If you’re chronically online like me then your feed has probably turned into a sea of “brat green” due to Charli XCX. The iconic album art has gone so viral that a plant-based brand adopted it to promote their vegan bratwurst. (There’s even a generator to give your everyday musings the royal brat treatment.) Despite all the bursts of butter yellow, this lime margarita green shade is the ultimate palette cleanser for “brat summer,” which is also defined by Charli’s essentials: “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”
Ahead of the album’s release date last month, a brat wall was quietly erected overnight in Brooklyn. During its two-month-long run, which included five paint jobs, hundreds of fans made the pilgrimage to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border to pay their respects to the unofficial landmark. A few case studies have already been published about the business of brat, praising how the campaign rollout became a “brand energy marketing” sensation.
For Charli, a huge part of the brat marketing campaign has been “creating moments that are physical and feel sacred and special, creating moments that you just simply HAD to be at.” Her intent with the wall was to cause a massive scene by offering a space “where me and my fans could come together as one without the barriers or stiffness of normal fan events.” As she further explains in an email, “I think in-person spaces are really important right now. They strangely feel more human than ever before—probably because we’re all living our lives mostly online.”
Obviously, I’ve been bumping the album (and circulating memes) nonstop, but what has deeply embedded itself in the crevices of my brain is the “brat green” color. As a millennial, I was overexposed to neon tinted green at the height of the Y2K era. (Back then, we preferred calling it “slime green” because of a controversial television network that shall not be named.) It was a green that bordered glow-in-the-dark and swamp, a color that could be found at the arcade in your local roller skating rink or somewhere in the dark, sweaty pit of a rave.
In recent years, the color green has been very on trend: sage green, moss green, emerald green, mint green, avocado green, forest green, kelly green, chartreuse green, martini olive green, pistachio green, and so on. From the kitchen to the bathroom and the bedroom, green is having a moment in fashion, design, and art. While many interior designers will turn to green to bring in elements of nature, “brat green” is not channeling a sense of serenity but rather ringing an alarm to get your attention. This particular shade of green seems to provoke a strong reaction—“brat green” is loud and abrasive, but also flirty and fun. “For me it just felt like the most WRONG out of all the options we had,” Charli argues. “The most off, the most uncomfortable, the most disorientating. And that’s why I chose it.”
