Why Brat Summer Is Really Just Female Rage Dressed In Green
Over the past few weeks the world has been turning itself inside out to decode something that barely makes sense to the musician who wrote it. Brat is ostensibly a dance album about being a hot mess of vulnerable contradictions: a woman who is both contemplating motherhood while spritzing perfume in the armpits of a party dress. But it quickly became much more than that when Charli XCX dropped its slime green album art with its lo-fi DIY aesthetic along with a bunch of ironic in-jokes and a meme generator. The wall went live at 7pm. The entire internet was chartreuse by dawn.
Academics called it a 'political mindbomb', Sadiq Khan said ULEZ was 'brat', Charli XCX herself declared Kamala Harris 'brat', then the mainstream media started to lose its mind. Your Aunt was texting you 'what is brat???' The girlies had trolled the establishment - and it’s fair to say it was working.
FIND OUT MORE ON ELLE COLLECTIVE
Somehow a joke about being a dry shampoo-powered feral party girl had gone stratospheric. Days after it blew the doors off the discourse, critics called it: we’d already reached peak brat. It’s only mid-August and Brat summer has already been declared over. 'Brat' now means everything and nothing all at once. It is Shrodinger’s brat, if you will.
As the saga unfolded and her phone rang off the hook, it was easy to imagine Charli, real name Charlotte Emma Aitchison, Balenciaga boots on a desk somewhere filing her acrylics while news anchors asked one another how a toilet, a sandwich or a subway train could be considered 'brat'. Just like the punks that came before her, she was proving her taste for chaos.
In 2022, Charli told Rolling Stone: ‘I think the people who know me and my work know that 50% of the time I’m entirely serious, and the other 50% of the time I’m a troll.’ It was exactly those troll vibes that held a Bic lighter (a Brat summer essential) to the blue touch paper of the internet. Trolling behaviour has long been its own kind of digital punk movement - a way of causing trouble online. It’s a cultural code, not to be confused with its ugly sister: toxic internet bullying. Troll humour shared in closed communities is ironic, deliberately provocative and often antagonistic. Often absurd, it rarely makes total sense. It’s real mission? To get attention. As writer Paul Graham defined it: 'the aim of the troll is to change the subject.'
The subject has changed. If last year was the year of girlification [think Barbie, Eras tour number one, TikTok's 'Girl Dinners'] then this latest grubby Brat pivot marks a moment that ‘girlhood’ - and by extension womanhood - hit adolescence. It got weirder jokes, sharper nails and a frankly, angrier attitude.
For years the growing ironic, nihilistic sense of humour that birthed Brat defined and bonded a cash poor, climate-anxious generation. But this summer, it hit different. The chaotic, ugly 'brattitude' captured something that felt truer than ever. As Charli told Rolling Stone in May: You’re only really a true brat 'if you’re acting out against something that’s made you feel a little bit insecure.'
Right now there’s plenty for women to be insecure about. A decade of girlboss feminism promised us that if we played by grown-up rules, we’d get grown-up rewards. Yet, emerging still breathless and broke from the pandemic, many of us fell behind on the goals society set for us. Then we watched with horror at the rolling back of reproductive rights around the world, the withering of the #MeToo movement in a public domestic violence trial, closely followed by Andrew Tate bringing us a freshly-baked batch of misogynistic hate speech. It’s easy to see why, for those of us feeling anxious and powerless, ‘acting out’ feels like the only option.
Brat culture provoked and teased a media that so often treats women ruthlessly. It captured the attitude of a woman not pleading to be understood, but daring the world to misunderstand her.
Lately we’ve seen recent glimmers of other women disrupting the discourse. Doja Cat telling social media that she’s a clone, Julia Fox’s impish online persona or Jade Thirwall’s latest invitation to the music industry: ‘when I pop off you sue me, so sue me.’
For lots of women the urge to be a menace is real. 'I think lots of people are sick of the basic Barbie stuff,' says Daisy 28, a Charli fan and self-confessed troll. ‘They feel lost and a bit weird and disruptive right now.’ Daisy likes to troll the ‘boomers’ in her family Whatsapps: 'I know it’s not mature but my family group chat feels judgemental. Sometimes it’s funny to blow things up by saying something controversial about spending all my money on drinks I know will annoy them.'
For others, dabbling in online trolling is about sticking it to the man. Millie, 30 from London says, ‘I’m a b*tchy stealth troll. I post subtle memes in the big work Slack when my boss patronises me. It’s perfect because he doesn’t really know how to respond. But for my younger colleagues, it can be kind of bonding for us.'
People have always found new ways to bond online, but for years trolling was nothing but a badly-dressed boys club. Reddit and 4chan forums offered solidarity to a spectrum of disenfranchised men who were able to hop out of the shadows and into the open arms of the far-right. But this class of dudes were never the only online subculture wanting to provoke a reaction. The women have been biding their time, and they’re ready to cause a very different kind of mayhem.
Nothing felt more like a peak molar-grinding chaos for the media than when arch troll Charli tweeted ‘Kamala IS Brat’ shortly after the VP announced her campaign for US presidency. There was something pleasingly jarring about a distinguished American politician aligning herself with an album that is, among other things, about the emotional fallout of doing too many drugs in the loos of East London. Brat might not have serious political consequences, but it was still a galvanising moment for disillusioned female voters. Silly though it was, it captured feminine reclaiming of cultural power over the strong man era of US politics that has marginalised women and undone their reproductive rights.
As I cycled across town - late and vaping - on my Brat green (formerly Lime green) bike, it struck me that the Brat rollout was truly the perfect piece of feminist punk commentary. It trolled and mocked the mainstream media by challenging conventional ideas of what is culturally ‘important.’ This weird lurid green moment in culture has catapulted us all into the embrace of chaos. But a self-respecting troll is here to cause trouble - not tell us what to think. As Anastasia Denisova senior lecturer in Journalism at University of Westminster points out ‘[as] with any good meme, “brat” is defined by incompleteness.’ The female trolls came to ‘change the subject’ and I’m waiting by phone to see where they’re taking us next.
ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE.
You Might Also Like
