The #BratPack is Back

I’ve flipped through enough of Rob Lowe’s Stories I Only Tell My Friends in various Hudson News outposts nationwide to know everything there is to know about the Brat Pack. As my dad and an E! True Hollywood Story I once saw tell it, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, and a few of their BFFs rose to fame in the 1980s. They palled around LA, drank a lot of champagne, and forced teenagers all across America to confront the tedium of their normal existences. It seemed great.

Given a recent photo I spotted of Demi Moore in a bikini and the results of a Google image search for “Rob Lowe AND abs,” I think it’s fair to say that the original clique still has the power to make most of us accept our inferiority. It’s okay. We’re managing.

But while you and I feast our eyes on their chiseled limbs and enviable spandex wardrobes, Vogue has moved on. This week, it anointed a new Brat Pack, crowning Kendall Jenner, Justin Bieber, Ansel Elgort — that sweetie, and a few of their peers the Plastics of our day. The spread, which Mario Testino shot through what looks a lot like the Valencia filter, features selfies of Kendall and Gigi Hadid, a snap of siblings Dylan and Hopper Penn in a moment of deep contemplation, and plenty of bared midriff.

Just as the glossy intended it, the gang looks beautiful and charmed and fabulous. Gigi Hadid is very symmetrical. And yet for all the luster and gleam and decadence, I have to admit: I’m bored.

As far as I’m concerned, this is not the New Brat Pack or Rat Pack or even the latest collection of Bratz dolls come to life. On behalf of a generation that includes Tavi Gevinson and Miley Cyrus, I demand better idols.

And I don’t think I’m alone. My friends and frenemies and I are jealous of more than excellent proportions and lithe limbs. We want to see talent and drive and unbridled ambition. What we want is the Bloomsbury Group, Part II or the Newest New York Intellectuals.

Let’s be honest: I don’t want to be Kendall and Gigi as much as I do Lorde and Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham. In the high school cafeteria that is the culture industry today, I want to sit next to the eternally youthful Iris Apfel and Miranda July. I want better than Bieber. And I bet you do, too.

So, who belongs in our #BratPack? Besides Mo’ne Davis, that is — that girl is obviously in. Who do we want it to be? Who leads the kind of life that merits a double tap? Let’s talk about it.

Images courtesy of Vogue, shot by Mario Testino