A GUIDE TO BRAT SUMMER

This summer, we’ve found ourselves in an unprecedented era of Brat.

- LENA DUNHAM

Perhaps your daughter is using it as an excuse to drop out of college and start a “choker empire,” or your father is leaving his marriage because your mother doesn’t “try it, bite it, lick it, spit it, pull it to the side and get all up in it.” But how do you characterize a movement that is represented only by the color “pale slime” and now extends to the White House? Soon enough it will be Demure Autumn, but, in the meantime, this guide seeks to answer the question: What is Brat?

Brat is walking down the street with headphones on and eyes closed, knocking over passersby and refusing to say you’re sorry.

Brat is being lazy until 10 P.M., at which point you construct a château using discarded scraps of pleather, finish it by morning, and immediately win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

It’s the Cynthia doll from “Rugrats.”

Brat is a fifteen-year-old writing a best-selling memoir about how she overcame her love-and-fantasy addiction.