Words by Lola Carron
Edited by Valerie Aitova
We were told Brat Summer would end with the summer, yet the lime-green acidity of the season hasn’t faded – it’s just mutated. Long after the “Apple dance” has left the FYP, the spirit of Brat has become a lingering frequency, a cultural atmosphere that refuses to dissipate. Now, Charli XCX is pivoting from the dancefloor to the silver screen with her A24-backed mockumentary, The Moment. By trading the stage for the lens, Charli isn’t just extending her brand; she’s executing a masterclass in lateral expansion, revealing a high-stakes new blueprint for what it means to be a polymath in the 2020s.
While the industry is drowning in content loops and the traditional tour cycle, Charli XCX is taking the dark, hazy glamour of her Brat era and translating it into the future of the multi-hyphenate star.
The ‘Clean Girl’ is officially obsolete, discarded in favor of the raw and the un-optimized. As we hit a collective wall with the “perfect” lifestyle, Charli’s leap into film signals the rise of a new blueprint: the Multi-Hyphenate who rejects the music industry’s vertical silos in favour of a dark, hazy, and horizontal world-building.
The modern pop star needs to sell a lifestyle, not just a sound. The aesthetic of Charli’s recent era-a hazy, glazy-eyed hedonism, all dark glamour and unkempt hair – is one that defies the forced perfection of the “clean girl” sensibility. This is a deliberate, embodied rejection of over-polishing, creating a vibe that is instantly recognizable and infinitely memeable. Her success relies on manufacturing a moment of escapism for an audience exhausted by the pursuit of sterile perfection.
For decades, fame was a ladder: album, promotion, tour, rinse, repeat. Today, that linear model is insufficient for artists, and dull for fans. Charli XCX didn’t just wait for this shift; she anticipated it. By championing hyperpop and prioritising immediate, digitally native output, she realised early on that the most valuable asset isn’t a hit single, but an immersive world. While others were still climbing the rungs of the old industry, Charli was already building the ecosystem we’re all living in now.
If the goal is total cultural immersion, then cinema is the inevitable next frontier. Her cinematic shift with The Moment – a self-referential ‘period piece’ exploring a rising pop star grappling with fame – is a recognition that the modern fan wants to inhabit an artist’s aesthetic, not just consume their music. Film offers the ultimate playground for this ambition. It allows her to merge her relentless industrial sound, her sleek, dark visual language, and her hyper-specific cultural positioning into a cohesive, monetizable vibe that transcends genre.
Charli is the vanguard of a growing class of ‘poly-creatives’ who view their musical output as merely the R&D for more lucrative, cross-media franchises. It’s an economic reality, too: the film industry, with its long-tail licensing and high-profile placements, provides a necessary expansion beyond the diminished returns of streaming revenue. Lateral expansion – launching her own production company, Studio365, to house the project – is no longer supplementary income; it’s the core business model for the ambitious pop star. The aim is to create a career lattice, growing wider and smarter, rather than just climbing higher on the same old ladder.
Charli’s visual language has always been about the friction between the glossy and the grubby. Her aesthetics-sharp angles, neon glow, and synthetic futurism-were already short films in disguise. This move into cinema is simply extending the runtime.
When she steps behind or in front of the camera, she solidifies her role as an auteur of her own persona. She is not just providing content; she is providing a meticulously curated context for her music and her identity. This level of control is paramount. In an era where every star is scrutinised, the most powerful move is to own the narrative and expand the universe into a space where her rules dictate the physics. The collaboration with director Aidan Zamiri, the creative mind behind her “360” video, confirms this continuity of vision.
The multi-hyphenate star of 2025 operates less like a singer and more like an ecosystem. The film is the world-building; the music is the soundtrack; the fashion is the uniform-often a striking mix of high-fashion structure and hyper-digital irreverence, moving seamlessly between Tumblr’s soft grunge roots and today’s cyber femme-dom looks.
Charli’s cinematic endeavour confirms that the highest-value product a pop star can sell today is not a sound, but a complete lifestyle identity-one that consumers can access through every available medium. This evolution is fundamentally a response to the fragmentation of digital culture. As audiences scatter across platforms, the celebrity must become a chameleon, expanding their presence across all mediums to maintain cultural saturation.
For Charli, film is the ultimate vessel to maintain this ubiquity, allowing her to leap from the small screen of a TikTok clip to the expanse of the theatre screen without compromising the singularity of her abrasive, beautiful vision.
The traditional pop star merely performed. The modern multi-hyphenate creates the stage itself. Charli XCX’s cinematic shift is not merely a side project – it’s the future of fame: a relentless, lateral expansion that ensures the pop star is not just singing on the world’s stage, but actively directing the show.
