With all due respect, the moment Kamala Harris co-opted the brat aesthetic for her presidential campaign, brat summer was over. For those who have been living under a rock, Brat is popstar Charli XCX’s latest album, which came out last month and made the internet go crazy. Since then, the singer has mythologised Brat into a persona and a way of life.
“You’re just like, that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes,” she explains. Brat summer is hedonistic — it’s about going out late and doing drugs in club bathrooms and being slightly unhinged. It’s the antithesis of Barbiecore that swept TikTok last year. People are obsessed.
The brat rollercoaster took an unlikely turn when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race. Charli XCX decided to beam her cultural cachet into US politics with the three-word tweet, “Kamala IS Brat”. Harris’s team saw an opportunity and took it, updating the official campaign account’s profile picture to mimic the Brat album cover, with a lime green square and “Kamala HQ” in a blurry font.
Brat crash-landed into wider public consciousness. But it’s all downhill from here
Charli XCX’s songs started popping up on Kamala’s TikTok, and brat crash-landed into wider public consciousness. But it’s all downhill from here.
We have reached the stage where boomers have read a “What is brat summer?” explainer. Where brands trip over themselves to produce lime-green clothing, and corporate social media accounts sap the last iota of coolness out of it. TfL have pronounced their green tram to be brat, while the Lib Dems posted a TikTok claiming “It’s a Li(b)eral Democ(r )(a)(t) summer”. Please.
American news outlet NBC even created a Venn diagram of what Charli XCX and Kamala Harris have in common (not much — they are both “vehicle enthusiasts”, apparently.)
People might be surprised that a presidential campaign is riding on the coattails of an album with lyrics like, “should we do a little key, should we have a little line?”. What started out as counter-cultural has become profoundly, institutionally mainstream. Meanwhile, twentysomething party girls will be looking at their new lime green dress and thinking, oh, this feels a bit dated.
Claudia Cockerell is a reporter on Londoner’s Diary
