When we look back on the summer of 2024, what will we see? Green.
Not just any green, but a hue so affronting that fashion news media has described it as “noxious,” “abrasive” and the color of “bilious sludge.” Picture Gumby with jaundice. Picture a Bottega Veneta handbag, dipped in Nickelodeon slime.
The color entered the zeitgeist as the branding for “Brat,” the album released in early June by the British pop provocateur Charli XCX. “It had to be really unfriendly and uncool,” the singer has said of the album artwork, which features four blurry letters centered in a puke-green square.
But then a funny thing happened: The intentionally repulsive color won over the internet, and then the summer, and then, at a pivotal moment, an entire presidential campaign. In a few short days, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, memed chartreuse into an unusually potent political symbol.
Its ubiquity online makes last summer’s “Barbie” pink look like a lighthearted suggestion.
Charli XCX was once for the young and ironically tattooed; now, she is being distributed to the masses. In the past week, people who may have never heard of the singer were listening to newscasters on major American cable television networks try to explain the sudden prevalence of this particular shade.
“I will aspire to be Brat,” Jake Tapper said on CNN to one of his correspondents, who had been holding up a slime-green meme printed out on a sheet of paper.
