Despite its ribbon-adorned head coming into view most seasons since the dawn of women’s fashion, an aesthetic of little-girlishness is undeniably in overdrive this autumn. Miu Miu’s longtime “girl at heart” now wears $900 single-strap satin ballet pumps so fragile-looking they bring to mind the beat-up flats of my own teenage years, destined to self-destruct by the winter break. This season, Marc Jacobs Heaven is offering teddies in the form of friendship rings, backpacks, and actual, cuddly, “bears who care.” And on TikTok, where everything that’s actually happening tends to coalesce, a community has formed around a self-dubbed “coquette” aesthetic, composed out of clothing and household items that all share in common a kind of explicit girlishness. Under hashtags like #coquetteaesthetic and #coquettefashion, girl users are sharing clips of their bedrooms (lace curtains, pink candles, collections of shells and candles on white antique dressing tables), clothes (floral pointelle-knits, white cotton dresses, silk hair bows, pleated skirts) and beauty routines (anything “dusky rose”) to an engaged audience.
The word coquette, as you might guess, is a borrowing from French, coming into its earliest usage as a noun in the fifteenth century: the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, describes a woman who is “eager to please through her appearance (…) given to flirting or coquetry,” and even one who is “talkative and gossipy.” That the term coquette is an old one makes sense considering the community’s aspirations to a kind of archaic grandeur, one that might touch upon the gingham of 1950s Americana one day, and a sort of high-Edwardian obsession with lace and frills the next.
Unfortunately, it has come under criticism for this very archaism: endorsing the same harmful ideals of whiteness and thinness that defined those historical time periods, abetting them in turn to stick to our own. It’s worth noting, though, that content flagging up this very issue is actively present among the most-watched content of the coquette community. What’s more, in watching coquette (and coquette-adjacent) content, you also quickly sense how the images produced here are already more complex than the images of pretty young-girl femininity that once circulated on sites like Tumblr. By staging the inherent construction behind their perfect, pretty aesthetic, the little-girlishness at work here is operating on multiple levels, not so much through the hybridity offered by other trends, but more in line with those oldest uses of the term: in terms of the intention embedded in a fluffy, appealing surface. For young Black girl (and boy) users, their coquette TikToks issue a challenge to racist ideas about whom ‘softer’ aesthetics belong to.
And for others, coquette is a space for satirical play, in which even inanimate objects like pill packets, deodorant spray cans and toy skeletons are an opportunity for DIY coquette makeovers. There is an absurd sense of humor running through coquette aesthetic feeds, to the point of parody: it’s like the girls are enjoying enveloping themselves in the girlish, material abundance of the look, while simultaneously letting the air out of any idea of its totality.
To be a coquette was never a seduction, after all, but a trick. The coquette, in her meaning as played out in literature, art and life since the sixteenth century, have been one who trifles with the affections of others, antics especially aimed at, but not limited to, men. There is a certain, less-discussed rebellious streak in the idea of coquetry that is recognizable even in the creations of TikTok users; that coquetry also implies a kind of secret knowledge and daring, as well as a certain indifference to men’s feelings, offers an alternative lens on the ways these girls are adorning themselves for their phone cameras.
Though also very much entwined with the world of film, 2022’s coquettes reject the main source material as the “Tumblr Lolitas” of the 2010s, who back then cited Adrian Lyne’s heinous, straightforwardly creepy Lolita, and the style of actress Dominique Swain in it, as their primary source material (for a nuanced discussion of that community, including the role Lana Del Rey played in forming it, Jamie Loftus’s “Lolita Podcast” features a remarkable in-depth episode on the topic). Many girls in today’s coquette scene actively push against this comparison, preferring references to favorites like Marie Antoinette, A Room with A View, Black Swan, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and, of course, the Tim Burton back-catalog.
It strikes me, watching many of these girls’ smart remixes of those films’ aesthetic signifiers, theme tunes, and dress codes, that to read their videos as simply regurgitated patriarchal femininity would be to make the same mistake as to interpret, say, a Sofia Coppola movie at the level of surface alone. Reading Anna Backman Roger’s critical text on Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, I was struck by her invocation of the film’s implicit male gaze—a trick of Coppola’s, too—in which the dreamlike images that parade before us are in fact told from the perspective of Michael, a boy who obsesses over the girls’ disappearance on the rock. “I think we miss something of Picnic’s rather camp aesthetic if we cannot admit that the film does anything beyond merely hailing and fetishizing femininity,” she writes, adding that for her the film “actively encourages the attentive viewer to read against the superficial grain of the image (…) there is a rebellious element to these moving images of young women that is lacking in [fashion] photographs.”
What do we see when we more attentively read the layers of the coquette’s filmmaking, as opposed to just the image? I see girls who love how they look, girls who just want nice things, and girls with a heightened awareness of the fabrication behind their mode of dress, who are taking pleasure in that process of self-creation. Yes, we are decidedly far from the arena of radical feminism—and the connotations of the emphasis on “delicacy” makes me actively watchful—but when the girls themselves are clearly having so much fun, I also hesitate to consign coquettedom as merely another way in which teenagers are making themselves more unhappy. Evidently, it is also making many young women feel good.
As for the rest of us, I don’t think we’re exempt from the complex intentionalities that are in play when we cherry-pick some of these elements in our own dress. In fact, on the bodies of adult women, the subversive appeal crystallizes all the more. I love how the artist Precious Okoyomon combines girlish dresses accessorized with a toy poodle, with her immersive installations that bring overgrown, earthily-dark fairytales to life; how Lotta Volkova, the stylist whose dress epitomizes the hard adult body X children’s aisle aesthetic dichotomy, regularly posts pouting, arms-raised selfies, such as one in which her sweat patch shows through her pale blue shirt and grey Miu Miu sweater combination. When you’re a grown adult woman adorning yourself with items from childish forms of dress, there’s an element of not partaking that will always be attractive; sometimes, as women, we like to play in the weeds of what the gaze has done to us, too.
I mention the sweat stain because it brings me to what, for me, is the most interesting thread of little-girlish aesthetics like coquette: that is, their inevitable embeddedness in lived reality. These are young women, after all, who go about their actual lives while championing an aesthetic that aspires to the kind of girlish purity that could only truly exist in constructed fiction. It’s this internal contradiction that, actually, lends the coquette aesthetic its occasional coquetry: a satirical knowing streak that results in those posts of sanitary pads and deodorant bottles covered in velvet bows, sequins and ribbons. When you’ve been told how little girls should be, act and dress since you were, well, a little girl, there exists a great pleasure in sending it up now and again: to perform the performance, by muddying those little white ankle socks in the ways we know how.