Design Subcultures and “Brat Summer”

Identity politics, the re-emergence of subcultures, and why the “anti-design” of blurry Helvetica feels like a breath of fresh air

By Priya Kral, Junior Designer

Design subcultures are not a new concept. In Berlin, design subculture boomed after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall—inspired by new fashions, music, and political liberation, creatives developed an iconic scene. They leaned into the aesthetics of graffiti, dystopian architecture and rave culture, and played with new motifs and ways of life. Berlin came to represent a mecca of creative freedom until corporate giants sniffed out the opportunity in Berlin’s lower rents and tax breaks. With the tantalizing lure of a steady income and big-name brands, creatives acquiesced their time and freedom to creatively conservative agencies and cushy Cannes Lions.?

In 2024, we’re finally seeing this phenomenon begin to rip at the seams. Milly Burrough of It’s Nice That champions that “As the global economy buckles under pressure from all angles, start-up lay-offs dominate the Berlin employment landscape, and the creatives that sold their soul to big-corporate have been abandoned, left to reclaim their creativity and redefine their value.” Irish-born, Berlin-based graphic designer Neale Johnston’s work is a perfect example of this cultural shift. Corporate designer by day, and freelancer extraordinaire by night, Johnston imbues imperfections and a “human element” into his gritty freelance projects. Contrarily, experimentation and exploration isn’t a primary facet of his motion-graphics day job.

In Tokyo, department store Laforet Harajuku has served as an epicenter for alternative youth fashion and design since its opening in 1978. Drawing shoppers away from other fashion districts in Shibuya and Shinjuku, Laforet was one of the first spaces to host unique offerings from local designers, with popups and “select shops” embellishing its floors. Designers who got their start living in the affordable Harajuku Central Apartments (previously American military housing and an Olympic village) soon saw their creations advertised at Laforet across the street. Notwithstanding the fashion itself, this cultural bastion has had equally impressive and subversive strides in its advertising. Takuya Onuki’s “The Giant Bra” boasted a larger-than-life bra that was haphazardly strewn across the tops of buildings in Los Angeles. Onuki set out to challenge norms and to create “advertisements that reject advertising,” fabricating a memorable and absurdist campaign. Ray Masaki, the writer of It’s Nice That: The View From Tokyo, quips “how Onuki received the budget and go-ahead to do this stunt, in America no less, is a mystery to me, but perhaps indicative of the freedom towards creativity that Laforet was encouraging.” In the American climate of 2001, I’d agree that it would be difficult to imagine such subversive advertising successfully pulled off in a culture that has their lawyer on speed-dial.

However, I believe that we are witnessing a renaissance in the way and scale Americans are interacting with design subcultures. The album cover design of Charli XCX’s 2024 hyper-pop “Brat” is a textbook example. The pixelated, condensed, lowercase Helvetica set against an acidic chartreuse background made waves when it was released. It became incredibly polarizing—people rallied behind it or condemned it, and Charli XCX changed all of her album covers to iterations of the “Brat” cover in response.?

Visually, “Brat” can be best categorized as “anti-design,” a movement that began globally in the 1960s as a response to mass commercialization culture at the time. Designers felt that their role in the creation of objects that served “government and corporate management interests that reinforced class distinction and fueled commodity consumption for the wealthy” made them complicit. In response, they challenged commercial principles by abandoning traditional design principles of composition, typography and color. The intention of anti-design is rooted in anti-capitalism and subculture; the goal of the final form isn’t to look good, but to spark conversation and promote creative individualism.

TLDR; it’s work that your Typography 1 design professors have nightmares about. “Brat” visually embraces all of the principles of anti-design, and backs it up with tongue-in-cheek lyrics: “If you love it, if you hate it, I don't fucking care what you think” bleats out over the bouncy, electronic beat on “360.”

The cultural ubiquity of "Brat" lies in not the design itself, but what it represents—there is nothing more emancipating than the idea of hastily typing out your album name on an acid chartreuse background and heading to the club. But it becomes even more potent when we realize that now, these aesthetically anti-design subcultures have reached the commercial mainstream.

“Brat” is Charli XCX’s largest commercial success since 2014, inspiring multiple op-eds and a cheeky plant-based sausage ad in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Similarly, Chappell Roan, the queer pop star whose tracks are a mosh-pit of '80s Lauper, heartfelt yodeling and upbeat bridges, drew the biggest Lollapalooza daytime performance ever. And since June, TikTok’s tour du force of UGC has been a constant churn of Kamala Harris “fancams” and memes based off of her iconic “coconut tree” quote and set to the background music of Charli XCX’s “365” and Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon.”

The dots begin to connect when one notices the visual similarity between Roan’s “Midwest Princess” merch and the sold-out Harris-Walz camo hats (sold out in 30 minutes, and generated $1 million in revenue so far). Chloe Gordon of The Dieline met with creative, G Roberts, who sharply noted, "A large makeup of X (Twitter) and TikTok's subculture is taking on this 'bad' design trend in the form of memes, which is another side of this trend that needs to be mentioned. This trend garners so much traction from Gen Z because it IS so satirical."

And it doesn’t stop at music, or politics – we’re seeing subculture pervade into drinks as well. Visually, drinks brands like Aura Bora are leaning into anti-design as a hallmark of their social media presence (@drinkaurabora). In the market, brands like Nice are promoting demystifying wine with tongue-in-cheek branding and copy. In the bars, we’re seeing a rise in fun, fruity drinks like the Cosmo and Appletini. What these have in common is a subversive flip from the stodgy, heritage-forward sentiments surrounding spirits. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a rise in classic cocktails (easy to make at home) and a million martini variants (popularized, at least in NYC, by the “quiet luxury” of HBO's Succession). If the martini is symbolic of tradition and the status quo, the Cosmo is its anti-establishment, fun-loving cousin.

In the United States, these subculture movements that began with organic, oftentimes humorous UGC, have translated into millions of dollars spent on campaigns, ad buys and market research. It’s ignorant to think seemingly “silly” design choices didn’t play a titular role in the amount of capital expended. Marketers are spinning their wheels trying to dissect the correlation between Gen Z’s spending habits and how “cool” a brand (or political campaign) appears on social media.

Globally, we’re feeling the re-emergence of design subcultures as a response to increased commercialization and a desire for authenticity. We were quick to embrace “Brat” because it represents a total departure from the seriousness and brevity in the economic and political spheres we’ve all felt since COVID. Will anti-design become a commercially successful, long-lasting marketing tactic? Has the “coconut tree” become a money tree? Your “Guess” is as good as mine. But all signs point towards a significant subculture movement in design moving to the forefront of public consciousness.