Paris Fashion Week, October 2025: artistic administrators are enjoying musical chairs on the massive homes. The army jacket is again and an exhibition honouring Virgil Abloh is spilling queues previous the Grand Palais. Staying in adjoining flats, a stone’s throw from Père Lachaise cemetery, Charli xcx and her tightest collaborators, Alex “AG” Cook and Finn Keane, snatch breakfast collectively then dart throughout town: Charli to take a seat entrance row at Saint Laurent and, that very same week, to shoot its new marketing campaign, Cook to work on a stay soundtrack for McQueen as Keane places the ultimate touches on Charli’s companion album to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Friends, together with actor Jacob Elordi and mannequin Alex Consani, are on the town; the events spill over into 6am afters within the house of a random French thinker woman. Between the smudged-eye sunrises, within the studio downstairs from their lodgings, Charli, Cook and Keane are secretly making the pop celebrity’s eighth album.
One Saturday night this February: Charli is at one other studio, in west London, to disclose her new music. I first see her by means of the glass, trademark sun shades on at 8pm, presiding over the sound desk in a Saint Laurent leather-based jacket: iconography casually assured. I sit down and she or he walks to the audio system to plug in her telephone, carrying skinny classic black waxed trousers and Louboutin heels. “We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it,” she says, compulsively enjoying along with her shades. “We knew it would be this very hectic, rich time and we like creating in that kind of atmosphere.” She crouches down, presses play and turns away. Heavily processed guitars strafe the room, then fracture together with Charli’s voice: “I think the dance floor is dead,” she drawls, “so now we’re making rock music.” Clearly we have now come to bury Brat.
The vulnerability, provocations and pithy hedonistics (“Bumpin’ that”) of Charli’s 2024 club-rat traditional turned her from decade-strong underground icon right into a towering cultural presence with out sacrificing a factor. Brat’s generation-defining incisiveness was greatest encapsulated by its concluding tracks: the deeply intimate “I Think About It All the Time”, through which Charli puzzled about motherhood, straight into the mutant rager “365”, the embodiment of coked-up revelations on a dance ground. Her self-proclaimed “Brat summer” – a temper of considering much less and feeling extra – ended up lasting two, due to a self-directed roll-out marketing campaign, the signature acid inexperienced of which might flip marketeers the world over Pantone 3507C with envy. The file labored at meme stage, inspiring bandwagoning from the Kamala Harris marketing campaign, and as deeply theorised excessive artwork. Everyone wished in, and Charli’s artistic coterie mirrored the breadth of her affect: Brat namechecked buddies together with Julia Fox and mannequin Gabbriette; Lorde, Ariana Grande and Robyn turned out for the avant-garde remix album; after the observe “Apple” seeded a TikTookay dance craze, Chappell Roan, Ayo Edebiri and Gracie Abrams cameo’d the strikes in the course of the Brat tour.
Ann Demeulemeester artistic director Stefano Gallici – who dressed Charli for the 2025 Met Gala and Grammys – was awed by her worldbuilding. “It resonated with an entire community,” he tells me. “I think we will carry the legacy for a long period.” George Daniel, drummer for The 1975 – and, as of final July, Charli’s husband, says: “It was an incredible time for her and hugely fulfilling, having proved so much to herself.” The runaway phenomenon additionally boiled Charli right down to a caricature – vests, cigs, feckless angle – which impressed her debut characteristic movie as producer and star, The Moment, launched earlier this yr. The mockumentary captured the queasy sensation of how mass publicity can destabilise your id. “Going through this widening of my audience has made me aware of how you can sometimes get made into these bullet points,” says Charli, all the time coolly analytical. “And that’s not something I’m shocked or even bothered by. Obviously, that happens – it’s cool when you can draw a cartoon of someone in that way.” Her new good friend, Coffee and Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch, likens Charli’s alter ego administration to how his previous good friend Jim Osterberg handles life as Iggy Pop. “She’s really savvy about it,” he says. “I’m sure it’s delicate and overwhelming at times, but she’s pretty solid in understanding the nature of not being the person that is projected.” He witnessed that in motion after they have been discussing movies at a celebration final yr. A photographer requested Charli: “‘Let me get you doing something wild – can you come and snort whisky through a straw out of an ashtray or something?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, all right.’ She does that, then comes back over to me like” – he does a prim English accent – “‘Were we talking about Tarkovsky?’”
