First came hot girl summer, and then the feral girls took over - white boys and rat boys got some press, but undeniably this year was brat girl summer. It seems that no summer can pass without a corresponding aesthetic with the right clothes, makeup and playlist to meet online expectations. And, as the mornings slowly get darker in the UK, the days inching shorter and school uniform ads infiltrating the algorithms, it's about time for a summer retrospective.
There are a thousand articles explaining what brat girl summer is with varying levels of success, so I will be brief and to the point: sex, drugs and mid-life crises. Much like the original 'hot girl summer', sparked by Megan Thee Stallion in 2019, the brat girl phenomenon is a product of musical marketing, with Charli xcx launching brat girl summer with her album Brat. Whilst the brat may have a little more substance than other trending aesthetics, used as a jumping-off point for healing female relationships (see Girl, so confusing) and celebrating queer awakenings (see Guess), it is ultimately little more than an aesthetic and TikTok trend, reflecting a cultural obsession with aestheticising the summer.
Summer holds a particularly significant place in our cultural landscape - it rings of nostalgia, rest from work and big plans. It has always been an important moment, with school summer holidays and opportunities to travel; a disconnect from the rest of the year. The memories and experiences we have attached to this particular season make it unsurprising that the summer-girl has become so integral to the language and aesthetics of the internet in the past few years. The type of girl summer each year is assigned offers a reflection on that specific cultural moment and what is happening at the time. And looking at recent girl summer history, we were due a bratty one.
Hot girl summer, the original, came along in 2019, just before the pandemic. Since then, our summers have been centred on things you can do at home. Healing girl summer, clean girl summer, feral girl summer.... These are all aesthetics and tones that are predominantly based at home- whether you are bed-rotting or making your bed. Girl summer adapted to the needs of its consumers, who, unable to leave the house, had to make do with aestheticising home life. A few years out of the pandemic proper, it's unsurprising that an aesthetic all about leaving the house and staying up until all hours has come along, reflecting a chaotic mood that hasn't really been seen since before 2020. The language of the internet is anthropocentric; it mirrors what is happening in reality and hones it into the online language of aesthetics- becoming not only more digestible, but more marketable.
Marketing is an important aspect of the summer girl industrial complex. Brat is the accumulation of years of profiting off of internet trends, and is primarily a musical venture and streaming scheme. Charli xcx isn’t stupid- brat girl summer isn’t just a fun little internet trend. It is a successful marketing campaign that ensures people buy her album, buy gig tickets, and do not stop talking about her. And when your cool girl of the moment is having op-eds written about her marketing tactics on LinkedIn, you can’t help but feel a little fatigued by the constant trend cycle that facilitates an endless desire to reinvent yourself at the cost of overconsumption, debt and environmental disaster.
There has been endless discourse on social media's lack of realism that it is boring to repeat here, but it has to be said that these constructions of the summer girl over the years create unrealistic visions of how summer should be lived. As marketing trends, these various girl tropes are designed to guarantee spending and content consumption, and, in doing so, create the feeling that to have an identity is to consume. On the internet, it is a risk to be authentic; it is much better economically to engage with trends that are disguised as identities, and so feed into a constant cycle of re-identification as new trends arise. There is, to an extent, a shared solidarity in existing with others in their brat eras, however, there is a competitiveness, a desire to fit in, and an onslaught of discourse every time a new girl type arises (that, admittedly, I am contributing to). We love embodying whatever new trend comes into being, but equally, we love tearing it down, over-analysing and gatekeeping it. As soon as people hear about a new trend they want to be involved- either to embody it or critique it- and this cycle is fatiguing, expensive and unrealistic.
As brat girl summer gets archived even as I’m typing these words in favour of its polar opposite counterpart, the demure girl, I’m reflecting on a failed brat summer and anticipating an unsuccessfully demure autumn. I've spent a good chunk of my summer working or unwell, successfully evading any risk of having a bratty summer. However, I do spend enough time online to yearn just a little for how others' summers have panned out- brattier than mine- worried that I've not lived up to Charli's expectations of me. Increasingly, life online can feel like a perpetual New Year's Eve downer: the pressure to have the perfect time that inevitably leads to disappointment when unachieved. Overly focusing on trend cycles and girl identifications risks losing touch with doing things you actually want to do, rather than buying into an aesthetic created by someone else.
Your summer doesn’t have to be bratty or feral or hot - no internet judge is going to reprimand you for not having the type of summer you felt you deserved. You do not need to change your personality to adhere to every trend that cycles through the algorithm. I’m very happy to say goodbye to brat summer and, hopefully, never see such an ugly shade of green again. Unfortunately, as we leave the brat girl behind, we enter demure girl autumn and face all the discourse and products that are a consequence of a new girl entering the arena. Maybe I'll be back here writing about the downfall of the demure girl in a few months time, continuing the cycle of marketing trends, outcry and discourse.
Charli XCX via Instagram
edited by Cormac Nugent
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