I have to get to the bottom of this! As an OG Tumblr girl, I was an active blogger at the time of the subculture’s inception and possibly even an unknowing participant.
After years of hearing the term used to describe everything Lana Del Rey does and everything overtly Americana (not my vibe,) I recently saw elements of my style under the coquette hashtag. Confused and curious I set out to answer one of my nagging fashion questions — what is coquette?
Luckily, I knew where to go to begin my search for answers.
The articles written by major publications may leave you with more questions than answers because they skip over the subculture’s Tumblr origins.
Based on the Urban Dictionary definition of “coquette” written by Nylijah, one of Coquette Club’s admins, is as stated, “The aesthetic is based on reclaiming girlhood and embracing a bubbly, flirty personality. People of any age, gender, race, and sexuality can be coquette. The aesthetic includes a variety of subtypes such as Grunge, Y2K, Classic Americana Coquette, etc.”
The Coquette Club is also very candid in the subculture’s origins — the nymphet hashtag. Nymphet was the original name for the coquette subculture, derived from the infamous Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita.
The name coquette was created due to Tumblr doing away with the nymphet hashtag. Tumblr felt this necessary due to the sheer amount of predatory DDLG kink practitioners (google at your own discretion,) invading the hashtag seeking to share their desires and prey upon the young preteen and teenage girls who followed the hashtag. The hashtag was a part of Tumblr’s 2018 site wide ban on explicit adult content.
To be clear, participants in the coquette subculture actively denounce predatory relations between adults and adolescents. Coquettes main takeaway from Lolita is the preservation of girlhood that informs every iteration of the aesthetic.
Scrolling through an archive of the style’s most popular years (2015-2017,) I see why I was on the fringes. A shiver of rejection and familiarity crept up on me as I scrolled through the archive full of pictures with white hazy filters, waist length pigtails, plaid dresses, and totally 2010s cringe poses.
And of course I didn’t see anyone darker than ivory in the archives.
My research findings corroborated Nylijah’s definition, coquette is intended to keep your youthful spirit alive.
The subculture’s fashion and decor choices are heavily influenced by the musings of your inner child, which explains why certain elements are highly repetitive i.e. baby pink paired with white. It’s not a rule of convention but rather a happening of circumstance.
This finding also explains why the most popular coquette aesthetic could not resonate with me back then and even now. Rather than bows, Mary Jane’s, and pearls, eight-year-old me had beads in my hair, Twinkle Toes on my feet, and roll-on cherry lipgloss in my pocket.
For Black Gen-Zers and Millennials, I think our girlhood is most effectively preserved through our hairstyles, music taste, shoes, purses, and delight in beauty supply store trips.
Bonus points to all the girls with a Hello Kitty obsession and who go for a dolly look with their lash sets. <3
Leave a Reply