Yo, Miss! (No. 53)

Kamala Harris Coconut Brat Girl Summer Explained

Jul 27, 2024

Back in June, those of us who are chronically online & tuned into pop culture declared it Brat Girl Summer after Charli XCX dropped her new album, Brat. If you’ve been paying attention to the vibes lately, it made perfect sense.

Last summer was all about Barbie. All the girlies put on their pink fits and flooded the movie theaters. (Yes, not everyone. I’m talking about overall trends here.) It was also the summer of disco silver fits at Beyonce shows and sequins & friendship bracelets at Taylor Swift shows. But all the while, I kept hearing rumblings of the return of the earlier 2000s style staging a comeback. A less polished messier but still glam af look reflecting a mashup of the multitude of emotions of the confusing nature of being a “girl.”

Last month, I tweeted: “Last summer was Barbie Summer. Hot pink, women making it a GNO [girls night out] to see the movie, all of us collectively unpacking the pressures of being a girl & what were we made for? This summer is Brat Summer. Obnoxious neon green, doing what we want, whether it be together or on our own, we are celebrating our power but in a much more overt way. We have processed what we are made for & we know what happens when we center the Kens. We are centering ourselves. Watch out.”

(By the way, thank you to Brian Ives for including me in your latest article about “Brat” and Charli XCX. You can read it here)

Here’s how Charli XCX describes this brat style:

“Ultimately, it needs to be a little chaotic. As Charli herself said, “It can go that way, like, quite luxury, but it can also be so, like, trashy. Just, like, a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter, and, like, a strappy white top. With no bra. That's, like, kind of all you need.”

Her album also reflects this energy. The neon lime green album color is both playful and chaotic. Her album has manic dance-inducing deep beats but there’s also anxious energy just lurking beneath the surface through her lyrics.

And that’s the summer vibe for so many of us. We are trying to have fun and assert our true selves. However, lurking just beneath the surface is a possible authoritarian takeover of our government that could leave us with less rights as these crazy Christo Fascist MAGAs try to make trad wives out of all of us.

Then we started seeing VP Harris’s viral coconut speech getting mashed up into Charli XCX’s music on TikTok.

How these things start I can’t keep track. But this viral mashup enveloped Harris into the Brat Summer aesthetic. Not because she’s been walking around in the Charli XCX fits and hopping around the club scene this summer. More because she reflects the brat aesthetic that women (and humans in general) don’t have to fit into one role. Harris contains multitudes. She’s serious but she can have fun. She’s kind but she can attack when necessary.

Even Charli XCX tweeted:

So now how does the coconut fit into this whole narrative? First, let me provide some context.

Vice President gave remarks for the swearing-in ceremony of commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, & Economic Opportunity for Hispanics. During the speech, She stressed the importance of not only focusing on the younger generation but being "clear about the needs needs of their parents and their grandparents and their teachers and their communities."

She then said that “none of us just live in a silo” and shared some words of wisdom from her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan: “My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you”

This became a meme starting in April on TikTok. I even did one!