Maybe Brat Summer is what a lot of us need right now

Wasn’t it amazing that Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” was able to put a feminist spin on aggressive pink? Well here we are in the summer of 2024 and slime green has taken its place. Brat summer is here and it seems to have taken over the meme-osphere.

OK, I’ll admit it, I had to have it explained to me

So there I was on July 19, getting ready for a beach-week raid at Costco with our son and his wife, then heading to Boston to speak for the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy on the 21.  That talk was on the morning of the 21 and I spent much of the rest of the day battling the logistics of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (summer weather has not been kind) and making it out to Long Beach Island.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, the world changed - Joe Biden ended his campaign, Kamala Harris picked up a lot of support and suddenly everybody was talking about “Brat Summer.”  By the time our week at the beach was over last Sunday, slime green had taken over the style section of the New York Times, the Today Show declared lime green to be the color of the season and an English singer-songwriter named Charli XCX was taking the world by storm.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in not knowing quite what was going on.  On July 22, none other than Rachel Maddow was trying to unpack the explosion of memes around Kamala Harris’ potential presidential candidacy.  For instance, what’s the significance of the “you didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree” comment?  That was Harris invoking her mother’s advice to understand the context and where you came from before attempting to create change.

It turned out to be unintentional genius. Just built for the Internet.  Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, used the coconut iconography in his endorsement of Harris.  Hawaii’s Senator Brian Schatz posted a photograph of himself climbing an actual coconut tree.  A DC bar even advertised “$5 Pina Kamala Coconut Shots!”  When Charli XCX tweeted on July 21 that “kamala IS brat,” Maddow said, “to be totally honest with you, I don’t know what that means, but the Internet does!”  Rachel, I can relate.

But now that I’ve seen how powerful the idea is, I’m quite smitten with it.

From being held to impossible standards to just owning our humanity

What I love about the brat theme is the idea of turning what others might define as deficiencies into positives.  As Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota pointed out, the Harris meme machine actually started with politicians, mostly Republicans, going after Harris.  “They go after her laugh, they go after the coconut tree line, and the like, and what I love about this is that as a woman candidate, and as we saw in the Presidential race, women candidates are held to these standards that are nearly impossible to make.  I love that they are just owning it and making fun of it, and kind of becoming an icon because of it.”   

This reflects the definition I liked best about Brat was about “accepting your imperfections while embracing the chaos.”   It’s about boomeranging the negatives, about acknowledging them but not letting others define you by them.  It's about owning your authenticity, speaking your mind, and radiating confidence.

So how does this connect to my normal business beat?  Well, if you’re obsessed with never getting anything wrong, never saying the wrong thing, never messing up and never being your real self, you’re never going to invent anything new.  A lot of the best innovators I’ve ever met have embraced being brat, although nobody called it that before. Brat is disruptive. Brat can be messy. Brat is having enough of your own sense of self to stick to your own views even when they don’t correspond with those of others.

We also know that women, whatever their age, are allowed a much narrower band of acceptable behavior than men in exactly the same situations (for those interested in this, my colleague Adam Galinsky has a killer TED talk on the “low power double bind”).  Leaning into brat is to give yourself permission to be imperfect, to be honest, to make mistakes and not to look like a stereotype.

My brat birthday

July 28 happened to be my birthday, and without intentionally doing so, I put on my only lime-green t-shirt for a day of stuff (our daughter is getting married this weekend and the run-up of activities is quite impressive).  With the arrival of the aforementioned New York Times section on how inescapable lime green was going to be, I thought, “what a coincidence.”  I guess I’ve been doing the brat thing for a while, but what a wonderful idea to free younger women up from the restrictions of being told what they should wear, think, do and try.

Against all the bad news that’s been causing a lot of us low-level anxiety for what seems like forever, the arrival of “brat summer” is very welcome.  Brat feels playful. Brat feels joyful. Brat feels young and full of energy.  And I’m all for that!