Interesting moment for Vanity Fair to put Charli XCX on their cover. To be fair, Vanity Fair clearly had this cover in the works and mostly written before Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl came out, an album which included “Actually Romantic,” a not-so-subtle diss track about Charli. Charlie declined to address Taylor’s song, but she did speak cryptically about “Sympathy is a Knife,” which many believe is about Taylor. I came out of this VF profile liking Charlie and thinking she sounds impossibly cool. I don’t think it’s an act – she really is this woman, this brat, this cool girl. Some highlights:

Is “Brat” over? “I don’t really get to decide when it’s over or not. I think that’s up to the world.” It will eventually exist “as a relic.” “I don’t think people will forget it,” she says. On the other hand, “It’s not f–king New Wave. The end will be interesting. Because then I have to look at myself in a different way and be stripped of the thing that everyone identified me with.” Whatever this post-brat version of Charli xcx is, she says, “I won’t be staring into the abyss wondering what I’m gonna do.”

She’s doing a movie-star thing next: “I not only know that this won’t last forever, I’m also really interested in the fact that it doesn’t.”

She’s always considering plastic surgery: “I’m always thinking about how I look and what I would change about my face,” Charli says, citing her favorite plastic surgery website RealSelf for giving her the resources to know that she can’t achieve a permanent version of the braid eye tilt with sugar threads. At some point, she says, she “probably will get” a mid-facelift. “I’m f–king thinking about all the s–t that I could do and pull and stretch and morph on my face, all the time. I have to just remind myself that maybe I can’t get too sucked into that.” She recently stopped getting Botox. “I miss it,” she says mournfully.

Her relationship with Atlantic, her label: “It used to be quite a turbulent relationship, and now it’s just really not.” She partially attributes the shift at the label to the fact that “they used to really not like that I was kind of a bitch, and now I guess they know it can sell.” Charli is pleased that Atlantic does not demand she “collaborate creatively.” “I’m not open to feedback. Like, that’s not what your job is. We can all pretend that it is, but it’s not…. I don’t wanna make it sound like the label are idiots. They’re definitely not. But I think it’s like, everybody has their strengths, right?” The label’s role: “They’re a bank,” she says. “We’re in a good place, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything. The devil you know.”

Her career goal: “I don’t even think my driving factor has been, ‘I wanna be the biggest pop star ever in the world,’ or anything like that. I always just wanted to make music on my own terms and have as many people listen to it as possible, which sounds really simple. But I think I’ve really struggled over the years, because I’ve never felt like I fit in. Am I supposed to be this underground left artist, or am I supposed to try and be this commercial package? And I think before Brat, I just gave up on fighting with myself on that. I really said, ‘Okay, I am going to make this record in this specific way, and I’m actually fine with the consequences of that; if it means no one hears it, if it means I get dropped by my label.’ ”

She reads everything about herself: She told me she reads every bit of coverage about herself—that the social media climate affects her. She wants to know how people discuss her, how critics perceive her, what the newer listeners make of all of this. “It’s fascinating to see how people ingest your personality and spit it back out—what people cling on to, what people miss. I’m always interested in, like, what does the casual viewer think? And they probably think I’m a girl who parties and does drugs and is a little bit bitchy.”

On ‘Sympathy Is a Knife”: “I think I’m just quite direct and blunt,” Charli tells me when I ask about that moment and talk about how different it feels from how warm she’s been today. “I hate this phrase, but what you see is what you get with me. People think it’s all some kind of performance, but it’s not. I’m not sat here talking to you being the way that I am onstage. But I think there is a correlation in that there’s a messiness and a lack of perfection. It’s the combination of talking about those things whilst also embracing them and really struggling with them is what makes me whole. And I think that it makes me honest. You can vouch for me, I hope.” The [Taylor Swift] saga continues in the comments section, but so far Charli has avoided engaging directly, including in the pages of Vanity Fair. She declined to comment on the situation.

[From Vanity Fair]

It’s pretty rare to see a celebrity acknowledge that they are paying attention to online chatter and they read everything written about them. It’s not really healthy, and yet… I can understand how and why Charli in particular would do that. And I agree with what she says about “what you see is what you get” – this isn’t an affectation, and while “brat” was a phase and a persona, she’s also really that person.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images. Cover courtesy of Vanity Fair.