Comment I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice . It is, as younger people on the internet keep insisting, the beginning of a long, hot Brat summer .
If you were hoping to still hold sway with last year’s “Tomato girl” stylings — Sophia Loren sexy cotton sundress paired with a Jane Birkin basket bag (itself a permutation of the Covid-cottagecore-era), this may be alarming news. The chief arbiter of the movement is Gen Z pied-piper Charli XCX , who played at Glastonbury on Friday night. The term was announced with her new Brat album cover, plainly written in a basic Ariel font on a Lime bike-green background, the soundtrack to the summer in which your aesthetic aim should be “being really hot but in a scary way”.
Or as she puts it in her song Mean Girls, “She’s kinda f***ed up but she’s still in Vogue”. Incidentally, the new British Vogue , edited by Chioma Nnadi, is very Brat. Its July cover features not a sun-kissed model artfully lounging around on a beach in a bikini as one might expect of a high summer airport buy, but the rapper Central Cee, looking both cross and slightly bored (one shot shows him head in hands) wearing a black polo neck, albeit draped in silver Chanel necklaces.
Seán McGirr’s new vision for Alexander McQueen — the hoof-platform-boots, the smashed-up chandelier cocktail dresses, the acid yellow Bingo-caller silk shirts — are bang-on Brat; so are knee-high black.
