“Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.” — Karl Lagerfeld
Every thinkpiece I read concerning the ongoing 2023 coquettecore bow trend observes the same paradox: reality in America right now means living in a world where Barbie/Taylor Swift/Beyoncé and bows suggest there is power in being “girl” and yet we live in a post-Roe world. If one had to speculate on the direction women’s fashion would trend in response to the removal of women’s reproductive autonomy, I think most would bet on a return to the shoulder pads and pinstripes of 80’s power fashion. (I, personally, retreated to my emotional support Warren Has A Plan For That official merch tank the day RGB died.) But, alas: internal data from Pinterest shows searches for “bow aesthetic” are up by 55% from last year, while the phrase “bow outfit” is up 190%.
Last month, Bazaar published “Bows are Back in a Big Way — But What Does That Mean For Women?” in which Tara Gonzales suggests,
The bow can be seen as a symbol of us trying to cling to our youth as it has been marketed to us, but perhaps it’s also representative of how collectively we are really just stunted and stagnant. We don’t want to grow up, and we haven’t grown up.
Likewise, Isabel Cristo at The Cut published “Woman in Retrograde” last December in which she equates bows not just with girlhood, but a pre-feminist state of self-infantilization.
The thing about girlhood is that it’s a before time: before puberty, before life, and, importantly, before feminism. Although in reality, girlhood can be (often disturbingly) pierced by the politics of the adult world, it’s a period that precedes those choices that feminism has always concerned itself with — choices about marriage, child raising, career building, homemaking, sex, sexuality, and caretaking. It’s also a time that’s free from the consequences of those choices. In girlhood, we’re not yet even ourselves … Maybe, in 2024, we might be able to find some joy and lightness in growing up as well. Maybe we don’t need to put a bow on everything.
Both these pieces interpret a reality in which women collectively reject their own adult agency as a response to the structural degradation of their fundamental rights. I guess I think that’s a pretty demeaning reading.
While I also strongly connect the vestimentary language of coquettecore with our current political and cultural moment, I don’t think the connection is paradoxical at all. Actually, I read this trend as a reparative attempt to address and take ownership over the first moments in a woman’s life when she began to see their herself objectified, her selfhood eroded. Cristo’s piece in The Cut glosses over this violence with the hotlinked word “disturbingly,” which when clicked opens bizarrely and unhelpfully to the ACLU’s homepage. My memory of clicking this link the day this article was originally published is that it led to a page of stats on violence against women in America. And that’s the real point — the idea of girlhood as a safe haven, a protected space free from violence is a myth.
Of all the think pieces I read (The New York Times, Elle, Refinery29, and many in Vogue) none mention the Lolita of it all.* As you probably know, Lolita is the story of a twelve-year-old girl whose pedophilic stepfather, Humbert Humbert, takes her on a cross country road trip after her mother dies, ultimately enrolling her in a private school. Humbert describes the first time he rapes Lolita bluntly,
This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning.
Nabokov’s novel is many things — a masterpiece, a cultural flashpoint, and a fashion trend. Think about that: there is an aesthetic named for a girl who was raped by her stepfather.
If, as Lagerfeld states, “fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality,” then the reality being interpreted by the language of the Lolita aesthetic is a dark one indeed. In a recent episode of Code Switch, Addie Mahmassani suggests the recent obsession with girlhood (especially as regards Taylor Swift) is occasioned in part because we are now old enough to be nostalgic. Indeed, this is the big gesture of the Eras tour—we watch Swift grow from princess tulle purple explosion in Debut to the adult woman of Evermore. More importantly: we remember ourselves and where we were the first time we heard “Our Song” eighteen years ago. Eighteen years — that’s a legal adult of a career.
If we are old enough to feel nostalgic for girlhood, I think we’re also old enough to mourn how little girlhood we actually got. Sorry to go back to the Swift of it all yet again, but, I was struck by a line from “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” a bonus track of the 3 AM edition of Midnights.
Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.
We could read this line in a lot of ways — a rebuke to one of Swift’s older ex-boyfriends or simply as a condemnation of the media’s insistence on sexualizing female pop stars. It doesn’t really matter how specifically we interpret this line: the point is that Swift (whose popularity is due in large part to her uncanny ability to stands in as proxy for the experiences of a huge number of American women) is reflecting on the ways in which her innocence never existed.
So, no, I don’t think women wearing bows is a marker of a desire to return to some trad wife pre-feminist state. Rather, I think it’s more like self-administered reparenting, a psychotherapy in which disturbances in childhood are addressed and a sense of personal agency and control is reassigned from parent to self. Yes, we live in a post-Roe world now and a convicted rapist is quite likely to be president once again, and yet there is control in reclaiming and repairing the original wound that is ruptured again and again by these realities.
In writing this week’s newsletter, I’ve felt unusually uncertain as to whether this observation is worth publishing. Last night, I reread Melissa Febos essay “In Praise of Navel Gazing” in preparation to teach it to today and I came across this this passage:
Sometimes, while writing this book, a question intruded: who cares? I snapped out out of the reverie of my work, struck by the fear that I was wasting my time, indulging subjects that had already been written about. While the question of who cares is an important question for every writer to ask themselves, embedded in my contemplation were more than thirty years of of conditioning to believe the that the subject of girlhood was not worth a few hours of a reader’s time. It was a very meta experience, an example of the efficiency of social conditioning. After a lifetime of my rejecting it, it still inhibited my writing about that very rejection. Don’t look over here! it shouts. No one wants to read about that.
But you know what? Tons of people want to read about the comprehensive mindfuck of adolescent girlhood under patriarchy.
And, of course, fashion is a major factor in the mindfuck febos writes of. In a conversation with Roland Barthes, Jean Duvignaud observes,
…fashion has been a way for women of displaying their existence in a society dominated by masculine values.
I think this to some extent explains the desire to put bows not just on the body, but on everything from swiss cheese to fast food with the caption “This is me. If you even care.” It is a proliferation of selfhood that extends beyond the body, a statement on the profound power of reclaiming not just the narrative but potentially even truer: the aesthetic, the language that interprets reality.
My camp rec this week is: Read Lolita! Original reviews of this book all note what a funny, funny read it is. And it is funny. And it’s unhinged. And the language is stylish and extra as hell. And — I just know if it were published today some BookTok-er would say it is, yes: Camp.
*Nylon did publish a piece titled COQUETTE IS THE NEW ROMANTIC AESTHETIC THAT’S ALL OVER TIKTOK two years ago. However, this piece mentions bows only once!