Can you have a sober brat summer?

There's more to it than cool girls and staged photo dumps

I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and say, I did not get the CharliXCX hype to start with. But, thanks to all of you educating me after this post and my TikTok algorithm, I have been initiated and blasting that neon green album on full blast out of my Fiat 500.

As a teetotal, non-party girl, I initially felt excluded from the Brat summer vibe.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing those videos of Charli DJ’ing to a packed club. I just don’t want to be there.

I couldn’t relate to Charli’s definition of a Brat summer either: “Just like a pack of cigs and like a BIC lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.

For a start I don’t smoke. I also don’t have the body confidence to expose my upper arms in public and I have the kind of chest that means going braless is and forever will be, an entirely alien concept.

But, the breakthrough came when I was driving back from my nail appointment in my aforementioned Fiat 500.

Driving from Deptford to Croydon, I had enough time to really listen to the lyrics and when Charli started singing about rewinding to a time when she used to burn CDs and paint her toenails in her bedroom, it finally clicked.

Suddenly, I was back in my friend’s Renault Clio, driving to Sainsburys during sixth form lunch break, while she blasted Basement Jaxx on repeat (literally, same song over and over again).

It wasn’t a forgotten memory, but it was a forgotten feeling. That idea of endless amounts of time, along with endless summers and doing whatever the fuck you wanted. Even if that did mean bunking health & social care (apologies, Mr Dicks).

I know I can’t live the cool girlie version of brat summer, but it also seems that most of my TikTok feed know they can’t either.

“You wanna guess the colour of my underwear",” sings Charli, but from all the lol-worthy videos I’ve seen, the most bratty ones of us are the ones proudly sharing our love of an M&S high waist brief, not a rhinestoned thong.

Don’t get me wrong, the gen Z’s are desperately trying to take it from us, but Brat is a series of millennial anthems.

Which is why, I’ve taken my definition of a brat summer to just be you, living your life unapologetically and doing whatever it is, that makes you happy.

Just like Charli is at 31 years old.

Remember how we all, with no inhibitions, embraced Barbie last summer? It’s not about being a cool girl and posting out of focus photo dumps from Soho House. It’s someone giving us permission to do whatever we want.

Last year that was buying every pink accessory we could and going to the cinema with our friends for the first time in years.

This summer is even more liberating because there are no rules. Your act of rebellion could be a small as sitting inside on a sunny day, defying the sense of guilt your parents passed down on you from childhood.

Whatever you do, act fast. We’ve only got a month and a bit left before the comparison syndrome inevitably returns come September…