Thank you, Charli XCX. The return of Messy Celebrity is long overdue.

Wherever you are, look around and you’ll see the signs. Photos and videos abound, lenses capturing what others might miss. Songs, even albums, lend their lyrics to the soundtrack of the revival. And celebrities, the gods of our culture, finally toppled from their perches of perfection we’ve built, staggering out of the club in a daze. Welcome.Brat “Summer” and the return of celebrity mayhem. This is mayhem, real mayhem unfolding before our eyes. And it’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfection.

Nothing, really. there is nothing It could be argued that it did more to revive Celebrity Mets than Charlie XCX’s recently released record. BratOf course, the Hertfordshire-born star could not have known that the album’s June release, and the international cultural tsunami it would trigger, would coincide with a year of relentless news cycles and breathless politics that the nation was subconsciously yearning for.

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Two months after the album’s release, as we stomp our hips to the lyrics of “Apple” and cheekily repeat the phrase “Brat girl summer” whenever someone we know steps slightly outside the bounds of social acceptability, she’s done what few artists have been able to do: She’s captured lightning in a bottle and used it to elevate real-life chaos back into the premier league of desire.

One example is the star’s 32nd birthday party, held this weekend at Los Angeles hotspot Tenant. Brat For the girl’s birthday, Charlie donned some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hot pants and his now-trademark black sunglasses to perform a duet onstage with collaborators Billie Eilish and Lorde. Among the fellow brats who joined the patron saint for her birthday were: Shiva’s BabyRachel Sennott, EuphoriaAlexa Demie, Sabrina Carpenter, and Rosalia arrived to the event bearing bouquets decorated with Parliament Blues, a branded gift fit for a host. Finally, the celebs were (sort of) telling us their true feelings.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, celebrities are just like us, and it seems we’re all waiting for a cultural shift. We probably didn’t realize it would be wrapped in sour apple green packaging and accompanied by a song that tells listeners to guess the color of the singer’s underwear. Gone are the days of hot yoga classes, celery juice, and nicotine-free e-cigarettes, and in their place are all-night dance sessions, champagne (yes, Charlie drank it from a flute while playing his Boiler Room set in Ibiza), and Camel Blues. We want to give notoriety and praise to people who reflect our values. Studies show that we use swear words more now than ever before. With smoking making a comeback, we’re lighting up cigarettes again. This year, more than 200,000 people flocked to Worthy Farm for Glastonbury, making it the busiest year on record. Queues to see Queen Charlie DJ on Friday night lasted more than three hours. If you think about it, we spent longer queuing to see Charlie DJ than it took to get into the festival itself.

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Hollywood celebrities were vilified, rather than celebrated, for the same activities that would come to define this summer. Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan were just a few of the cultural casualties whose brands were criticized for partying too much throughout the 2000s. But today, Young Hollywood has stepped out of its sequestered, clean-cut shadows, and the stars are shining right along with us, literally.

The nature of celebrity mayhem is what’s resonating with people: the party animal behavior and the craving for pure, unadulterated mayhem. Brat According to Launchmetrics, it generated $22.5 million in media impact value. BratAccording to global shopping platform Lyst, #Brat-inspired “slime green” has surged 17% in the past two weeks. There are more than one million #Brat videos on TikTok, where Gen Z is fully embracing their newly appointed party girl leader. When asked to define “Brat Summer,” Charlie herself put it best. “It can be super vulgar,” she told Nick Grimshaw in a BBC interview. “It’s like a cigarette packet, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top.” Audio of her interview is proliferating on TikTok.

Charlie has launched a movement that goes beyond music.”Brat summer‘ Charli reminded us that despite the difficult friendships and fertility struggles that many of us face and that Charli writes about in her lyrics, there is nothing more liberating than embracing the messiness that envelopes us all. The messy omnipresence of Charli and other artists has given us the knowledge that we are not the only ones fumbling around for life’s oncoming answers, or wanting to temporarily drink and dance to suspend reality, if only for a night. After years of supposed perfection, it feels good to open up social media and see the people in the public eye, the people we follow, in all their messy glory, unedited, unfiltered, unconstrained by the things that have bound them for so long.

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