on Marlborough Golds. Today's crop of It Brits embody all of the insouciance required of a British It girl without any of the churlishness.
Take Edgar-Jones, whose breakout role in the BBC adaptation of Normal People catapulted her to global fame in the midst of lockdown in 2020. London-born, with alabaster and chocolate brown eyes, the bones of an It girl were there, but it was when she tapped Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber's stylist, Dani Michelle, for this summer's Twisters tour that her face was so beautifully and perfectly everywhere. Her acolytes didn't need to know any more about her, there was no requirement for her to overshare or overdo it while promoting the film: her clothes communicated everything we needed to glean. Instead, via a gentle wash of cultural osmosis, her status was cemented as an It Brit, clad in some of London's finest fashion talents no less.
The same is true of Charli XCX whose shape-shifting album Brat defined the spirit of 2024. Since the album’s June release, Brat has generated $22.5 million (£18 million) in media impact value, according to Launchmetrics, while searches for items in Brat-style 'slime green' — the colour of the album's cover — surged 17% in the weeks following the album's release, according to global shopping platform Lyst. On TikTok, where Gen Z has fully endorsed its newly-ordained chief party girl, there are over one million videos with the #Brat. When asked to define what exactly a 'Brat summer' is, the star herself put it best. 'It can be, like, so trashy,' she told Nick Grimshaw in a BBC interview. 'Just like a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter and, like, a strappy white top.' The audio of her interview naturally proliferated on TikTok. What Charli XCX did this summer was capture lightning in a bottle, and in doing so she created a new, messier blueprint for being an It girl today. It's not about being part of a glossy posse; it's about being authentically yourself, something that Britain's new roster of It girls have accomplished with aplomb. And what does authenticity achieve? Why Grammy nominations, of course, which Charli received seven of. Raye, a Brit School-educated star, cried as she also received three nominations, her first ever.
Once upon a time, the It Brit girls of our era were Kate Moss, Sadie Frost and Naomi Campbell. They were models who dated actors and we followed them, grew up alongside them, as they stumbled in and out of clubs and on and off the front pages of magazines. We watched their messiness and for a while, as social media claimed more of our attention, a generation of women crumbled under the pressure to be perfect, rather than real as their It girl predecessors had done. That's what the It Brits of 2024 have managed to encapsulate so well; they are real, they are silly and they are doing us so very proud. The eyes of the world can once again feast upon a buffet of British women who are defining fame and themselves on their own terms. And nothing is more 'it' than that.
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