In the middle of July, I received an unexpected text on my family’s WhatsApp. It’s Dad. What does brat mean? He texts again. Wow. Explanation gave me a headache. Thanks ChatGPT. The “explanation” read, “The brat trend is a vibrant cultural and fashion movement that emerged in 2024.” The words, “nonchalance,” “rebellion,” “messy,” and “luxury,” follow it. He calls me. I still don’t get it.
There was nothing to get. Maybe an energy of sorts, but brat’s ritual invocation eventually got to my head. Don’t get me wrong, I overused brat. Brat is that mean girl from middle school. We talk about her all the time, but we hate her. We act like we know every detail about her life, but she remains a mystery. This phenomenon isn’t limited to brat. Social media typification behaves like this. Think: “Barbenheimer,” “Demure,” and “Mindful.” These terms turned trends seem specific, but deep down, are vague: loaded with meaning yet meaningless. What is it about those words, so overused and oversaturated, that manage to trap us?
Much of the appeal of these sorts of trends is the catchy term: the prospect of a label that applies to everyone, from your friend to the Vice President. From there, new forms of consumerism arise, mobilizing the word that we all recognize against our wallets.
Our digital communities are echo chambers, reverberating the dazzling word off into complete irrelevance. Like a flash flood, it inundates, is overwhelming, but recedes as quickly as it arrived. Because all of these words represent identities that people strive to embody. Brat is the party girl with the strappy black top with a cigarette. Yet in defining ourselves by these terms, we pull away from forming our desired, individuated identity. As we repeat the language of others, we move further away from the uniqueness we seek to create and submerge ourselves into a nebulous cultural dialogue. It becomes an ouroboros of self-subversion: as we constantly try to stand apart, we end up circling back to the mainstream.
This is where I believe my frustration came from. The overuse of brat provides a firsthand view of a new type of conformity. Traditional social conformity is often driven by a fear of social failure—the pressure to align with societal expectations to avoid rejection or judgment. Usually, these pressures come from external forces, from our families or friends or social communities. With brat, conformity feels different. It feels more self-imposed. It’s not about fitting into some abstract societal mold, but about making the willing choice to capitulate our senses of self to a trend. It allows us to put our own identity on the back burner and experiment with a new, fleeting one. One that affords us a sense of acceptance within a group. Purchasing all neon green paraphernalia is excused by the capitalist consumerism so deeply entrenched within these trends. While this might be fun and empowering in the moment, it explains why the phenomenon quickly loses its appeal as soon as it becomes too widespread. When everyone is playing the same role, the allure of uniqueness fades and the trend becomes irrelevant.
Looking back, perhaps we can argue that brat gestures towards a more complex way of being in the world. The hyper-confidence displayed is a mask for hyper-vulnerability, a way to control how the world perceives us. However, it is only in hindsight, when the confident facade is cracked, that we can examine the layers of insecurity that fueled it. The nuanced realities behind brat can only be studied after the flood, looking back.
