“It’s eye-catching in all the wrong ways,” the British pop star tells Architectural Digest. We’ve added some of our favourite interiors using brat green and every other shade of green showcasing some serious colour drenching ideas for 2024.
If you’re chronically online like me then your feed has probably turned into a sea of “brat green” due to Charli XCX. The iconic album art has gone so viral that a plant-based brand adopted it to promote their vegan bratwurst. (There’s even a generator to give your everyday musings the royal brat treatment.) Despite all the bursts of butter yellow, this lime margarita green shade is the ultimate palette cleanser for “brat summer,” which is also defined by Charli’s essentials: “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”
Ahead of the album’s release date last month, a brat wall was quietly erected overnight in Brooklyn. During its two-month-long run, which included five paint jobs, hundreds of fans made the pilgrimage to the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border to pay their respects to the unofficial landmark. A few case studies have already been published about the business of brat, praising how the campaign rollout became a “brand energy marketing” sensation.
For Charli, a huge part of the brat marketing campaign has been “creating moments that are physical and feel sacred and special, creating moments that you just simply HAD to be at.” Her intent with the wall was to cause a massive scene by offering a space “where me and my fans could come together as one without the barriers or stiffness of normal fan events.” As she further explains in an email, “I think in-person spaces are really important right now. They strangely feel more human than ever before—probably because we’re all living our lives mostly online.”
Obviously, I’ve been bumping the album (and circulating memes) nonstop, but what has deeply embedded itself in the crevices of my brain is the “brat green” colour. As a millennial, I was overexposed to neon tinted green at the height of the Y2K era. (Back then, we preferred calling it “slime green” because of a controversial television network that shall not be named.) It was a green that bordered glow-in-the-dark and swamp, a colour that could be found at the arcade in your local roller skating rink or somewhere in the dark, sweaty pit of a rave.
In recent years, the colour green has been very on trend: sage green, moss green, emerald green, mint green, avocado green, forest green, kelly green, chartreuse green, martini olive green, pistachio green, and so on. From the kitchen to the bathroom and the bedroom, green is having a moment in fashion, design, and art. While many interior designers will turn to green to bring in elements of nature, “brat green” is not channeling a sense of serenity but rather ringing an alarm to get your attention. This particular shade of green seems to provoke a strong reaction—“brat green” is loud and abrasive, but also flirty and fun. “For me it just felt like the most WRONG out of all the options we had,” Charli argues. “The most off, the most uncomfortable, the most disorientating. And that’s why I chose it.”
Even though the market is oversaturated with green tones, Charli was fascinated by how a hue like Bottega green could dominate the cultural zeitgeist. “We almost certainly didn’t need another green in culture, but that sort of made me want to go there even more,” she remarks. “To oversaturate sort of develops this entirely new language of a colour…. It’s like when you say a word over and over again and then it suddenly doesn’t make sense anymore and sort of begins to sound like a different language or possibly even nonsense. That’s what I wanted with the green of the album cover.”
Much like her music trajectory, “brat green” has attracted a massive cult following. While I have zero interest in painting brat green on my walls or outfitting my home with brat green accessories (I’ll leave that to the Green Lady of Brooklyn), there’s something about this hue that shifts a vibe when it sporadically crosses your path. It’s a green that screams and leaves an acidic taste in your mouth.
Brat green doesn’t just encapsulate a mood, it builds out an entire world (or within this framework, a brand universe). Brat green shocks your system like an energy drink; there’s a pulse, it has a frequency. “We wanted something that felt the least pop, the least accessible, the most jarring. Green is that colour,” explains Imogene Strauss, the longtime creative director on Charli’s team. “It’s a shade of green that’s just the right amount of ugly. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But the girls who get it, get it.”
“We did an intense amount of research and development on all these elements—which probably doesn’t show in the final product, but ultimately, that’s the point,” says Imogene Strauss.
From the very beginning, a “text only” cover was extremely appealing to the British pop star. “I knew I didn’t want to be on the cover because I knew it would be more of a conversation to not physically be there, especially if I pushed into this anti trend kind of wormhole I wanted to go down,” she insists. “I was initially met with disappointment by my team—they all wanted me to be on the cover I think—but they quickly got that a cover like this would evoke the bluntness and directness of the music I wanted to make.” Strauss remembers how Charli wanted something drastically different from her previous album covers; something more simple and minimal. “We (me, Chris, and Terry) were slightly skeptical at first but as soon as she sent me a mock up she made on her phone, I totally got it,” she says. “It wasn’t a ‘graphic design’ cover—it’s a direct, straight to the point, eye-catching, and controversial moment. The least pop star thing you could do.”
Charli had been sitting on the name “brat” since 2022; the full concept began to take shape in the form of texts with her manager about the tone and the feeling she wanted to evoke through the album. “I kept musing on this for a while and then in 2023 I made a mockup for the album cover—a green square with the word brat typed out over it. I just made it on my iPhone. I’m not very technical and I think my lack of design knowledge sort of created the parameters which already felt very stubborn, very bratty,” Charli says. “I hadn’t started making much music at this time, but the cover was sort of a guiding light in a way.”
From there, she and Strauss worked closely with the Special Offer team to refine the colour, font, and blur of the cover along with the surrounding branding and packaging for brat. (Apparently, it took weeks to decide on the shade after going through several versions.) “The two of us alongside Special Offer played around with a multitude of different versions of my initial mock up: different greens, different fonts, incorporating pixelation,” Charli says. “We sort of did this massive loophole to then land back sort of quite close to where we began. The process was necessary and the fact that we were so thorough made the choice feel bullet proof.”
Terrence “Terry” O’Connor is the marketing genius responsible for making a physical manifestation of the album that became a viral internet moment: the brat wall. “When I first thought of the wall it was shortly after Charli revealed the album artwork and there was all this discourse about it being ugly, lazy, boring, etc. which is of course what she wanted,” he recalls in an email. “So I just thought it would be funny to use that colour and paint it across the side of an entire building and stream it on TikTok.” Their strategy behind repainting the mural was “treating it as if it was a digital screen that just took 10 hours of loading every time you wanted to change it.” In terms of the location of the mural, which is directly across the street from the Lot Radio, O’Connor insists, “that’s where the kids are.”
“People are hungry for things they haven’t seen before and as a fan it’s just kind of boring to see a million different lip sync videos,” says Terrence O’Connor, who oversees all of Charli XCX’s marketing and photography, and creative directs her social media presence. “I want to see things that I haven’t seen before and even better if I can also go experience them in real life.”
Unlike Paul Smith’s pretty Pink Wall that looks perfect on Instagram, the brat wall was purposely hideous. “We knew people would show up, but I certainly didn’t think it would be as crazy as it was,” Charli admits. “I mean, people watched paint dry on that wall via livestream and in person literally three or four times in one month! I think the wall became this humorous thing where people could kind of engage in it, show off their personality, and create funny moments, but it also became actually a kind of meet up spot, a cool moment in my corner of culture. An ‘if you know you know,’ ‘were you at the brat wall 2024’ type moment.”
Strauss credits the virality of brat green to being “symbolic of the whole tone of the album.” As she further elaborates, “being brat can mean so many things. At its core it’s bold, it’s a little messy, but there’s something about it that’s quite chic and I want to hang it on my wall.” Like so many of us, now all O’Connor sees is brat green. “I’ll be on a hike and think ‘oop not these trees giving brat,’” he says. “It’s ultimately become the colour of internet brain rot, which I think is beautiful.” From Charli’s personal point of view, brat green is “eye-catching in all the wrong ways” and that’s exactly what she loves about it.
When we all look back on this era, will brat green be remembered as the colour of 2024? “I don’t religiously keep up with colour of the year, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to be looking this year,” Charli laughs. “With any kind of trend, if it crosses my path I’ll sort of wonder what it’s all about, understand it but not necessarily engage with it. I think the best trends reach people when they’re not searching for them, that’s how it becomes a trend in the most infectious and subconscious sense of the word. Those are the best ones, when you’re following without even realizing.” For the record, her favourite colour right now is Pantone 3507C.
This interview originally appeared on Architectural Digest US.
