BRAT Pablo Cushion Cover Wearable Art Made in Montreal

A remix album, titled Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, featuring 20 guest artists, was released on 11 October 2024. Brat Summer was about to hit the road, too, and the rallies were only getting bigger. Though the Sweat Tour—which Charli co-headlined with Troye Sivan—struggled initially to fill seats outside of the biggest cities, by its kickoff in September, it was a hot ticket. As the tour wore on and the summer wound down, Charli teased a remix album, with billboards spawning all over the country boasting the names of the guest artists included.

At 18 she left home to study at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art, but dropped out during her second year after signing with Warner’s Asylum Records. A.G. Cook recalls, “We had some mutual friends at her art school who said, ‘This girl joined; she makes music and is, like, signed to a record label! But in the spring of 2023, she presented her team with what has been described as the “Brat Manifesto,” a mood board and binder full of PDFs and notes for “brat generator,” a full year before the album was released. Nothing prepared me for the firestorm of attention that resulted.

Few details are known about her follow-up to 2022’s Crash, but Charli told The Face in a cover story that it’s her “most aggressive and confrontational record” to date and explores society’s “fascination with mean girls,” among other topics. This is not the first time the “Speed Drive” singer has reacted to commentary about Brat’s minimalist visual, which select fans began voicing their opinions on immediately after she announced the LP in late February. The alt-pop artist (whose real name is Charlotte Aitchison) also opened up about her vision behind the cover. Special Offer has gone on record to say that the font on the Brat cover is a customized version of ABC Rom designed by Dinamo. However, they also used Arial in some instances, for example, in stage graphics. From fashion to food, and even tech, read how influencers and KOLs use their power to sell to their audience.

But it is something refreshing to see from a pop girl, and I often wondered when Gaga would get the courage not to feature herself on one of her album covers. “I did a few small acoustic gigs, but I never felt particularly myself, singing on a stage with a guitar,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was 14 or 15 and started going to raves that I felt inspired, performing with my iPod and a mic.” She continued in that direction, posting songs and releasing mixtapes, gradually expanding her pool of collaborators. Charlotte Emma Aitchison was born on Aug. 2, 1992, in Cambridge, England and raised in nearby Start Hill, about 30 miles north of London. The only child of a Scottish father and a mother of Indian descent, she says she was bullied because of her background and was a loner as a child.

Next came 2022’s “Crash,” the final album in her initial record deal with Atlantic U.K., for which she tried to play the pop-star game — another way of mixing things up to keep herself interested. She’d tried playing a more traditional pop game with 2022’s “Crash,” which was her best-charting album before “Brat,” although it didn’t lead to a major breakthrough. For culture-shifting musicians such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande and, to an increasing degree, Charli, music is only a percentage of the overall picture that we’ll call their brand. It’s marketing, photography, videos, memes, social-media presence, product lines, pop-up shows and other surprises. The art of managing a career is figuring out how all of those things add up to a vast and unified cultural presence — and the trick is how to be everywhere in such an interesting way that people don’t get tired of you. With that kind of cultural saturation, the songs are the gateway and the fuel for something much bigger.

During her Billboard interview, Charli scrolled through her texts all the way back to March 16, 2022. That was the day that she said to her friends, “I think it should just be one word on the album cover… Maybe it should be called ‘brat album cover generator.” She didn’t actually start writing the album until six months later in Mexico City, but used the title as inspiration for the attitude she aimed to encapsulate in the music. Because while a politician needs cold, hard votes, a pop star can skate by on good vibes and a vaguer sense of cultural impact. The numbers that quantify popularity—sales—were never really on Charli’s side.

The leader of the Brat Pack ordered two slices of pepperoni pizza and a Coke at Lamonica’s N.Y. Pizza stand in Westwood, the home of UCLA and, seemingly, the capital of the generation that buys all the movie tickets. There is an enormous movie theater at practically every intersection in Westwood; movies that have long since closed elsewhere are still playing here. So for Emilio Estevez to show his face in this neighborhood was to invite the stares of countless fans, and as he wolfed down his slices, the rest of the customers watched in silent respect.