Need a new it girl? Leave it up to Charli XCX
The unrelenting quest to find the next “mother” is one that plagues every Gen Z girl who spends too much time online and has (at least at one point in her life) been in therapy. Luckily, one of the patron saints of “mother-dom” is taking on that responsibility herself: in the video for “360” – the latest single to drop from Brat, her sixth studio album – Charli XCX and a not-so-ragtag crew get together to “fulfil the prophecy of finding a new, hot internet girl”. If they don’t do that, their kind will “cease to exist”. That’s according to Euphoria‘s Chloe Cherry, anyway. She pops up in the video alongside Gabbriette, Bottoms‘ Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, Richie Shazam, Emma Chamberlain, Hari Nef, Isamaya Ffrench, Alex Consani, and (last but certainly not least) Quen Blackwell. Oh, and Chloë Sevigny makes an appearance.
So, who is the next “mother”? According to “360”, it’s the hapless waitress serving the table of it girls in the video, aka @randomcontrol. If the cringe-to-cult career trajectory of TikTok star Addison Rae is anything to go by – we don’t think it’s entirely serendipitous that since lending her vocals to “Von Dutch” she’s become an unequivocal cool girl – she’s probably one to put on your radar.
Though there’s something definitively Gen Z about the visuals for “360”, the princess of PC Music is clearly taking cues from other videos which featured ensemble casts with the potential to break the internet. Sure, there’s the millennial motley crew in the video for Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” – which, looking back, reads as “360” for girls not on antidepressants – but we’d hazard a guess that a girl with cultural references as wide as Charli is probably taking cues from the Beastie Boys’ video for “Make Some Noise”. Released back in 2011, the video featured everyone from Chloë Sevigny (who also popped up in “360”), to Elijah Wood, to Seth Rogen.
It’s been quite the few months for Charli. Before the Aidan Zamiri-shot video for “360”, she dropped singles “Von Dutch” and “Club Classics”, both of which were first shared as snippets during her infamous Boiler Room set in February. Featuring performances by “360” alumni Julia Fox, the set, called BABYGIRL, received a whopping 37,000 RSVPs. Following the success of her track for the Barbie soundtrack last summer, Charli is also working on music not only for David Lowery’s upcoming film Mother Mary, but the TV series Overcompensating. Basically, it’s Charli’s world and we’re just living in it.
