The Brat Era Gets Its Premiere: Charli XCX Dominates in Leather and Lace at A24’s The Moment
At the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills, where Los Angeles gathered for A24’s The Moment premiere, Charli XCX arrived not to participate in red carpet theatre but to author it entirely. Her ensemble—a custom collaboration between Jean Paul Gaultier and Ludovic de Saint Sernin—was less outfit, more architectural provocation. It was the kind of look that doesn’t whisper. It declares.
The construction began with a vintage Alexander McQueen leather bra, domed and defiant, its sculptural silhouette hovering just above a steel-blue corset laced with the precision of surgical intent. The corset itself became the anchor: cinched, structured, unapologetically severe. Beneath it, R and M Leather’s Tammy micro shorts—barely perceptible, cropped to the point of abstraction—played peek-a-boo with the eye. Her legs, sheathed in sheer black tights, bore a small but potent detail: the film’s title, THE MOMENT, stamped in delicate serif along one thigh. Method dressing at its most literal, most cheeky.
The footwear choice was ruthlessly clean. Saint Laurent’s Apolline slingback pumps in glossy patent leather extended into exaggerated pointed toes, a study in sharp elegance that balanced the chaos above. And then—the pièce de résistance—a massive cream-colored faux-fur stole, voluminous to the point of absurdity, trailing from her hand like a defeated curtain or a trophy skin. She didn’t wear it. She held it. A flex in textile form.
Charli’s beauty leaned minimal: muted makeup, pitch-black hair worn down and deliberately undone at the front, as if the ’90s had been dragged through a wind tunnel and deposited, still sparking, onto the 2025 red carpet. The overall effect was bondage-meets-glamour, restriction-meets-release, a visual essay in contradictions that somehow cohered into pure star wattage.
The evening itself felt meta. The Moment is both homage and interrogation of Charli’s Brat era—a cultural supernova that redefined pop rebellion for a new generation. And what screams brat louder than casting Kylie Jenner and Alexander Skarsgård? Jenner arrived alongside Charli in a romantic, deconstructed Maison Margiela look pulled directly from their Spring/Summer 2026 runway, offering a softer counterpoint to Charli’s hard-edged provocation.
But make no mistake: this was Charli’s night. The look didn’t ask for space on that carpet. It claimed it, foghorn-loud, leather-laced, and utterly unapologetic. Inventive, restrictive, almost wrong—but not quite. Just right for someone who’s never played it safe.
