OPINION - Brat summer, must we really? Fashion's latest trend is just manufactured mayhem
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”.
Incidentally, the new British Vogue, edited by Chioma Nnadi, is very Brat. Its July cover features not a sun-kissed model artfully lounging around on a beach in a bikini as one might expect of a high summer airport buy, but the rapper Central Cee, looking both cross and slightly bored (one shot shows him head in hands) wearing a black polo neck, albeit draped in silver Chanel necklaces.
Seán McGirr’s new vision for Alexander McQueen — the hoof-platform-boots, the smashed-up chandelier cocktail dresses, the acid yellow Bingo-caller silk shirts — are bang-on Brat; so are knee-high black pop socks worn on show below shorter hemmed skirts (very much A Thing).
Katy Perry in C-section-scar-skirting ripped black tights and nothing but a fur coat at Balenciaga’s haute couture show in Paris last week was exceptionally Brat (this isn’t just any old tour-promoting gratuitous nudity, it’s A Mood etc); as was Charli XCX herself, also on the front row. Taylor Swift is not Brat; but Sabrina Carpenter absolutely is, flitting around in her latest video with real-life boyfriend Barry Keoghan as a bank robber.
Keoghan is also a paid-up member of the newly minted “hot rat men summer” category, which is very much a Brat spin-off movement (please God someone make me delete Instagram from my phone).
The entire cast of The Bear are Brats. At the show’s season three premiere, leads Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach were spotted out the back smoking cigarettes. Smoking is obviously both old and new Brat, and somewhat concerningly on the rise. Vapes, with their bubblegum flavours and neat little USB-casing, are definitely not Brat.
But Jordan Pickford screaming at his England teammates in his neon green strip with matching socks is peak Brat.
Call it a vibe shift, call it a honking great taste crisis, but after last year’s idolisation of Barbie, plastic-posed makeup routines and saturation of saturated pink, the only logical place we have to culturally pivot to is Mattel’s early Noughties nemesis, the hectic, bug-eyed Bratz doll. Looking perfect is fine, but also quite uninteresting and dull?
Last September almost every fashion show from a luxury house had an iteration of pristine white top and blue jeans (ones costing thousands of pounds, obvs). The great lean into “quiet luxury” and 20-year-olds making TikToks about “how to look expensive” wearing Shein could ultimately only end up in a flurry of trashy, punkish flames. And not just because of the polyester content. Or if you’re Charli XCX, dousing last year’s It piece — the white vest — in a bucket of red wine.
There is of course only one way to break the spell of these endlessly churning homogenous so-called trends (or “cores” if we must). How to appear to be authentically zeitgeist? Simply buy a load of new things as dictated to you by someone being paid by a brand to hold their handbag, to look like everyone else wanting to look different. Mayhem, but make it manufactured. Enjoy.
Victoria Moss is Fashion Director of the Evening Standard and ES Magazine
