A brat, said Charli xcx – describing not so much her album, Brat, as the spirit of brat – has a “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. This is “brat summer” – not to be confused with rat girl summer (2023, a TikTok trend centred on living like a rat), which itself was a verbal variation on hot girl summer (which was, according to the journalist Jasmine Fox-Suliaman in 2021, “about embodying self-love, a positive body image, healthy boundaries and relationships, self-actualisation and, of course, sultry style choices”). Brat, neither a social media nor a consumer creation, is different; perhaps because it actually means something. But what?

A brat is a girl, but it’s a self-defining category – it is what you make it – so it doesn’t have to be. It’s also an album, of course, and a phenomenally successful one, hitting No 2 in the UK album chart and No 3 in the US’s Billboard chart. “The album is really confessional but also really brash – it feels like voice notes to your friends,” says Sheena Patel, a novelist and part of the 4 Brown Girls Who Write collective. “Charli xcx feels like a Dionysian agent for being more unhinged.”

Brat is also a colour – slime green – and fashion houses and high-end retailers have vied to release the most convincing “green edit”. “If you were going to a concert,” 16-year-old Cicely Higham (my stepdaughter) says, “you’d wear neon green. The album cover is so simple, and it’s quite easy to badge yourself. People have started taking selfies next to green things. But it’s not an exterior thing. It’s nothing to do with what you wear. It’s nothing to do with what you look like.”

Even if it were a look, it is not one you can pick off the rack. There is no brat merchandise, so self-made versions of it are flourishing: from T-shirts in that incredibly simple typeface to nail art, caps and lighters. Marketing experts have praised the “authenticity of the DIY vibe”, omitting to mention its wellspring, which is that you couldn’t create the look, sound or atmosphere of brat with merch: individuality isn’t a thing you can buy.

Monica Heisey, the Canadian author of Really Good, Actually and sometime writer on Schitt’s Creek, describes the implicit message of the album as “feminine contradiction – the way someone can be a 365 party girl and also anxious about motherhood, the way friendship with other powerful women can be both empowering and a source of anxiety, the way a full-on thirtysomething woman can still feel like a girl inside. It’s also about saying: fuck those contradictions, I’m having fun and I don’t care if I’m being a little annoying about it.”

Annoying, dirty, hedonistic, bra-less; this is reminding me of something. No, something before Fleabag, before even 90s ladette culture. This is reminding me of the 80s, although people who weren’t there for that are powerfully reminded of the other big recession since the second world war: 2008. “Brat is a hyper-pop sound, using Auto-Tune explicitly as its own instrument, to make it sound more robotic. This is recession pop,” Higham says. “People noticed this when Pitbull and Kesha were massive – whenever there’s a recession, people party way more. If anyone wants to play a fun song, it’s usually from 2008.”

It’s not a feminine ideal, brat, because it rejects the social surveillance that requires all young women to be the same way: but if it were, it would be a backlash against “clean girl” (this is crowdsourced from a number of 14- to 16-year-olds, most of whom wish to remain nameless). Clean girl is a TikTok aesthetic. Followers wear their hair in slick buns, dress in pink, have 10 reusable cups lined up next to each other. They all have pink yoga mats; they love being clean; they love opening their journal after a long day of pilates. They love overconsumption. Clean girl buys 400 pairs of leggings. Brat retaliation is that you wear the same dress every day for a month and don’t shower. “You can say it’s environmental,” Higham says, “but that’s not really the heart of it. It’s like, you know the world’s gone to shit, and climate is part of that, but you’re having fun through it.”

The paradox of the highly groomed ideal is that, while all its language is about the self, and so much of its Instagram practice is interior (“staying home, growing food”, as Patel has it), it’s very focused on men, perfecting an intensely traditional, almost helpmeet version of womanhood. “It’s kind of misogynistic,” Higham says. “Women having to be these neat, feminine creatures.” It’s fine for a brat to also do pilates. “I love reformer pilates,” Patel says, but adds that she does not model herself on “being palatable for men”. “This is about the female gaze: I’ve bought hiking shoes, I’m wearing shirts with joggers. And girls are like, ‘Oh my God, I love your shoes.’ I’m not going to get any boys saying that.” Xcx’s video for her single 360, in which she drinks red wine on a treadmill, covering herself in it and not, if we’re honest, doing any meaningful cardio, is probably the most explicit indication of where she stands on this clean girl sensation – which is to say, she tramples all over it.

The mirror image of the clean girl – arguably her nemesis – is the pick me girl, who affects an anti-feminine, carefree demeanour, while by coincidence being extremely feminine, and caring a lot. This is actually a mutation of classic Gen X double-speak, where you affected body positivity but were in fact fat-phobic, and had ladders in your tights, but in a hot, Madonna-esque way, not a “got locked out, have no money for new tights” way. The brat is not interested in any of that; she has no fixed aesthetic, because she doesn’t consider her appearance to signify a static relationship with the world, on which she could be policed. Heisey says, “I think what we’re seeing is that women want to be able to be cute when they like and disgusting when they like – to embody whatever part of themselves feels most appealing to them that day – and they’re a bit exhausted having everything they do, say, wear, or feel being judged by some outside body.”

It’s unmistakably economic: the thing about being a clean girl is that it’s really expensive, performatively so. Arguably, the whole of self-care is a display activity, your body and self-image as the ultimate Veblen good (a luxury product which becomes more sought-after as it becomes more expensive). The female body as commodity is, of course, locked into the patriarchal idea of sex as a commodified exchange, so there’s a tacit understanding that clean girls aren’t promiscuous. Casual sex, then, becomes an indication of poor boundary-setting and insufficient self-love – in old money, selling yourself too cheap. While that “strappy white top with no bra” line emphatically doesn’t mean “will sleep with anyone”, the brat has her own sexual destiny, which we could loosely describe as “sleeping with whoever she wants to”, and here she has roots in the ladette, the “new woman” of the 90s.

Everyone talks about the ladette now as a lager-drinking trope, but at the time she felt more like a reclamation of sex positivity, after the long second-wave feminist hangover, in which sex always entailed a victim, unless it was “meaningful”. Furthermore, as Heisey points out: “Not to be too ‘I’m on Feeld’ [a dating site for ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, casual sex, kink and swinging] about it, but ‘brat’ predates the album as a term in the kink community, where it’s this interesting mix of submissive and badly behaved. I think the way the TikTok girlies and the way kink people are using it are kind of similar. It’s like a traditionally submissive person deciding to have a little fun within that role – to make things harder for the people in charge, as it were.”

Having said all that, Brat as an album “is not really sex-centred”, Higham says. “Guess is the most sexually out-there song; it’s just about men wanting to guess what kind of underwear you’re wearing. Nothing on it is, ‘I’m here to have sex’” And that, as a way to be female in music, is itself quite rebellious. It recalls the Bechdel test, which is the classic gauge of feminism, or lack of it, for films: in any given movie, is there a scene in which any two women have a conversation that isn’t about a man? Pop’s variation on that would be: in the interior landscape you describe in your song, is any of it not about how you’re sexually perceived? For her forthcoming Sweat tour in North America, xcx will perform with Troye Sivan, a long-term collaborator, who is probably best known for One of Your Girls, in which he dresses in drag to look like one of the prettiest, most intensely feminine girls you could imagine. The contrast with xcx is pronounced.

One performer who got massive at roughly the same time as xcx, Chappell Roan, has described her visual references as “drag, horror movies, burlesque, theatre”. If you wanted to distil the brat look, it would be neither hiking boots nor feather boas, but it wouldn’t be as loose as “wear literally anything”, either. It’s not a reprisal of grunge; it’s not trying to look invisible. I’d say it was essentially a rejection of the Fordist model of femininity, whereby you manifest your sexuality by the extent to which you resemble other, perfect women. So you’re still expressing your libido (in the Jungian sense, of energy and will to action), but what you think is hot will be idiosyncratic by definition.

“The sexiest girls you know are the ones you know,” Patel says. “When you don’t look at the internet, when you look at the world, comfortable women are the most beautiful. But it’s hard to get comfortable.”

The joke about the Sweat tour is that it’s going to smell like poppers; it’s partly that that’s the drug you can least imagine a clean girl countenancing, since it smells like a cross between chemicals and feet and it gives you a headache, but it could also stand in for any drug. Xcx was contacted by the Advertising Standards Authority for having a plastic bag on her UK tour poster, “because they said it was promoting bad things … but it’s obviously a sandwich bag”. She replaced the image with a giant wholemeal-bread sandwich on the poster, to underline the point that, if you see a drugs reference in a plastic bag, that’s on you, bro. Yet the brat trope and the alacrity of its adoption marks a real break with the cliche about Gen Z: that they’re the most clean living on record, both in terms of their sexual behaviour and their drug and alcohol use.

It was always a caricature, Heisey says: “It’s a bit silly to try to suggest there’s some blanket way that all women behave. As a millennial it’s been kind of wild to see the same conversations happening around Gen Z that happened to us in the media 10 years ago – are they more or less conservative than their predecessors? Are they killing off certain industries? Are they having any sex, and if so what kind? It’s a cultural obsession with youth, looking for any way in.” The idea that a whole generation could be defined as clean-living, even if it was true in aggregate, meant that those who did take drugs and get messy were simply not seen as real members of their demographic. But they did still exist. A brat might take cocaine, or might not. She will neither pretend it never happened, nor wear any of your assumptions about how out of step she is with her generation.

What does a brat summer mean, for the condition of young women in society? Heisey counsels against getting overexcited. “Being looked at and judged as women isn’t a new trend. It predates every social media platform we have. Trying to find ways to combat the constant surveillance – or find a way to enjoy oneself in spite of it – is not new, either, but brat summer is a fun iteration.” There have always been the tanks of conservatism, and there have always been free spirits sticking a flower in the gun barrel; but this time it’s not a flower, it’s a Bic lighter, and maybe that’ll liven things up a bit.