If your social media scrolls have included ribbons tied to unexpected items, serenaded by Lana Del Rey tunes, you have encountered the intriguing #coquette trend. Surpassing a billion views and millions of creations, this viral movement has extended beyond digital platforms. Incorporating pastel hues, lace, and chiffon, the coquette style challenges conventional notions of femininity. While the Oxford Dictionary defines a coquette as a flirtatious woman, contemporary interpretations add layers of personal meaning.
For Amira Mohamed, a 22-year-old from North London, embracing coquette clothing is a powerful act of self-reclamation. “It’s a style of dressing for ourselves,” she told BBC. She claims to see the coquette as “the feminine side of dressing.” “I think at the heart of the aesthetic is nostalgia, looking back at what made us happy,” she says.
Influencer Kellen Beckett discovered coquette themes on Tumblr three years ago and sees it as a chance to fully embrace femininity, especially after experiencing that being girly wasn’t considered cool during school. “Not liking pink was kind of a cool thing,” she recalled.
Now, with the current trend, she feels things have changed, and it’s okay to appreciate traditionally feminine things, like the color pink. Ms Beckett shares her take on the coquette style through videos. She said, “There’s a lovely mixture of things that are the very essence of girlhood.”
Fashion historian Dr Serena Dyer highlights the extensive historical roots of the coquette aesthetic, drawing inspiration from periods spanning 200 years. “A lot in the corsets seen in the 18th century, fabrics of the Regency era and lace from the Victorian period,” she said, as per BBC.
In her view, women using fashion as a means of self-empowerment is not a novel concept. “It’s partly about women’s agency over their bodies, they are presenting what they want and how they want to be presented. And while that might be a sexual gaze, there’s no sense that’s necessarily a heterosexual gaze,” Dr Dyer said.
Meanwhile, fashion TikToker Addy Somers sees the situation as more complex. While she appreciates the idea of coquette offering a fresh perspective on the male gaze, Addy believes that real-world issues arise. “It’s that weird counterbalance between reclaiming something that should be accessible to everyone. And yet you have this predetermined set of rules that exclude a vast majority of people. It becomes inherently problematic, because you start setting a standard that many women simply cannot attain,” she said.
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