Lime green. Shrek green. Puke green. However you would describe that shade of green that appears on Charli xcx’s Brat album cover, one thing is for sure: it leaves a mark. Since Brat’s release on 7 June, its minimalist album artwork has become a meme of its own, and its striking colour has taken over social media. Some music fans are now using a green background as their profile picture on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), while others are associating anything in that colour with Charli XCX.
This wouldn’t have been the case if Charli XCX had picked a hue that’s easy on the eyes. But the English musician shared that she purposely chose that off-putting colour for her album cover to provoke people into questioning what is considered good or bad in pop culture. With Brat, she has made a sickly shade of green go viral.
Charli XCX is not the only person to have so boldly challenged our ideas of good taste with the colour green. In the fashion world, the Italian designer Miuccia Prada has come to be known as the master of ugly. Her collections for Prada and Miu Miu so often feature elements that are unattractive or unpleasant; they do not conform to conventional ideas of beauty, femininity or sexiness.
Case in point: Prada’s Spring/Summer 1996 collection, which was later dubbed “Ugly Chic”. When talking about the collection, the fashion designer said, “Bad taste is part of our history, part of culture. But it’s scorned in the fashion industry. Sometimes, fashion focuses on fixed, narrow, and limited notions of beauty, luxury and glamour. My spring 1996 collection attempted to upend these prescribed concepts.”
Inspired by what she called the “trashy” textiles found in suburban homes in the ‘50s, Prada adorned the collection’s coats, dresses and skirts with mundane geometric patterns. Her colour choices are also memorable: there was a lot of brown, which Prada said she liked for being “the least commercial colour” at the time, as well as unflattering shades of green.
In her review of the show for The Washington Post, Robin Givhan wrote, “The greens hovered somewhere between shades of slime and mould”. Fashion critic Alexander Fury described one particular shade, which Kate Moss wore on the runway, as “a yellowy, bilious green that is so Prada it could be dubbed ‘Miuccia sludge’.”
‘Miuccia sludge’ has since become a Miuccia signature, appearing across her designs for both Prada and Miu Miu. Most recently, for Prada’s Fall/Winter 2024 collection, the colour was used on a knitted top that was paired, jarringly, with a baby pink cardigan. The brand’s latest menswear collection featured a similar look.
That Prada green has also been seen on celebrities. Scarlett Johansson donned a green satin minidress featuring the brand’s triangle logo at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, months after another Hollywood star, Michelle Williams, wore the same dress. At Milan Men’s Fashion Week this year, K-pop star Karina of Aespa contrasted her white dress with the Prada Re-Edition 1978 Re-Nylon bag—in “Fern Green”.
Prada has also challenged the notion that wearing green to the red carpet is a faux pas. Over the years, both of her brands have created some of the most striking green dresses for the stars, including Amanda Seyfried and Maya Hawke. Who can forget the neon green Prada paillette dress that Sarah Paulson wore to the Ocean’s 8 film premiere, much to Rihanna’s envy?
It seems that green isn’t going anywhere. Unappealing shades of the colour have popped up in the Fall/Winter 2024 fashion shows. Both Burberry and Fendi nodded to the great outdoors with an earthy and muddy colour palette. After presenting a lime-green coat in his Gucci debut, creative director Sabato De Sarno used what his design team called a “rotten” green in the dresses and coats of his second womenswear collection. The designer said that he wanted to combine “what I hate with what I love to make something new.” Likewise, when Belgian designer Dries Van Noten described his collection—which featured coats in a phlegm-like acid green hue styled with pink skirts or cement grey boots—he said, “Everything is really about all of these really strange colour combinations.”
The unlikely rise of ugly greens, as with many other fashion trends, can be traced back to Miuccia Prada. (You could even say that she is fashion’s favourite reference, baby.) Today, both Prada and Miu Miu are among the most popular and profitable luxury fashion brands. Almost three decades after Prada shocked the fashion industry with her Ugly Chic collection, her clashing combinations and ideas of dressing the “wrong” way have taken hold of the mainstream.
Much like Prada, Charli XCX has demonstrated a rebellious streak throughout her career, instead of following a formula to becoming a pop star. The chaotic and abrasive sound of Brat, as well as its lyrics that vacillate between being confessional and cocky, reflect Charli’s experimental approach to music. And like Prada, Charli doesn’t aim to please. She wants to provoke—be it with her songs, her videos, her outfits, or her lime green album cover. The Mean Girls singer is much like the woman that Prada designed for, as she once described: “This is not at all a nice woman. But that does not mean that she isn’t very exciting.”
Below, see more examples of the green colour trend from the Fall/Winter 2024 collections.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA Singapore.