The Party Girl and Mythmaking: Curated Visions of Excess, and Club Culture Since the 80s

Flashing lights. The pulsing beat of a house track. Two people in a dark corner. Smoke wafting out of a joint. Dancing, like really dancing, in a way that would be embarrassing if not for the boldness it requires. 

Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s “Party Girl” (1995) inhabits New York City’s vibrant and occasionally gritty club scene through the eyes of its titular party girl, Mary (played by an outrageously perfect Parker Posey). She dances until the morning in colorful designer clothes. That is, until she throws a party to raise rent money but gets busted and thrown in jail. Mary’s only way out is her uptight godmother Judy, who hires her as a library clerk. She struggles to get the hang of the Dewey Decimal System, her indoor voice, and not coming to work hungover, but she slowly finds her groove and begins to enjoy the job. “Yes, mama, I know what’s going on, mama,” Mary theatrically drawls in an after-hours shelving session, books piled atop her head. 

After the wreckage of a particularly bad night out that leaves her drunkenly sprawled on her building’s stairs after alienating all of her friends, Mary knows her party girl days must end. She uses her newfound skills to research library science programs and announces this very non-party girl endeavor at her birthday party. “I’m serious about graduate school,” she yells to her friends as a stripper dances on her. 

Parties are not unique to Mary; they punctuate life’s mundanity with music, people, and dance. They do not have to be grand, and often aren’t: The best parts often reside in the times when you see your friend across the room, the overenthusiastic hug you give someone who would normally just be an acquaintance, and small talk in line for the bathroom. Reality is heightened through the crowd, sweat, and often, substances. The best parties become reasons to go to another, the memory of brief moments of true abandon buoying you towards the next night. The worst are hard to recover from, physically or emotionally, containing public humiliation or the private shame of a night misspent. It is no wonder that the term “party girl” can be viewed as negative or positive, derogatory or reclaimed; the partier exists in a world of extremes.  

Nearly 30 years after one party girl was lost to grad school, another was anointed in a neon green light from on high.

“Brat” and its visionary party girl, Charli xcx, revitalized the archetype in 2024. She brought us back to, as Meaghan Garvey wrote in Pitchfork, “a time when the It Girls were hot messes, flashing the paparazzi as they tumbled from the Chateau or looking feral outside Les Deux at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.” The album flows easily between hyper-energetic songs like “Guess,” “365,” and “Club Classics” that have become, well, club classics, while moodier entries such as “So I” and “I think about it all the time” are hauntingly vulnerable expressions of grief and aging. 

But “Brat” has been far bigger than the songs for most of its short life. “Brat” was a line of shirts at Urban Outfitters, an aesthetic, and (infamously) Kamala Harris. Cigarettes, white crop tops, and cocaine became synonymous with the British pop star and her lifestyle. “Brat” spread quickly and stayed, with its own language, iconography, and characters. 

“Brat” brought club culture back into the mainstream, a full-circle moment for Charli. The singer got her start playing in dingy Essex clubs that her parents drove her to at age 15, and she soon graduated to the London rave scene. Throughout her career’s mix of radio-friendly albums and ahead-of-its-time experiments, her roots remained. Nowhere is this clearer than in her 2020 album “how i’m feeling now,” written and produced during lockdown. It contains the song “Anthems,” an expression of mid-pandemic longing; she spends her days online shopping and watching TV, oscillating between fear and intense boredom. What gives her hope is anticipating a future of “late nights, my friends, New York,” imagining that “finally, when it’s over / We might be even closer.” In a time when human contact was virtual and breathing the same air had become dangerous, her wish to “feel the heat from all the bodies” was a radical one. The loud, crowded, and communal world of “Brat” had been a dream only a few years earlier. 

The vibrant club culture Mary partook in was also born of tragedy. New York’s social scene in the ’80s was marked by the mass deaths caused by AIDS and Mayor Ed Koch’s call for crackdown on mega clubs like Studio 54 that defined the previous decade. Years of plague and grief along with the dissolution of community left the city hollow. It was filled in the ’90s by the Club Kids and the birth of new clubs like Palladium, Club USA, and Limelight. The Club Kids brought gender and sexual fluidity to new heights, but there was room in the clubs for everyone from bankers to Boy George. The clubs were extravagant—money that would drop from the ceiling, winding slides from the booth to the dance floor, and a shampoo room—as were the people. Standing out, as Mary did in her now much-Pinterested outfits of colorfully patterned tights and luxurious furs, was the goal. It was a time of excess, individuality, and freedom. 

While Mary is drawn to the hedonistic elements of the Club Kid lifestyle, she is also a model citizen, if one excuses the drug charges, unlawful sale of liquor, and the illegal operation of a social club. When she is in a club, fellow partiers know to greet her through individualized call-and-responses, dances, and inside jokes. She helps her friends and buys from the struggling but authentic falafel stand instead of the comically gentrified one next door. Her time in the library gives her a new way to engage with her community, such as organizing her DJ roommate’s record collection according to the Dewey Decimal System and helping the falafel stand owner (turned lover) research educational opportunities. When she announces her librarian ambitions, she is surrounded by friends old and new. Mary has spent years investing in those around her through shared moments, drinks, and cigarettes. 

Charli finds the balance between indulgence and community in her friends, too. She does not just sing about long nights and lines of coke, but has created a mythology around who she was in the clubs and bathrooms of “Brat.” The album has an extended universe of influencers, models, and musicians who contribute to the party girl milieu. Namedrops abound: Gabbriette, Julia Fox, A. G. Cook, George Daniel, SOPHIE, The Dare, and HudMo are vaunted for their music, iconicness, and being “so Julia.” They are in TikToks, music videos, and “Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat,” a remix album that platformed Charli’s longtime collaborators, friends, and heroes, sharing her success with them. 

This group of “internet hot girls,” as Gabbriette calls her peers in the “360” music video, is supposed to be cool. Charli herself proclaimed in a recent Substack essay that even if Julia Fox were to have a custom McDonald’s meal and Amazon drones with her face on them, “she’d find a Warholian way to make it all make sense” and stay cool in the most commercial of ventures. They are supposed to be our moment’s counterculture that was inadvertently made mainstream, and if the success was intentional, it’s only because trying is cool too now (see Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar campaign). Charli views herself and her friends as clearly in the Club Kid lineage. Her Letterboxd review of “Party Girl” reads, “need a remake of this w rachel sennott,” who unsurprisingly was also in the “360” music video. Her reverence for that cultural moment is evident, from the song “1999” with Troye Sivan to Chloë Sevigny smoking a cigarette in the “360” video, and even the almost rustic early internet simplicity of the “Brat” cover. 

What Charli and her group lack, however, is mystery.

They know it is important, as Richie Shazam explains in the “360” video, that an internet hot girl must be “known, but at the same time unknowable.” It is, of course, hard to be unknowable when you are incredibly famous. But more than that, the very videos and pictures that construct the party girl image easily render it hollow as well. Her 32nd birthday party, an elaborate LA affair, was recorded not just by paparazzi and a professional photographer, but also by seemingly every attendee. The resulting flood of social media content could be read as either a good time or a performative slog where no fun was had but much was seen. Charli said of the criticism, “I think a lot of people felt that it was performative or something, but I think maybe they were just mad they weren’t there.” 

The Club Kids of the ’90s knew image was essential but lacked today’s plentiful tools of self-promotion. Steve Eichner worked as the house photographer for many of the time’s biggest clubs, and therefore was a social kingmaker. He photographed celebrities like Kate Moss, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Julia Roberts, recording their presence at clubs in images that made both the figures and the clubs more aspirational. Also photographed were drag queens, suburban teens, and the Club Kids themselves. These pictures captured moments of fashion experimentation, revelry, and freedom. To be seen meant a lot, Eichner recalled. “I was like a rock star. I went to the clubs, and the club kids were dressed for a social media moment, but there was none of that—there was just me. They would prance around in front of me, and I felt this sense of power where I have this camera, I know how to use it, and when I point it at people, they fell in love with it.” The brief moments immortalized by Eichner are just that, not the incessant nature of social media or the scourge of iPhone photography. He was typically the only camera in the club.

Charli just immortalized yet another part of “Brat” in “The Moment,” a mockumentary about the album’s wildly successful arena tour. It skewers the music industry, social media, and the very structures that made “Brat” a viral phenomenon. Charli and her friends are bold and brash, as is “Brat” of them, but the camera remains. The internet inherently strips the internet hot girl of ambiguity; she can be seen online in perfect iPhone camera resolution as she checks her phone in the club, wipes white powder from her nose, and films a TikTok. Her personal image is too prevalent, too consumable. The strobing lights and reverberating music never look as good on Instagram as they feel in the moment anyway. 

The Club Kids had the luxury of only flashes of their night being shared. Mary does not worry about looking too inebriated in a photo. She is not, consciously or unconsciously, trying to perform the correct amount of fun for anyone else. Her mythmaking exists in the oral tradition of great nights, a crowd’s hazy memory put together to form the recollection that a good time was had. 

Abby Slap can be reached at aslap@wesleyan.edu.