Brat Green — the colour, the movement, the marketing

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/08/2024 (754 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the 2006 comedy The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep, playing fearsome fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, delivers a now-iconic monologue known simply as “The Sweater Speech.”

In it, she quite literally dresses down her new hire Andrea (Anne Hathaway) for acting as if fashion is vapid and beneath her, zeroing in on Andrea’s blue sweater.

“But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis,” she says in a tone so frosty you could chip icicles off it. “It’s actually cerulean.”

Miranda goes on to recount how it was Oscar de la Renta who first did a collection of cerulean gowns in 2002, followed by Yves Saint Laurent showing cerulean military jackets. The colour then turned up in eight other couture collections before making its way down to the department stores, and then into the thrift stores, “where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

“However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”

I immediately thought of the Sweater Speech while thinking about the colour of the summer, Brat Green.

Brat Green is that affronting shade of not-quite-lime, not-quite-chartreuse you’re seeing everywhere online these days, from nail polish to political memes about U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris. It’s a repellent, polarizing colour — the colour of sour candy, the colour of slime. It’s this summer’s answer to Barbie pink.

First, let’s talk about where this colour came from. In June, British electropop artist Charli XCX released her latest album Brat — a brash (and, yes, bratty) love letter to London’s rave scene. The album’s artwork is a simple square of the radioactive hue now known as Brat Green, with the word “brat” in a stretched and pixelated sans-serif font that recalls 2000s-era blogs.

Like the shade of blue at the heart of Miranda’s Sweater Speech, Brat Green was heavily considered by creatives, and the colour is queasy by design.

In an interview with the New York Times, designer Brent David Freaney says his team looked at 500 shades of green during a design process that took five months.

“The directive was: I don’t want this to feel like it has any taste,” he told the NYT. “I want it to feel off-putting and kind of garish.”

Brat Green ushered in Brat Summer — a movement to embrace the messy, the bold, the irreverent, the feral. And soon, Brat Green and riffs on the Charli XCX cover started popping up everywhere — including, improbably, in Harris’s presidential campaign after Charli tweeted “Kamala IS brat.”

Brands and retailers started co-opting it, and then Brat Summer finally reached its saturation point when pundits on CNN started struggling to define it on-air. In other words, it’s made its way down to the proverbial clearance bin.

While some might bristle at Brat’s co-optation, brat — the colour, the summer, the vibe — has always been about marketing. Last summer’s craze for magenta began with the promotion cycle for a film; the embrace of an intentionally hideous shade of green began with the promotion cycle of an album.

Brat Green might seem more organic because it’s scrappy and lo-fi, but we didn’t choose that green anymore than we chose that pink. It was, like Andrea’s blue sweater, chosen for us.

And in an era in which fandoms and subcultures have been largely replaced by “esthetics” to be quickly donned, doffed and declared “over,” Brat Green’s life was already destined to be short.

Hopefully Charli XCX’s (excellent, by the way) album will be able to outlive it.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com