I’ve never been an early adopter in my life, but for the first time in my life I’ve beaten other people to the punch, because I have already had my brat summer. A few weeks ago I opened a bag of clothes from last summer — denim miniskirts and baby tees, strappy tops and slutty dresses. Everything smelt a bit like secondhand smoke, or damp because I’d left them in the washing machine too long. That pile of tangled synthetic fabric is an archaeological site, the remains of my own personal brat summer. A summer that I have no desire — or ability — to revisit ever again.
Brat summer – if you’re not chronically online – is a viral aesthetic and lifestyle concept which espouses behaving, well, like a brat. Brat Summer icons include Charli XCX – who released an album last month called Brat, as well as the actress Julia Fox, model-musician Gabriette, Lana del Rey – and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions. Charli herself explained the concept, saying: “You’re that girl who is a bit messy and loves to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. She’s honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile. That’s brat.” She went on to tell the BBC’s Nick Grimshaw that the brat summer starter pack would be “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.
You could be forgiven for thinking that brat summer was just another piece of meaningless internet jargon, and if you’ve lived through the content about hot girl dummer, rodent boy summer, Euro summer and coastal grandmother summer. But this one is different. Those were aesthetics. Brat summer is a way of life. Sure, you can dress brat by matching the shade of green on the album cover, or wearing a strappy top without a bra or a dress you’d have found in Jane Norman in 2005, but it’s more than that. Brat is an attitude, a behaviour; a modus operandi.
There’s a kind of gorgeous chaos to brat summer. By way of example, creator and patron saint of brat, Charli XCX released a “diss track”, about her complex relationship with a similarly grubby-looking mega talent, the singer, Lorde. Then she invited Lorde to do a remix with her, where they became best friends again. Charli’s just out there being best friends with Kyle McLachlan (Orson from Desperate Housewives and Trey from Sex and the City), flying around the world. There’s a sense of perpetual motion to brat summer, you’re constantly moving from story to story, drowning yourself in the most interesting narrative and the most exciting environment.
Without wanting to sound like a campaign backed by Nancy Reagan, there is a reason that this kind of filthy living went out of style and was replaced by a Gwyneth Paltrow-style clean living mentality, and it’s because (from experience) if you brat long enough, all of your organs start hurting. By the end of last summer I got repetitive strain injury in my right hand from swiping on apps, and messaging attractive men and women I wanted to snog. I had an ulcer on my tongue which wouldn’t go away, a cigarette burn on my right thigh and I kept getting conjunctivitis. I’d vaped so much I was getting chest pains, I never wanted to look at a glass of rosé again, and my TikTok algorithm was showing me non-stop “things you only know in your early twenties” videos, because my behaviour was so juvenile that I’d tricked the algorithm into thinking I was barely out of my teens. I’d spent a worrying amount of money on micro miniskirts and baby tees.
I get why it’s fun, I went in on it hard last year. But I’m also going to tentatively say that if you throw yourself into brat summer you will almost certainly find yourself bailing on Parkrun with your school friends, or being too hungover to attend a friend’s baby shower. Brat summer relies on you not being reliable, or predictable, or having any kind of routine. Brat summer is not for people who have children or full-time jobs.
If you’re not 22, and you’re still feeling the siren call of Brat Summer, I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you that sticking your middle finger up at cameras, chaining Malboro Reds and saying something is “serving c**t” when it’s actually just quite nice, isn’t actually the act of rebellion you might want it to be. Maybe it’s different for other people, and their brat summer is entirely genuine. But for me, and I suspect other people, it’s all rather performative.
There is something genuinely glorious about Charli XCX’s revolutionary spirit — not least because she’s 31 years old and would, in music industry times gone by, have been taken behind the barn and shot. So it’s real for her. But for the fans embracing the brat life, it’s not. Much of the time it’s a load of management consultants and marketing executives using their annual leave to put on a pair of fishnets and micro shorts, suspend their environmental concerns to do a load of cocaine, and then go back to heating up their meal-prepped lunch in the office microwave. And who can blame them? It’s a reaction to not having the same linear progression as our parents, and a rebellion against the clean girl aesthetic which has dominated social media for the last half decade, celebrating skincare and early nights, long walks and drinking lots of water. Brat summer might be very bad for you, but at least it’s interesting.
Lots of women — especially very young women who came of age during the pandemic — have never gone home with a stranger and woken up with their contact lenses in. There are women all over the world who’ve never had to use the location services on their phone to work out where they are, or had two Red Bulls on the way into work to stay awake through a meeting. All of that is essential character building stuff. It’s the foundation of the stories you tell when you’re older, because your grandkids aren’t going to want to hear that you did heatless curls and mouth taping and went to bed at 9.30.
But if you do it properly, you only need to do it once, and therefore there will be no more brat summers in the Reid household. Instead, this year I’m opting for a Daphne du Maurier summer. Long walks, ideally coastal ones, with a dog. A sensible navy blue jumper and slacks. Writing lots, reading lots and inviting interesting people to dinner parties.