What I Learned About Style From Charli XCX's "Doing It" Featuring Rita Ora

I often feel sad about Rita Ora. Too often she’s a footnote when I feel like she should be the headliner. She’s consistently a side piece to (in my opinion) far less talented (and in the case of Iggy Azalea, far more annoying) performers. But who knows, maybe it’s all part of the strategy. She is, afterall, the best “featuring Rita Ora” in the game. And I guess to some extent, being a featured artist is a kind of “all care and no responsibility” sort of job, like working for double pay at an average job on a public holiday. She’s not going to get blamed for a flop, and she still gets to enjoy all the perks of being a pop star. Sometimes second best is actually best.

Which is the case in Charli XCX’s “Doing It,” which features Rita Ora, but could have just as easily been starring Rita Ora. I can’t pretend to know that the song would actually be better with a Rita vocal, but I imagine it would be far less grating without Charli’s Icona Pop cutesy nasalness and a little more of Rita’s Rihanna-sex-husk. “Doing It” is catchy as hell, and the second shame of it is that it wasn’t saved for a summer release. The third shame is that the video seems to be a very loose, budget version of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s incredible “Telephone” video (remember when we lived in a world where Gaga was big enough to work with Beyoncé and Beyoncé was small enough to work with Gaga?). All that said, I’m still kind of in love with the stylized Southern-state white-trash, Thelma & Louise gaudiness of “Doing It” (which is completely lacking any sort of cogent art direction or plot development in comparison to its seeming predecessor, “Telephone”).

I feel like all we’ve been doing post-2001-Britney is waiting for white trash to be hot again. And Charli does it, albeit in a far less authentic, highly-stylized fashion. That leopard cowboy hat. That blood red cropped top. Those denim patchwork short-shorts. The only thing that would make this better is diamantes. Please don’t judge me for wanting to make this my 2015 summer look.

After 2014’s massive year for women in pop, the chicest thing a pop star can do is pal around with their best gal for a chart topping track. The days of Ja Rule featuring Ashanti are over. The formula for a very now power collaboration is at least four X chromosomes. It’s a new kind of Generation X. There’s also something really enchanting about seeing two women who are also friends holding each other up, rather than competing against one another. GIRL POWER AMIRITE?

I mean, you can be Beyoncé. You can be especially chic. You can be BFFs with Tom Ford. You can never put a perfectly shod foot wrong with your sartorial choices. Or you can go full Fran Fine, because fashions change, but The Nanny chic is fashion language that no one will ever misunderstand. Keeping up with trends can be exhausting and expensive, but pulling a Janice from Friends looks like the most fun a girl can have with her clothes on.

Noisey UK's Emma Garland already noted that Charli and Rita—both British—are making a play for American audiences, which is one hundred percent irrefutable, especially because Charli pulls a flasher move with her coat to reveal not a naked body beneath, but an American flag. The whole thing also appears to be set in some completely romanticized, friendly redneck-middle-America-small-town-scape, so the UK pop stars are obviously trying to sell themselves to a very specific culture with some very blatant visual references. The moral of the story is, everyone wants to be kids in America (wa-ho!), and unfortunately gaudy patriotism is still in, to the absolute delight of Coachella attendees everywhere.

Jennifer Lopez did it last year with her “I Luh Ya Papi” video parodying the misogyny of hip-hop videos. Nicki sort of did it by providing her own interpretation of sexuality in “Anaconda.” Taylor Swift most certainly does it in “Blank Space” where she implodes with male dictated sexiness that gives way to pure, wild emotion. Now Charli and Rita are doing it with two hot male police strippers (I Googled to see if one of them was Mark McGrath. Unfortunately, it is not) in nipple tassles. Turning the male gaze inside out is a music video trend I certainly approve of, and hope sticks around.

The best style lesson to learn is that everyone should take an occasion, or even just an hour in the privacy of their own bedroom, to revert as best as possible to their 10-year-old self, and get dressed with the spirit of that child in control. Because Charli’s pink cowgirl outfit is impeccable, and it’s everything a ten year old girl probably dreamed of. If it were me, I’d be a hot pink Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the Kristy Swanson one. There’s something really whimsical about letting yourself play dress ups that I’ll always love, and even though I live amongst a cohort of people that thing ugh, dress ups are so lame, I’m like, totally just wearing jeans to that Halloween party I don’t even want to go to, I think that if everyone took a day to dress like their childhood fantasy, we’d all be at least marginally (for some of us, infinitely) happier.

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