Look around you, wherever you may be, and you'll see the signs. You'll likely have seen them for months. There are photographs and videos aplenty, lenses capturing that which may be passing others by. There are songs, nay entire albums, lending lyrics to the soundtrack of the revival. And there are celebrities, those cultural deities falling from the perches of perfection upon which we've placed them, stumbling bleary-eyed out of clubs. If there was no cultural tsunami that will come to define 2024, it will be 'Brat summer' and the return of celebrity mess that ensued in its wake. This has been a year of mess, real mess unfurling before our very eyes. And it's been perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Nothing – no, really, nothing – can be credited with this year's return of celebrity mess more than Charli XCX's record Brat. Of course, the Hertfordshire-born star wasn't to know that the June release of her album, and the international cultural reckoning it would trigger, would coincide with an unrelenting news cycle and a breathless year for politics in which we, the people, had been unconsciously aching for a release.
FIND OUT MORE ON ELLE COLLECTIVE
Read Next
Yet two months after the album's release and there we were, tapping our hips along to the lyrics of 'Apple' and sassily parroting the words 'Brat girl summer' when anybody we knew did anything even remotely outside the confines of societal acceptability. This year, Charli did what few artists have been able to; she captured lightning in a bottle, and with it promoted real-life mess back into the premier league of desire.
Case in point: the star's 32nd birthday party, which she held in August at Los Angeles hotspot Tenants. For the occasion, a veritable Brat girl birthday, Charli wore blink-and-you'll-miss-them hot-pants, her now-signature black sunglasses, and duetted on-stage with her collaborators Billie Eilish and Lorde. Among the fellow brats who joined their patron saint at her birthday were Shiva Baby's Rachel Sennott, Euphoria's Alexa Demie, Sabrina Carpenter and Rosalía, who arrived at the event with a suitably on-brand gift for the host: a bouquet of flowers festooned with Parliament Blues. Finally, celebrities were back (sort of) to being real (ish) with us.
Perhaps it should come as no great surprise. Celebrities, after all, are just like us, and it seems that every last of one of us has been itching for a cultural shift. We just maybe didn't realise it would come wrapped in sour apple green packaging, soundtracked by a song that instructs listeners to guess the colour of the singer's underwear. Gone are the days of hot yoga classes, celery juices and nicotine-free vapes; in their place are all-night dance sessions, champagne (which Charli, of course, drank from a flute while she performed her Boiler Room set in Ibiza) and Camel Blues. We want to award infamy and acclaim to those who reflect our own values. Studies have shown that we're swearing now more than ever before; once again we're all lighting up because smoking is back and more than 200,000 people descended upon Worthy Farm this year to attend Glastonbury, its busiest year on record, where queues to see Queen Charli DJ on the Friday night surpassed a three-hour wait time. Just let that sink in: it took longer to queue to watch Charli DJ than it did to enter the festival itself.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the who's-who of Hollywood were shamed rather than celebrated for the very same pursuits that will come to define this summer. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are just a few of the cultural casualties whose brands were penalised for their partying throughout the 2000s. But today, Young Hollywood is stepping out from the sanitised shadows it's been sequestered in as its stars, quite literally, light up alongside us.
The essence of celebrity mess has resonated with people too, the craving for party animal antics and pure, undiluted messiness. Following the album’s release, Brat generated $22.5 million (£17,890,695) in media impact value, according to Launchmetrics, while searches for items in Brat-style 'slime green' surged 17% in the weeks after its release, according to global shopping platform Lyst. On TikTok, where Gen Z fully endorsed its newly-ordained chief party girl, there were over one million videos with the #Brat within weeks. At the time of writing, some six months after Brat's release, there are one million more videos under the hashtag. When asked to define what exactly a 'Brat summer' is, Charli herself put it best. 'It can be, like, so trashy,' she told Nick Grimshaw in a BBC interview in June. 'Just like a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter and, like, a strappy white top.' The audio of her interview has proliferated on TikTok.
What Charli masterminded this year is a movement that went beyond music. 'Brat summer' reminded people that, despite the fraught friendships and fertility battles that many of us face and Charli lyricises, there's nothing more freeing than embracing the mess that ensconces all of us. Charli et al's messy ubiquity has furnished us with the knowledge that we're not alone in fumbling for the looming answers to life, nor are we alone in wanting to momentarily drink and dance to press pause on reality, if only just for a night. After years of perceived perfection, it has felt freeing to open social media and see those in the public eye, those who we follow, in all of their messy glory; unedited, unfiltered and uninhibited by that which bound them for so long.
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.
Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
