Is fast fashion brat?

So, brat summer is over. The internet is mourning the end of chartreuse green and perhaps we are all getting ready to dump our sweaty white tank tops in the drawer. But, after all, party girls don’t stop partying when the temperature drops. Being a messy, sleazy, grungy girl is a year-long commitment and no one does it better than the brat girl herself, Charli xcx. And what better way to usher in gloomy weather than with an opulent plastic mob-wife coat? Yes, Charli has partnered with fast-fashion mogul H&M for the 2024 autumn/winter collection, described by the brand’s creative director as an intersection between ‘great fashion and liberating self-expression’ that is ultimately about ‘great clothes: real wardrobe icons, […] with flashes of vintage-style opulence’. Well, if vintage fashion was made out of plastic, that is.

Needless to say, this new partnership has caused waves of disappointment or even outright opposition in certain corners of the internet. Model and fashion environmentalist Brett Staniland (@twinbrett on Instagram) voices his opinion on the matter: ‘It’s a cash grab for Charli and a clout grab for H&M’. This is with no doubt true: Charli now sports over 40 million Spotify listeners and is likely a multimillionaire after the brat summer storm and H&M is, well, only one of the most popular fast-fashion brands ever. They also happened to make the highest number of global sales of their history in 2023. The comments on Brett’s post reflect some critiques of the artist’s decision. One of them reads: ‘Charli doesn’t care about the environment. She never did’. Another one: ‘I was really disappointed […], I just don’t get why she would say yes to that’. And more: ‘[…] She doesn’t strike me as someone that would do anything for cash but oh well, I guess brat summer really is over’; or ‘I literally cannot listen to her album anymore cause I don’t want to relate to her anymore[…], she’s here just for the clout and money’. It seems that there is a pattern here that I would describe as a misunderstanding of Charli’s persona and intentions which, for some people, came across as shocking. But brat summer, in my opinion, epitomized the aesthetic of just… not caring. Of not giving a fuck. Of being authentic in a way that is particularly self-absorbed. Reckless, messy, iconic, and nonchalant: in a brat girl’s world, what could possibly matter beyond herself?                                                        

This is not to say that the outrage for this campaign is senseless. The thing is, the brat girl is an artistic persona but Charli is a real person. She’s a pop star, a public figure. Public figures are after all, public, and it is often warranted to criticize them if we truly believe that what they did was wrong. In this case, it’s about the repercussions of granting even more visibility to a serial planet polluter and notorious human labor exploiter such as H&M. The brand collection has been in fact awarded a spot for a show on the opening night of London Fashion Week, which happens to coincide with multiple other shows championing sustainability (such as the Oxfam Runway for Change). So what’s really interesting about this outrage isn’t that it doesn’t make sense, but how these political expectations of Charli’s personal character came to exist in the first place.

So is Charli brat, is brat Charli? Brat completely revolutionized Charli’s career as it followed a very precise and intentional marketing strategy that focused on a sort of ‘messy minimalism’. Charli’s team understood that we, as an audience but most importantly as online consumers, are literally bombarded with new flashy products and advertisements, glow-up recipes, 12-step skincare routines, and headache-inducing microtrends. The market is oversaturated and so are we. We needed something simple; something real and dirty; something that made no promises, just was. And Charli delivered. Brat girl summer was so aware, so post-ironic in its reproduction and conglobation of current online culture (‘I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia’, trumpets 360) that it became synonymous with what we believe is Charli’s own raw authenticity. But is this authenticity fabricated? Can something be truly authentic when it ultimately needs to be sold? Thus, authenticity becomes a brand; the brand includes products; the products are now being sold to us and suddenly we are appalled.

I think it’s worth mentioning that H&M isn’t the first to exploit the ‘brat girl’ craze. As the TikTok sound layering Kamala Harris’ ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ with notes from the song 360 was going viral, the new presidential candidate’s campaign turned its head towards the fertile ground that were brat-themed memes. ‘Brat campaign’ was then endorsed by Harris’ own team’s effort to appeal to its Gen-Z audience – which it most definitely did – as well as Charli’s concise ‘Kamala IS brat <3’ tweet. Just like Harris’ campaigners understood the way to grab our generation’s attention, so did Charli when she decided to laconically endorse the ‘brat Kamala’ wave. But Harris wasn’t the only one to hop on the bile-green bandwagon: amid wars and live-streamed genocides, NATO posted a ‘peace’ meme in the iconic blurred arial narrow font, captioning it ‘Summer might be over, but the goal for peace remains <3’. So, when the media presence of today’s biggest political forces, who are currently under scrutiny for allowing the most horrifying holocaust of our generation to take place, is defined by ‘brat’ memes…where did that authenticity go? I would argue that these examples simply stand as confirmations of how powerful Brat’s marketing has proved to be, with a scope so wide that it went from embodying the ‘cool girl’ aesthetic of the summer to being used as a political tool. The shock following Charli’s and H&M’s partnership, then, sounds perplexing to me. Politics has never been an element in Charli’s music: she has said so herself, ‘My music is not political, […] politics doesn’t feed my art’. And yet, as we’ve seen, brat summer did take a political connotation. And if that very idea of authenticity, of relatability and dispassionate realness can be used so far as being leveraged politically by unrelated forces, what is authenticity after all?

We are living in a time in which everybody is supposed to very publicly ‘care’ about things. Everybody is supposed to take a stance and when they don’t, they fall off the pedestal we created for them. When they do, on the other hand, that ultimately creates even more expectations for them to act from a public and moral standpoint; for them to navigate issues that even we, as their audience, do not fully understand how to approach. Chappell Roan, for example, is one the most politically and socially outspoken in her generation of newer popstars. When she stated in a Rolling Stones interview that she had no intention of collaborating with brands such as H&M since they were not in line with her values, fans praised her for her commitment to her craft. But when she was pushed to speak on the very touchy subject that is the upcoming American presidential elections, many didn’t appreciate her lack of enthusiastic support towards Kamala Harris even as she stated her reasons.

At the end of the day, the amount of interrogatives is overwhelming. Is it socially acceptable to project political and environmental anxieties on pop stars like Charli? Does our hunger for relatability blind us? When authenticity reveals itself as a product, as something we can own, are we allowed to be surprised? Most importantly, are we allowed to be disappointed if we played right into it? The only feasible solution is to divest from celebrity culture and to understand public figures as nothing less and nothing more than people who found themselves in the spotlight and who, for the most part, are willing to do just about anything to stay there. Charli DID take a stance when she agreed to partner with H&M; it’s just not the stance we want. Writer John Semley is straightforward in telling us that ‘Celebrities do not lead culture; they follow it’; Charli follows part of the culture and Chappell another. Just like normal people do.