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How Charli XCX’s ‘Against the Grain’ Aesthetics Confound, Inspire & Create Copycats

As Charli XCX celebrates the release of 'brat,' her creative collaborators reflect on why her influence is at an all-time high.

By riding on the outskirts of pop music for so long – dating back to her early days performing as a teen at illegal raves in London – Charli has ultimately paved an parallel path where counterculture can coexist with the genre. As she told Billboard earlier this year in her Women In Music Powerhouse interview, “My big struggle is deciding whether I care more about being the biggest artist I can be commercially, or being critically sound. But no matter how Charli’s every move has been received or replicated, it has all fueled the hyperpop hyperdream that was the brat rollout – from her viral Brooklyn Boiler Room rave in February, dubbed Party Girl (for which she wore an oversized shirt that read: “CULT CLASSIC”) to her widely-discussed “360” music video that arrived in May, in which she and her friends (including Chloe Cherry, Quenlin Blackwell, Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott and more) are pressed to find “a new hot internet girl” — or in other words, an influencer to join their ranks.

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