Thick into the edits to my time-travel-rom-com novel set in the Regency era about two sisters who couldn’t be more different (one loves Jane Austen, one loves Skims), my gentle editor suggested I rethink using “demure” and “brat” to describe them. They might not be a thing by the time the novel came out, she worried, and mentioning them could feel cringey. I was loath to give them up, but she had a point. We’d be two years past Charlie XCX’s “brat girl summer” (she’s a little messy, might say dumb things, “feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown”) and nearly that long past Jools Lebron’s “very mindful, very demure” fall that was its hyper-viral antipode. Yes, Demure and Brat captured the essence of my sisters, but it wasn’t worth dating the novel.Article continues after advertisement
I took the point, killed my darlings, and rewrote the scene.
Still, I can’t help but feel that Demure and Brat capture something essential about not just the moment, but the culture. It’s the reason I clung to them too: because they encapsulate a debate we’ve been having not for two years but more like two hundred. This time with new clothes (and hashtags!).
The reason we’re still talking about Demure and Brat is that they’re the modern descendants—the current iteration—of a debate we’ve never stopped having.
