EDITOR’S LETTER
It’s a Brat Summer. And I Am Here for It.
It started with a record-breaking Boiler Room set in February. Continued with a surprise event in Brooklyn and a Glastonbury Festival performance. Then came the album with plain, low-quality text on a loud green background cover and a ‘360’ video filled with It girls, including Chloë Sevigny, Julia Fox, and Chloe Cherry. Summer started with the TikTok viral dance, the “brat generator”, and all the memes. Now it is everywhere. “It” is Charli XCX’s new studio album, Brat, released in June. ‘It’ is one of the most genius marketing strategies lately.
Brat has certainly captured the zeitgeist of this summer, although there is still no official definition of what brat is. However, in a TikTok interview, Charli XCX offered her definition of the brat attitude: “You are just that girl who is a little messy and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it. It is honest, blunt, and a little bit volatile. That’s Brat.”
According to the general consensus on TikTok, a brat is someone who doesn’t conform to societal norms and beauty standards. Someone who embraces the chaos of life, takes chances, and creates their own path. Many see it as a direct dig at #cleangirl and wellness trends, while others go as far as calling it a cultural reset. The time will show how much impact it will actually have, but after clean girl aesthetics, #quiteluxury, wellness girlies in beige athleisure, matcha latte art, and similar artifacts of today’s online landscape, it certainly feels refreshing. And so much fun.
As a millennial who grew up through Y2K aesthetics, indie sleaze, and extreme skinny ideals, the whole self-care concept of promoting wellness and body acceptance at first seemed refreshing and a logical step in the right direction. But as it happens with all trends and movements that flood our social media feeds daily, it has soon turned sterile, extremely boring, and highly problematic. Have I mentioned boring?
Wellness culture and many other self-oriented trends might portray themselves as highly aspirational, but actually cater to a very specific demographic and consequently lack much-needed diversity. They mostly alienate everyone who does not fit into the young, white, semi-rich, clear-skinned and skinny-framed category. And let’s not forget all of us with non-exclusively positive vibes.
Behind the curated facade of self-care and body acceptance hides a multibillion-euro worth industry selling the repackaged misogynistic messaging that taps into deep, underlying fears about female bodies and sexuality: staying young, hot, and productive is your only currency of value. And of course, you can’t achieve it without intense productivity and some serious financial investments. Body as the ultimate Veblen good.
For a hot second, brat managed to overpower this messaging and simultaneously uncover the sad truth: our online landscape is more mundane than ever. The algorithms continuously serve us with an endless stream of content aligned with our existing beliefs and preferences, leaving little opportunity for spontaneous creativity and individual inspiration. Unfortunately, the internet we all hoped for hasn’t delivered on its decentralized promise.
Returning to brat summer. Will it turn mainstream and become a commodity? Certainly. I might say it already did. But for a short time frame, it was exactly what our society and current online landscape desperately need. Less collective taste. More weirdness. The sensation of surprise. Less seriousness. Exuberance. More substance. More obscurity. More time offline. While they might not be cures for everything, they can make our lives much more pleasurable.
So here we are. My social media apps are paused. Negroni is mixed. Eve Babitz’s books are re-read. Festival tickets are bought. My Mubi subscription has been renewed. Saturday papers are read. Home is a fluent category. The same slip dress and swimsuit are worn every day. Heated opinions are shared with a bunch of friends hanging at our house. Some long-overdue thoughts are written. Nights turn into mornings often.
Because sooner or later, I always come back to the simple truth: in order to change your output, sometimes all you need is to adjust your input.
About the author:
Sandra Gubensek is the founder of utopiast.com, an online platform and concept store promoting and mentoring emerging designers and sustainable brands. She is an advocate of sustainable fashion, driven by the notion that brands have the ability to evoke strong emotions and can act as a powerful catalyst for change. Born in Slovenia, she has called Netherlands her home for the last three years.
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