Fashion's new Brat era is all-consuming, but it's just manufactured mayhem

Call it a vibe shift, callit a honking great taste crisis but after last year’s Barbie idolisation it’s logical

- Victoria Moss

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 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 Arial font on a Lime bikegreen 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.