Paris Fashion Week, October 2025: creative directors are playing musical chairs at the big houses. The military jacket is back and an exhibition honouring Virgil Abloh is spilling queues past the Grand Palais. Staying in adjoining apartments, a stone’s throw from Père Lachaise cemetery, Charli xcx and her tightest collaborators, Alex “AG” Cook and Finn Keane, snatch breakfast together then dart across the city: Charli to sit front row at Saint Laurent and, that same week, to shoot its new campaign, Cook to work on a live soundtrack for McQueen as Keane puts the final touches on Charli’s companion album to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Friends, including actor Jacob Elordi and model Alex Consani, are in town; the parties spill over into 6am afters in the apartment of a random French philosopher girl. Between the smudged-eye sunrises, in the studio downstairs from their lodgings, Charli, Cook and Keane are secretly making the pop superstar’s eighth album.
One Saturday evening this February: Charli is at another studio, in west London, to reveal her new music. I first see her through the glass, trademark sunglasses on at 8pm, presiding over the sound desk in a Saint Laurent leather jacket: iconography casually assured. I take a seat and she walks to the speakers to plug in her phone, wearing skinny vintage black waxed trousers and Louboutin heels. “We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it,” she says, compulsively playing 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 along with Charli’s voice: “I think the dance floor is dead,” she drawls, “so now we’re making rock music.” Clearly we have come to bury Brat.
The vulnerability, provocations and pithy hedonistics (“Bumpin’ that”) of Charli’s 2024 club-rat classic turned her from decade-strong underground icon into a towering cultural presence without sacrificing a thing. Brat’s generation-defining incisiveness was best encapsulated by its concluding tracks: the deeply intimate “I Think About It All the Time”, in which Charli wondered about motherhood, straight into the mutant rager “365”, the embodiment of coked-up revelations on a dance floor. Her self-proclaimed “Brat summer” – a mood of thinking less and feeling more – ended up lasting two, thanks to a self-directed roll-out campaign, the signature acid green of which would turn marketeers the world over Pantone 3507C with envy. The record worked at meme level, inspiring bandwagoning from the Kamala Harris campaign, and as deeply theorised high art. Everyone wanted in, and Charli’s creative coterie reflected the breadth of her influence: Brat namechecked friends including Julia Fox and model Gabbriette; Lorde, Ariana Grande and Robyn turned out for the avant-garde remix album; after the track “Apple” seeded a TikTok dance craze, Chappell Roan, Ayo Edebiri and Gracie Abrams cameo’d the moves during the Brat tour.
Ann Demeulemeester creative 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 last July, Charli’s husband, says: “It was an incredible time for her and hugely fulfilling, having proved so much to herself.” The runaway phenomenon also boiled Charli down to a caricature – vests, cigs, feckless attitude – which inspired her debut feature film as producer and star, The Moment, released earlier this year. The mockumentary captured the queasy sensation of how mass exposure can destabilise your identity. “Going through this widening of my audience has made me aware of how you can sometimes get made into these bullet points,” says Charli, always 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 friend, Coffee and Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch, likens Charli’s alter ego management to how his old 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 action when they were discussing films at a party last year. A photographer asked 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?’”
