Cigarette Bouquets and Disheveled Brats: Inside Charli XCX’s Star-Studded Birthday Party

There are two types of people in this world: those who aspire to be part of Taylor Swift’s so-called girl squad, and those who receive invites to Charli XCX’s birthday parties. I have no interest in pitting two extremely normal—and extremely well-adjusted—standoms against each other, but I do know that Swifties would have balked at the cigarette-stuffed bouquet of Calla lilies that Rosalía gifted to Charli this weekend, preferring them to have perhaps been filled with cats or something.

Charli celebrated her 32nd birthday at Tenants of the Trees in Los Angeles on Saturday, where almost everyone—i.e. Lorde, Ella Snyder, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, Tove Lo, Addison Rae, Gabbriette, The Dare and Nelly Furtado—wore some variation on the Brat uniform: Charli in a Sia Arnica crop top, micro shorts, and knee-high boots; Rae in a Vivienne Tam top and denim hotpants; Rosalía in a Siberia Hills trucker cap, a bralette and boxer shorts. Even Alexa Demie came out of hibernation, blowing gum at the paps while dressed in a Little Tokyo Table Tennis jersey, bicycle shorts, and boots.

Charli dueted with Lorde; Charli dueted with Billie; and Charli dueted with what is perhaps the world’s ugliest cake, a disintegrating mound of icing and dough festooned in sloping candles. But such is the Brat MO: to rehabilitate the messy as signs of a life well-lived. Timony Ramos’s unfocused and artfully grease-lensed photographs from the evening will prove just how aspirational this undone lifestyle—described by Charli herself as “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra”—has become in the wake of Brat, which was, of course, over until it… wasn’t.