Why Does Everyone Want Brat Summer and Party Photography to Be Dead So Badly?

There’s a photo set going around on Twitter of Rachel Sennott lying down on a wooden bench at Charli xcx’s birthday party in a red leather mini dress, tits hiked up to the gods, fingers daintily wrapped around a glass with clear liquid and a lime wedge. It feels straight out of a 2000s Facebook album. There’s skin. There’s flash. There’s motion blur. Only now, there’s also discussion.

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I feel like there’s no elegant way to describe the state of a discourse. The pictures of Rachel inspired a slew of comments that dripped in superiority over anyone who dared to participate. Participate in what exactly? Falsehood. Disingenuousness. Performance of hotness, coolness, the dirty, sleazy good old days we saw on the tabloids at the grocery store. It’s inauthentic, they said. The subjects of the pictures are too aware of the lens. The Cobrasnake party photo doesn’t hit the way it used to in the age of innocence when we were too plastered to wonder what we looked like, when cameras were too scarce and shitty for it to even matter. One particularly prolific tweet: “The worst part is they’re not even having fun they are just obsessed with checking their phones as well and when they are not checking their phones they are wishing they were.”

It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like a hater in either direction, so I want to say in plain English that I am a pre-Brat fan of Charli xcx, that I’m an incredibly nostalgic person, but that I love parties, modern ones and not just ones from ten years ago. But it’s hard to deny that something was lost when everyone started bringing cameras into clubs. I think it’s real to admit there’s a heightened sense of performance to starring in a party photo now, one that’s different to the way we posed for photos then. That sometimes it does feel more important to be photographed being young and wild and free than to actually be those things. I mean, literally just a week ago, a friend very cutely bragged to me at a party that she had her picture taken by Cobrasnake, and she showed me, and she looked hot, and she knew it. The party photo is not casual anymore, it’s not naive anymore, and people miss when it was, and it’s understandable. I was in elementary school in the 2000s, but if I were at the club, I’m sure I would look at the photos of Charli’s birthday and think, this isn’t what it was like at all. This is a copy of it.

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It is a copy of it. I mean, why else would Charli get Cobrasnake of all people to photograph her party? But so what? Part of me does feel like people who don’t like partying anymore really want the club and the lifestyle and the scene to be irrelevant. The truth is it’s more alive than it’s been in a while, it’s just different. But it has to be. I don’t know if it is true that because they’re (we’re) obsessed with posing and posting and checking our phones that it means that they’re (we’re) not having fun. Modern people know what we look like all the time, so even our fun is all laced with that awareness and a subsequent cosplay that we have no idea. It is less carefree, it may be kind of sad, and it’s just reality. Charli and her clique of friends and all the non-famous people who are getting life from posting themselves looking hot at the club are all rolling their eyes at the discourse, even if the critics make an honest point every now and then. I can’t tell you what to think, but I will say that I haven’t seen people talk about a pop star’s birthday party like this in years, so like, dead where? I know there will be people out there who will say, “No one needs another person’s opinion about the state of party photography,” and you’re definitely right, but I know Miss xcx would rather die than have us stop talking about her.