Why Brat Green Became Inescapable

If last summer was oversaturated with Barbie pink, this summer is all about Brat green. The repulsive slime-adjacent shade has been described as “affronting,” “noxious,” and evoking “bilious sludge,” a “putrid in-between” that isn’t quite chartreuse or lime and counters all notions of green as symbolizing growth and abundance. But according to Charli XCX, the British pop rule-breaker who selected the corrosive color as the branding for her sixth studio album Brat, being hard on the eyes was intentional. “I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong,” she said, noting how she experimented with 65 different colors over five months with creative studio Special Offer before landing on the correct shade. “I want to provoke people. I’m not doing things to be nice.”

Instead, she inadvertently captured the zeitgeist. Brat Summer began when she threw a surprise set at Lot Radio on Brooklyn’s Williamsburg-Greenpoint border in May. She promptly plastered the album art and its blurry sans-serif lettering on a nearby wall, its messaging updated frequently with the album’s promotion cycle and revealed via TikTok live streams. An image generator gave any word or phrase the Brat treatment. The music video to lead single “360” was packed with it-girls. All these marketing tactics worked—Brat won over the internet overnight, washing the entire summer in bursts of puke-green and yielding an endless barrage of memes, merch, and ham-fisted corporate marketing ploys. (The MTA suspending G Train service 24/7 between Brooklyn and Queens seems like the furthest thing from “so Julia.”)

Brat’s high-BPM message lies in embracing your inner mess and flipping off curated perfection, perhaps as your shattered iPhone and half-empty pack of American Spirits spills in the backseat of your late-night Uber home from the club. It indicates the pendulum shifting away from performative influencer slop and checking your Instagram story views. So there’s no irony lost in brands, museums, and even presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris co-opting Brat green to reach Gen Z-ers. (To be fair, though, Harris does have Charli’s endorsement.) According to one report, Brat has generated more than $22.5 million in media impact value since its June release. British Vogue anticipates the shade will feature heavily on catwalks; magazines, even uptown shelter titles, are publishing breathless get-the-Brat-look roundups left and right.

Well-intentioned and SEO-friendly as they are, the slime-green style guides miss the point. The shade has been a staple in fashion, pop culture, and design through the decades—take Andy Warhol’s embrace of highlighter yellow, the ‘90s anime boom, and Prada’s watershed Spring ‘96 runway show, a pioneer of “ugly chic”—but Brat is a mindset, unbothered and retro-leaning. That spirit is difficult to capture in merch or anything arising from suited executives blathering in a conference room. Searches for white tank tops have skyrocketed; J. Crew surprisingly nailed it with a capsule of “downtown-cool coquettishness” with indie designer Maryam Nassirzadeh. Brat isn’t about following trends; it’s about feeling empowered to be your own favorite reference.

The majority of Brat’s rollout was masterminded by Charli XCX herself, which makes the satisfying domination of slime green that much sweeter. “It turns out when you truly make something for yourself,” Rick Rubin wrote in his book The Creative Act, “you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.” And while there’s reason to believe that Brat Summer’s days are numbered, we’ll never forget how the supercharged hue flipped the script and made us feel.