In 2023, social networks were permeated with trends that romanticized and rescued gender characteristics that were intrinsically related to the female experience. Among others, it included Barbiecore and bright pink clothes, being a clean girl for having all the skin products of the moment and bucolic cottagecore, a slow and artisanal lifestyle. But there was one trend that devoured all the previous ones: the coquette aesthetic.
The coquette, a word rescued from the French that means coquette, aims at garments and accessories that exalt hyperfemininity: bows, corsets, dresses with volumes and pastel colors, in which pink predominates. It refers to the Victorian Regency and Rococo era. Experts such as Elina Norandi, art and fashion historian, suggest that its main figure is Marie Antoinette, specifically the version by film director Sofia Coppola from 2006.
Sandra Ramos has a degree in philosophy and a high school teacher. She remembers that the first time she wore a bow as an adult was at her grandfather's funeral. She dressed in a miniskirt, patent leather shoes, and put on the bow inherently, without thinking about it. “The first thing my mother did when she saw me was ask me how she was dressed like that. She called me nerdy and I felt very embarrassed,” she explains. “It was something negative and something I hadn't given much thought to.”
These accessories and garments are established as gender markers in the construction of the patriarchal world and have traditionally been used to devalue everything that has to do with women and the feminine. They are associated with pejorative adjectives such as childish, vulnerable, weak or innocent. The feminist French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Second Sex, explains that the masculine has always been read as neutral, while the feminine is read in a negative key.
The coquette is not just another trend, but has acquired great power to demand. The use of these garments that are characterized as feminine, become symbols of appropriation and empowerment that allow femininity to be celebrated without feeling shame or guilt for it. Norandi affirms that “some women use it as aesthetics because they like it and others because they want to send a message.”
The fashion communicator and designer who identifies herself on Instagram as Sereinne clarifies that “the coquette style emerges as a form of escapism from an increasingly monotonous world, but which, at the same time, is nostalgic for bygone eras.” It is about taking refuge in pastel colors to escape from minimalism, from grey, from the image of the girlboss as a successful business woman who plays in favor of the patriarchal ideology of productivity.
It is not the first time that an aesthetic movement that appeals to hyperfemininity has emerged. The coquette is a reinvention of the aesthetic of the social network Tumblr during the 2010s, in which the singer Lana del Rey was crowned queen. It was the expression of feminine grunge that was identified with the incarnation of “the sad girl”, the romanticization of self-harm and indie music, but which was usually related to a more sexualized version of women, close to the nymphet aesthetic of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lana del Rey then sang “I'm pretty when I cry” on her album Ultraviolet, the same lyrics that Olivia Rodrigo revived this last year on her second album Guts, followed by a nostalgic aesthetic that is very reminiscent of to that bygone era.
Ramos argues that it is a reference to fantasy, to the idealization of the feminine and that the movement itself is aware that there is a problematic element. What differentiates the coquette from the previous aesthetic is that “it is focused on being beautiful, not disturbing, not being heavy, being polite and being graceful. The flirtatious brings you back to that aspirational point that any aesthetic movement has,” he says. In this case, feminine perfection in all aspects: moral, physical, academic, work and in caring for relationships.
For a decade, the predominant current of what a woman should be was the girlboss, a term popularized by the American businesswoman Sophia Amoruso in her book with the same name about the creation of her clothing brand Nasty Gal. At the end of 2019, the term began to have a derogatory connotation. The trend called for focusing on being productive, serious, enterprising, assertive, and in fashion it translated into wearing neutral suits and colors. It was about women empowering themselves with characteristics that had traditionally been associated as masculine, in short, “putting on their pants,” Ramos describes.
As the French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier explained in an exhibition at the CaixaForum in Barcelona in 2022, fashion, like cinema, “reflects what happens in society.” The girlboss values that were attributed at the time reflected the leap of women to the forefront in companies. However, in 2022, according to the Eada business school report, the presence of women in general management roles was 9%, while in human resources positions, traditionally associated with the role of care and relationships personal, it was 33%. In this way, claiming feminine characteristics as a source of power for empowerment with an aesthetic like the coquette becomes a form of transgression.
Ramos relates that, in her professional career in education, she has received comments about her appearance for wearing corsets. He comments that, even in this area in which women represent 67% of the teaching staff, according to figures published by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MEFP), men do not suffer any scrutiny for their image, nor are they required to take care of it. and it is a fact that extends further into other professional environments. It is a “perverse assumption,” describes the philosopher, because women are required to take care of their image, but without being exaggerated or making it explicit that they do so. “If you are worrying about your appearance, you are not worrying about other things. Maybe you are in a meeting thinking about what you are going to wear tomorrow, or shopping online. They are a series of associations in the patriarchal imagination that continue to be reproduced,” says Ramos. Fashion communicator Sereinne adds that coquette has nothing to do with how men perceive you, or dressing as the patriarchy dictates, “but dressing for the female gaze,” she declares.
The term erotic capital, first used by sociologist Catherine Hakim following Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of social and economic capital, explains the social value that falls on a person as a result of their sexual attractiveness. In short, the power that your physique exerts and what can be achieved through appearance. “Men have never been interested in cultivating it, but even when we have been very oppressed, erotic capital has continued to function,” argues Ramos.
In fact, this is what happens to the main figure of the flirtatious aesthetic, Marie Antoinette, in Sofia Coppola's 2006 version. Also in the director's recent adaptation of the story of Priscilla Presley (2023) and in Bella Baxter , the protagonist of Poor Things (2024), we see young women who have been locked up, whose freedom has been stolen, and who have not been able to have experiences related to adolescence. These three women dress in voluminous clothing, bows and pastel colors, that is, they follow the flirtatious aesthetic. “When they begin to gain freedom and have a life of their own, they use clothes and their attractiveness as a form of power and transgression,” clarifies philosopher Ramos.
Sereinne adds that, however, it is still a minority, since "it is very difficult to be taken seriously when you dress in pink, to give you authority, value or to reach the same place as a cis man who dresses like a cis man”, but that it is also important to “break up and not dress in the uniform that society sets,” explains the fashion expert.
Art historian Elina Norandi shares that, when it comes to any type of aesthetic, the essential thing is that it be chosen “in complete freedom,” regardless of genre. “In such a right-wing, cis, hetero, monotonous and gray world, for a movement to come and tell you to put a bun on your head of the size you want, is to go against it. Because from that place, we are not staying still but, with all these bows, we are fighting and planting our ideals. And we are triumphing,” says Sereinne.
