Private Ritual to Public Spectacle: Contemporary Perspectives on the Rise of Coquettes, Cosmetics, and the Blurring of Gender and Class Identities in François Boucher’s Toilette Scenes

Written by Lisa Garbuio, McGill University

Edited by Rebecca Bennett

Introduction

Nicknamed “Reinette” at an early age, Madame de Pompadour had expensive tastes: François Boucher’s portrait (Fig. 1) provides a glimpse into her toilette, a lavish display of coquetry bearing a boudoir full of cosmetics with which to adorn herself. Fears of identity and morality leeched onto the toilette during the so-called “century of sex,”[1] for many assumed it to be the place where the coquette prepared her allure to seduce men.[2] Yet the vanity, at least for King Louis XV’s mistress and advisor, was not restricted to the trivial; she used the space to conduct her daily affairs and entertain various diplomats, philosophers, and creatives, including the Abbé de Bernis, Diderot, and Voltaire.[3] Boucher’s portrait is a political tool as much as it is a representation of feminine charms: the small pendant image of the king on her wrist asserts her proximity to royalty, even if she is not a true member of the nobility. Moreover, her youth, beauty, and expensive garments highlight her wealth and status.

Figure 1. François Boucher, La Toilette, 1742, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 66.5 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

In the buildup of the Revolution, eighteenth-century Paris saw an upsurge in anxieties and frustrations about gender and class identity that coincided with a rise in consumer culture. Makeup became a hallmark of the elite in the hands of men and women both, but it gained a controversial status for women of the bourgeois and working classes. Although it remained a sign of wealth, Paris vilified the use of cosmetics for its deceptive nature, and the archetype of the coquette arose. Shaped by the rise of capitalism, the coquette played a pivotal role in the development of modernity: its history is linked to the emergence of a specular economy and the identity anxieties brought on by adapting to newly commercialized social dynamics.[4] The Rococo’s visual culture became enthralled by the previously private ritual of a woman in her toilette and transformed it into a heavily criticized spectacle. Gender and class anxieties manifest in eighteenth-century French Rococo art, specifically in François Boucher’s images of women at their vanities. These works portray confusion about gender, class, and artistic identity. Boucher’s La Toilette (1742), The Toilette of Venus (1751), and Pompadour at Her Toilette (1758) generated criticism for playing into the narrative of the duplicitous woman, blurring the lines between the feminine and masculine through Boucher’s seductive aesthetics. Through an analysis of its eighteenth-century genesis, this paper will shed light on the contemporary re-emergence of the coquette and Rococo aesthetics in art and media. Although films like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) have found their way into studies on the Neo-Rococo, research into the concurrent rebirth of the Rococo style and advent of the coquette trend—marked by bow-themed clothing and accessories, a predominantly pink palette, and an at times fetishized idolatry of girlhood—is scarce.

The Toilette as a Social and Political Space

Figure 2. Boucher, The Toilette of Venus, 1751, oil on canvas, 108.3 x 85.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Initially pejorative, Rococo gets its name from rocaille, a type of grotto and shellwork ornament that influenced its emergence. Like the coquettish toilette, the Rococo is undervalued in comparison to the Baroque and Neoclassicism, yet it was the first artistic style to challenge the universal value of the classical orders, a visual standard upheld since the Renaissance.[5] Characterized by its frivolous and feminine aesthetics, the Rococo provided the ideal market for the emergence of toilette scenes like those by François Boucher. Pompadour—a generous patron of Boucher and many of his contemporaries—led the way in popularizing the staged routine that transformed the dressing table into a marker of social standing. The introduction of the toilette as a public ritual alongside a shift toward consumerism led to the rise of the coquette and the subsequent demonization of women in the public eye. Initially an informal ceremony practiced by the ladies of the court, art historian Tamar Garb describes the ritual reenactment of the toilette for an audience as a routine that transformed a woman “from a mere female into the epitome of feminine desirability.”[6] Similarly, François Boucher’s La Toilette (Fig. 2) opens an intimate scene of a woman in her dressing room. He catches his protagonist as she ties her stocking with a pink ribbon. She is not ready to present herself to the public—half-dressed amongst a site in disarray—yet Boucher invites us into a ritual of the private sphere. The viewer becomes an intruder, and an intimate moment between a mistress and her maid transforms into a lavish spectacle, allowing the audience to indulge in a voyeuristic experience. The act of applying makeup at one’s vanity turns into the theatrical application of an already-imposed façade, amplifying the tension between the concealed and the exposed.[7] Thus, the ritual of cosmetically adorning the face—the layering of masks—serves as a reminder of what she obscures. In the wake of this fascination with the private sphere, oil painting functions as a medium to reveal the private interior to the public, parading the inner sanctum of female artistry for public criticism of feminine artificiality.[8] Artists like Boucher remove the routine from the ostensibly private sanctuary of the dressing room into the public eye, where the theme of the woman at her vanity quickly aligns itself with the practice of coquetry. In this way, the toilette begrudgingly inherits the coquette’s infamous reputation.[9] The scene in Figure 2 is at once refined and playful. Clutter engulfs the room: rich fabrics drape its surfaces, abandoned ribbons hang from shelves, a bellows and brush lie discarded by the fireplace, but the eye is drawn to the graceful subject. A luxurious dress of blue and ivory adorns her figure and exposes patches of soft pale flesh on her thigh and chest. Although her open pose alludes to sexual energy—her cat lays at her feet between her open legs, unraveling a ball of yarn—she appears elegant and either unaware of or unbothered by her audience. Thus, Boucher hints at the anxieties surrounding the connection between the morally loose coquette and the function of the toilette.

François Boucher and the Aesthetics of Coquetry

However, the vanity scene also allows the female subject agency. In these cases, who is the actual artist: the portrait’s painter or the woman who paints her face? And who holds the power? The artist has the brush, but his subject holds the ability to control how men will view her. Though her malleability poses a threat to traditional class and gender roles, it gives the woman power over her identity and how people see her.[10] It was, in part, his contribution to the agency of his female subjects that earned François Boucher’s art such intense condemnation. Criticism typically revolved around the artist’s colourism, ebullient painterly effects, and his tendency to produce made-up complexions. Diderot remarked that Boucher “does not paint a single nude woman without her bottom being as made up as her face,” drawing an explicit analogy between Boucher’s paintings and the art of the toilette.[11] Critiques often applied the term papillotage, a noun derived from the verb papilloter (to blink) in reviews of his work, referencing the effects of flickering and reverberating light Boucher was known for. It was also Diderot who nicknamed Boucher a “peintre d'éventail” (a painter of fans), associating him with female society and mondaine culture.[12] Such criticism linked Rococo painting with the feminine toilette and coquetry. French writer and historian Louis-Antoine Caraccioli voiced anxieties about the toilette’s popularity and its performative nature, fearing it blurred visual gender distinctions. He wrote that the dressing table, popular even amongst upper-class men, became “such a fanaticism […] that it almost caused one to confound the two sexes.”[13] But here arises a broader question: does the issue lie in the vanity setting or the activity it hosts?

In the seventeenth century, Jean de la Bruyère and other writers condemned makeup, viewing it as a tool of feminine deception.[14] As consumerism grew in the 1700s, women became covetous, gaining a predilection for the collection of material objects. Paris developed an association of sex and shopping, a concept perfectly articulated by the term lèche vitrine, or literally, licking the window. Dependent on their consumption of the commodities advertised to them, women were “simultaneously deified and enslaved” by this market, while they themselves continued to be commodified.[15] As fears of women wandering out into the public sphere and gaining self-sufficiency arose, so did a reemergence of domestic values, encouraging women to focus on nurturing their families at home. The painted woman in the public eye was ignominious because her adorned face transposed its eroticism into the public spheres in which she trespassed.[16] Cosmetics promote this duplicitous plurality of the visage by allowing the face the versatility of a mask, creating inconsistencies within the identity it proclaims.[17] The art of cosmetics called into question the signs and anchors people used to distinguish personal and collective identities.[18] Thomas Laqueur, in his book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1940) describes the eighteenth century’s switch from the one-sex model, which viewed male and female bodies as variations of a single sex, to the two-sex model, whose emphasis on anatomical and biological distinctions framed men and women as fundamentally opposite.[19] This made prevalent the idea that biological sex determined an individual's identity and role in society, prompting gendered social spheres and the de-sexualization of women. These beliefs worked together to render women’s position in society as qualitatively inferior.[20] Laqueur’s two-sex theory removes any potential for women’s agency because it backs them into a corner—the domestic sphere—creating an atmosphere of sexual polarization. The two-sex model depended largely on a change in the understanding of conception, as the de-sexualization of women hinged on the demotion of the female orgasm, which was no longer considered necessary for conception.[21] It was alongside the rise of this model that France conflated the originally ungendered term ‘coquet’ with femininity and molded it into a sexually charged insult rather than a neutral label. While the women of the nobility and royal court were partially protected by a cover of wealth, the bourgeois and lower classes carried the brunt of the degradation as their penchant for cosmetics and forceful entry into the public sphere destabilized visible identity markers.

By mid-century, makeup had become a potent weapon in the hands of the socially ambitious woman, generating societal concerns over the fluidity of identity as a tool of social mobility. Through their use of cosmetic arts, French women embraced artifice, undermining social identity and using makeup as a medium to challenge, rather than affirm, social realities.[22] Boucher’s portrait of Pompadour reinforces fears of feminine deception by depicting the king’s companion at the height of her beauty, although she was thirty-seven and suffering from an illness when she sat for him. By masking her visible ailments through the cover of time, Boucher inadvertently subjects Pompadour to further criticism: the public accuses her of social mobility through the guise of sex. She and other coquettish women threatened masculine self-sufficiency by altering themselves to manipulate powerful men.[23] Née Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Pompadour could not be presented to the court without a title. As a solution, Louis XV purchased the marquisate, naming her the Marquise de Pompadour, to allow her entry into his social sphere. As a non-aristocratic woman, Pompadour’s beauty was weaponized because it allowed her to penetrate the veil that separated the bourgeoisie from the nobility.

The Critique of the Toilette and the Coquette

Figure 3. Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, 1750, oil on canvas, 81.2 x 64.9 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts.

From the vilification of the boudoir emerged the image of the duplicitous woman, where makeup became confounded with loose sexual morals, and the coquette became the prostitute. The image of the erotic painted coquette no doubt accelerated the process of the woman becoming sexually passive because she was perceived as sexually aggressive.[24] Yet cosmetics were not inherently immoral—the ideal woman used makeup only to adorn her immanent beauty: when unregulated, the use of cosmetics could turn enhancement into disguise and conceal what was meant to be visible.[25] Here too, it was women from bourgeois and lower-class backgrounds who undertook the burden of public criticism—they suffered most from the conception of the modern sexual world.[26] In Boucher’s Toilette de Venus (Fig. 3), he aestheticizes the toilette routine by elevating it to a divine ritual, moving away from the quiet intimacy of wealthy women in their homes. Venus sits naked amongst a mess of gold-gilded furniture, strings of pearls, and luxurious fabrics. Three cherubs encircle her, one fixes her hair as she wraps a blue ribbon around the white bird in her arms. The rouge on her cheeks and pale complexion indicate that she has completed her routine and is ready for public view, but other than the paint on her face, there are no cosmetics in sight. The colours are soft and hazy, and the blue curtains behind her open to reveal a nature scene—trees, a blue sky, and a column. The glimpse of the natural world and her bare body contrasts with the artificiality of the toilette ritual. As the goddess slips into a different identity, the viewer is reminded that this is a fantasy. Yet, as a goddess of love, Venus represents the ideal woman. However, her role as patron of sex may also hint at the erotic tendencies of painted women. If a sex goddess delves into the cosmetics craze, then it is safe to assume that women who use makeup are driven by similar motives. The sexually active woman was abnormal, ambitious, and untrustworthy.

If Madame de Pompadour commissioned this piece, what does that say about her and her motivations? Did she wish to promote this lifestyle, edging toward the coquette, or normalize her aesthetics? And is Venus meant to be a metaphorical representation of Pompadour? If the king’s mistress intended to self-fashion as a goddess, she reveals yet another level of social mobility, one that distances her from her bourgeois background to an unreachable divine status. Boucher’s oil paints become an extension of her cosmetics, a tool to rise above the society of her past and secure a spot amongst the nobility.

Ultimately, Boucher’s toilette scenes expose societal anxieties about gender erosion, social mobility, and the sexually active coquette as symbols of fluid identities. Art historian Melissa Hyde expresses how art criticism intersected with a critique of public women that also centered around the use of cosmetics; together, these overlapping narratives not only contributed to the dismissal of the Rococo style as a feminine counterpart to the masculine Neoclassicism but also to the broader enlightenment critique that devalued femininity within elite culture.[27] Although post-revolutionary France abandoned the Rococo in search of new aesthetics to define their liberation, Europe continued to refine the art of the toilette and the persona of the coquette, elements that would become pivotal in shaping a feminist historical narrative.  

The Rococo Revival and Feminine Aesthetics

In the past decade, there has been a clear reemergence of the Rococo and the coquette, but these trends are seemingly devoid of the misogynistic connotations that developed alongside their origins. Instead, the art and media accompanying the advent of the Neo-Rococo take on a new meaning, pushing back against the anti-feminist sentiments of their predecessors. Once again, a critical link forms between this style of aesthetics and consumerism, wherein the Neo-Rococo relies heavily on consumption, creating a predatory market wrung out by advertising of hyper-feminine clothing and accessories. This aesthetic has also found its way into the contemporary art world, such as in works by Flora Yukhnovich, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca DiMatteo. These female artists are at the forefront of the movement, producing works that hint at the visual language of the Rococo world and focusing on femininity as the central theme in their revival of eighteenth-century aesthetics.

Figure 4. Flora Yukhnovich, Le rire de la Méduse, 2017, oil on linen, 180 x 250 cm. Accessed at https://www.florayukhnovich.com/. 

Flora Yukhnovich, based in London, has had solo exhibitions at Victoria Miro Gallery, Leeds Arts University, Parafin, and the Brocket Gallery. In 2024, the Wallace Collection in London featured Le rire de la Méduse (2017) (Fig. 4) among a collection of other works exploring femininity in the Rococo in an exhibition titled “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo.” She has rapidly become one of the most celebrated artists on the scene—one of her biggest auction surprises was the sale of a graduate-show piece, which went at Christie’s for £1.9 million in 2021, but her auction prices have now reached $3 million.[28] She told the Financial Times that the playfulness of her art allows her to return to the things she loved as a child: fantasy, Barbie, Disney, and fairytales, a characteristic that makes her work so alluring.[29] The colours of Yukhnovich’s Le rire de la Méduse reveal visual similarities to the whimsical pinks, greens, and blues that dominated the Rococo palette. The composition is lush and vibrant, made up of fluid brushstrokes reminiscent of Boucher’s pastoral elements. Yukhnovich’s soft colours blur into dreamy hues, suggestive of an idyllic natural landscape that resembles the setting of the Toilette de Venus. In interviews with Artnet and the Courtauld, Yukhnovich has mentioned that she draws heavily from the Rococo, and from artists like François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau.[30] Like these artists, she often finds inspiration in the beauty of Greco-Roman mythological worlds and the figure of Venus in particular. Yukhnovich’s romantic abstraction hints at dynamism: the quiet flow of nature shuffles through entangled figures. Through her reimagining of these iconic aesthetics, she is intent on unpacking the relationship between the Rococo and notions of femininity.[31]

In an interview with the Courtauld, she describes a sense of familiarity she finds in the style and says, “there are lots of things that I, as a woman and also as a girl growing up, interacted with which seem to have a Rococo sensibility to them.”[32] Through abstraction, her work departs from the Rococo’s focus on narrative detail but still manages to capture the style’s vibrancy without any direct figural precision. Her blurring of figures stems from an attempt to avoid objectifying the nude female figure, which appears frequently in the Rococo’s idealized notion of female beauty.[33] Yukhnovich interrupts the voyeuristic experience offered by Boucher’s Venus, breaking the male gaze that looms over female subjects of the past. Instead, her abstract forms shift the focus towards the sensual and empathetic experience of the figures, rather than simply observing their physical form. The loose, fluid brushstrokes introduce a sense of subjectivity—her figures are elusive and dynamic, but never fully tangible—encouraging viewers to find their own interpretation of her art. The title of the piece comes from twentieth-century writer and feminist critic Hélène Cixous’s essay by the same name, in which Cixous asserts that women must write for themselves to avoid being confined within their own bodies by a language that denies them self-expression.[34] Until Yukhnovich read Cixous’ essay, she felt she had always been combatting the male-dominated sphere of art history. But the essay’s approach to the feminine showed her that her art could be a feminist act in itself. She says, “in this way, my work and the pictorial language that I developed could contribute to the populating of painterly discourse with a multitude of differing female voices.”[35] In doing so, she elevates the significance of female voices while reclaiming a movement undervalued for its association with femininity.

Flora Yukhnovich’s art draws a line of continuity between the visual themes and implicit narratives of Boucher’s Rococo and the contemporary theories of art and feminism. Rather than condemning it for its darker history, she captures the whimsy and luminosity so admired within the movement and transforms the rest into pieces that resonate with modern audiences. She subverts the idea of the Rococo as superficial, asserting that the sensory aspect of art and the sense of escapism it invites is not insignificant: “You go somewhere, you come back and you’re changed by it — it’s not like turning off your brain, it’s like a parallel space,” she tells the Financial Times.[36] For eighteenth-century Paris, a setting ripe with political tension and struggling with a crisis of identity, escapism was perhaps the greatest comfort visual art could provide. But does the re-emergence of these aesthetics imply a desire to withdraw from reality?

Beyond the contemporary art world, Rococo themes of femininity, coquetry, and voyeurism have frequently worked their way into film and media since the 2000s. Sofia Coppola, in particular, has repeatedly carved a space for Rococo themes in her films, which are often characterized by their delicate feminine aesthetics. Take Marie Antoinette (2006), a film based on Antonia Fraser’s book Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001), in which Coppola centers her protagonist’s struggle between experiencing girlhood and quickly adapting to her new role as Queen of France. The opulence of eighteenth-century Rococo aesthetics clashes with a Y2K indie rock soundtrack and postfeminist perspective, creating an atmosphere of empathy for a woman whose girlhood was ripped from her. The spectacle of the private interior is a recurring theme in Coppola’s films through their constant tension between public and private, where the Coppola heroine experiences deeply intimate moments under relentless public scrutiny that leaves her unable to exercise meaningful political agency.[37] Marie Antoinette’s character is constantly on display—from eating to getting dressed, everything must be performed before a crowd of spectators. Coppola erases the boundaries between public and private, a concept further emphasized by the presence of the film’s audience, who watch as Marie’s personal life unravels. She is so “painfully visible” that her sense of self, being shaped by public discourse, seems to erode until she meets her demise at the hands of her critics. In other words, the audience watches the young queen vanish over the course of the film.[38]

In the final shots of Marie Antoinette, Coppola captures Versailles in shambles after the rioters break into the grounds (Fig. 5). Although the home of the Coppola protagonist is typically described as a “gilded cage,” a spatiotemporal articulation of their elite status and the site of their oppression, Fiona Handyside instead chooses to label it as the “exploded home” because it rejects the familiar binary trope of the housewife and suggests the forceful impact of feminist consciousness on these girls’ lives.[39] The exploded home allows her to blur the borders between spheres, as girlhood becomes both a private knowledge and public concern.[40] After the royals flee Versailles, Marie’s home is destroyed. Rioters leave her empty bedroom in shambles: its ornate door has been ripped from its hinges, the crystal chandelier has fallen from the ceiling and now lies in pieces, and fragments of a vase have been discarded on the ground next to it. Handyside explains that the smashing of glass windows and mirrors in the final shots of Marie Antoinette visually demonstrates the concept of the “shattered self.”[41] In Boucher’s toilette scenes, the viewer takes on the role of the mirror as the female subject looks ahead while she applies cosmetics or rolls up her stockings. Similarly, the widespread presence of glass and mirrors in the scenes of Coppola’s film, which embodied Marie’s constant spectacle, are shattered, marking the definitive end of Versailles as her home.[42] Looking at this scene through the lens of the eighteenth century’s heightened obsession with domestic values, Marie Antoinette’s failure to adhere to the demands of domestic life may have fueled the public’s violent decimation of her home.

Figure 5. Still from Marie Antoinette (2006), dir. Sofia Coppola. Accessed at: IMDB.com

Coppola’s “beautiful and tragic world”[43] may appeal to her postfeminist audience, yet her films circulate within the same consumer-capitalist logic. ‘Postfeminism’ or ‘third-wave feminism’ started in the 1980s, initially constructed as a more inclusive and welcoming space, particularly with regard to racial, ethnic, and class diversity, than earlier generations of feminism. However, over time, it has developed into a form of white or liberal feminism wherein the liberation of the white Western woman is prioritized without consideration of intersectionality. Just as Marie’s postfeminist utopia offers her a brief escape from the politicized forces shaping her uncontrollable public image, her actions reflect the dynamic of affluent white women navigating neoliberal narratives that glorify them while participating in a postfeminist consumer culture that equates empowerment with shopping.[44] Coppola’s world simultaneously offers an immersion in and an ironic detachment from the image-driven, capitalist system that shapes the lives of her characters, who lack personal agency and struggle to engage with society in meaningful ways.[45] Coppola’s films reflect the challenges and contradictions of postfeminism, as they celebrate femininity and provide a platform for exploring feminine subjectivity but ignore the limitations of this privileged perspective; the girls may venture out, but they remain confined to the safety of their “cosseted white worlds.”[46]

Coppola’s work uses aestheticized visuals of material consumption and melancholic moods of girlhood to critique the excess of capitalism and the commodification of young women within a commercial culture, yet she also profits from the creation of these fantasy spaces that are then sold to these same women.[47] In Marie Antoinette, Coppola largely sidelines the broader political context of economic mismanagement and wealth inequality that fueled the French Revolution and led to the royals’ downfall, concentrating instead on her protagonist’s personal struggles and the emotional toll of the social pressures she faces at Versailles. When the Revolution finally comes into the plot, it appears without warning. Nonetheless, the impossibility of leading a fulfilling life under neoliberal capitalism is Coppola’s main selling point: the dreamy, wistful yearning that pervades her films is crafted and marketed as the romanticized mood of ennui.[48] Like Boucher’s portraits of wealthy women at their vanities, Marie Antoinette is filled to the brim with material excess and frivolity. The protagonist succumbs to the allure of consumption, a concept best visualized in the “I Want Candy” scene, where she surrounds herself with expensive clothing, imported goods, and candy in the background of Bow Wow Wow’s song of the same title.[49] Beyond her fascination with the collection of material goods, as the film unfolds, Marie “co-creates herself as a material object.”[50] Coppola creates a parallel between her royal protagonist and the bourgeois women of the Rococo world: Marie views consumerism as the path to her personal freedom, while it is her excessive spending that makes her a target of public disdain. Similarly, women in eighteenth-century Paris faced criticism for shopping because although consumerism granted them access to the public sphere—encouraged by products marketed specifically to them—they were simultaneously demonized for engaging in this activity.

Portrayals of girlhood garner criticism for their potential fetishization of young girls and contribution to a market that views them as a commodity. However, according to Handyside, Coppola’s representations of girlhood offer a way to reclaim the figure of the girl and feminine pursuits, demonstrating an unwillingness to reject femininity; the neo-feminist paradigm encourages women to retain femininity as it evolves with rapid socio-economic changes.[51] By placing her protagonist in a position where her identity is “under erasure,” Coppola creates a distinct postfeminist and Neo-Rococo aesthetic that treats femininity with dignity and presents intimate explorations of complex female characters, rather than adopting a counter-cinema feminist aesthetic intent on “destroying pleasure.”[52] With the release of her most recent film, Priscilla (2023), Coppola’s Neo-Rococo aesthetics have surged in popularity over the past couple of years, becoming inextricably entangled with the viral coquette trend and a year marked by a renaissance of girl culture.

The Coquette Trend and Contemporary Feminism

2023 was termed “the year of the girl,” reinforced by the release Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023), the return of coquetry, and microtrends like “girl dinner,” “hot girl walks,” and “girl math.”[53] The rise of the coquette trend in the past year or so reflects a broader cultural fascination with nostalgia, femininity, and the reclaiming of traditionally girly aesthetics. Embedded within this trend—and also in Coppola’s films and Yukhnovich’s art are themes of a loss of self, a longing for a return to girlhood, and embracing femininity, but does it contribute to a growing concern over the sexualization and idealization of girls? Young women are targeted by the consumer market because they are commodifiable and easier to sexualize in the public eye. Following the rise of ‘girl power’ in the 1990s—a movement that repackaged a version of liberal feminism as appealing and empowering for young women—the girl is “hypervisible.”[54] Sociologist Jess Butler explains that the consumer-based logic of postfeminism confounds feminism with femininity, and consumption with activism, fabricating a narrative where women seemingly opt to present themselves as sexual objects as a reflection of their empowered choices.[55]

Like Sofia Coppola’s white feminist fantasies, the coquette and accompanying trends seem to carry the same postfeminist pitfall, catering predominantly to white girls and women. Postfeminism, here, seems to actively exclude women of colour and “reproduce racial inequality by reinstituting (Western) whiteness as a dominant cultural norm,”[56] so to what degree can it really be labeled a ‘feminist’ trend? The glorification of the feminine in contemporary media seems to hinge on McRobbie’s theory of disarticulation: a dynamic that disrupts the intergenerational and cross-cultural solidarities among women by portraying non-Western women as sexually oppressed as a false contrast to sexually liberated Western women, alluding to a belief in Western superiority.[57] Thus, the exclusive nature of these Neo-Rococo trends limits the scope of their power in reverting misogynistic attitudes toward the feminine.

On social media, phrases such as “girl dinner,” “girl math,” and “I’m just a girl” have worked their way into a virtual vocabulary, but does this seemingly harmless vernacular play into the infantilization of femininity or ‘bimbo feminism’? Bimbo feminism and the coquette aesthetic have the potential to empower women to embrace the hyper-feminine stereotypes imposed on them, but they can also have the opposite effect by catering to male desires. A woman’s sex appeal diminishes with age, and with it, her societal value. Men gain power as they age, becoming sexier, wiser, and more experienced. In her article for Vogue, Liana Satenstein asserts, “Seeing the world through powder pink tinted glasses might be a raunchy recipe for male gaze disaster, but only if we want it to be.”[58] The “Girl-aissance”[59] of 2023, as Mashable writers Chase DiBenedetto and Elena Cavender charmingly termed it, went so far as to feminize masculine—often misogynistic—characters in media, such as Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession, who was assigned the persona of “babygirl” through online discourse. The endeavor to ‘girl-ify’ everything, including the masculine, might arise from an attempt to counter the looming presence of the male gaze over the feminist agenda at the root of Neo-Rococo aesthetics.

Conclusion

Regardless of its failures, this new-age idea of coquetry embedded in the Rococo revival draws a stark parallel between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. The backdrops of François Boucher’s frivolous toilette scenes saw a rise of feminine aesthetics and the corrupt coquette amidst a period of political and gender anxiety alongside heavy public scrutiny of women, where fears about the uncertainty of a post-revolutionary French identity were projected back onto them. Compare this to the contemporary mise-en-scène, where one opens TikTok and is faced with hundreds of videos catering to girlhood, hyper-femininity, and putting pink bows on rats while in the background of all this are socially regressive events, like America’s overturning of Roe versus Wade in 2022, the ongoing Palestinian genocide, and Trump’s re-election in 2024—an undisputable demonstration of rampant social anxieties. Within a context where women’s identity is ground zero for an attack brought on by mass societal unrest, an aggressive vindication of femininity appears a reasonable defense.  

 Endnotes

[1] Karen Harvey, “The Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 899.

[2] Elise Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s ‘Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette,’” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 17, no.1 (1987): 48.

[3] Ibid, 49.

[4] Shelley King and Yaël Schlick, Refiguring the Coquette: Essays on Culture and Coquetry, (Lewisburg, Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses, 2008), 13.

[5] Irénée Scalbert, “The Rococo Revolution,” AA Files, no. 39 (1999): 12.

[6] Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France, London: Thames and Hudson (1998): 115.

[7] Lynn Festa, “Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, ed. By Catherine Ingrassia and Jeffrey S. Ravel, Vol. 34, (Maryland: JHU Press, 2005): 38.

[8] Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 115.

[9] Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s ‘Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette,’” 48.

[10] Festa, “Cosmetic Differences,” 33.

[11] "I1 n'a plus que deux couleurs, du blanc et du rouge; et il ne peint pas une femme nue qu'elle n'ait

les fesses aussi fardées que le visage": “Sur le Voyage d'ltalie publié par M. Cochin," Oeuvres complètes, 13:40, quoted in Melissa Hyde, “Confounding Conventions: Gender Ambiguity and François Boucher’s Painted Pastorals,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 27.

[12] Ibid, 26-7.

[13] Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, La critique des dames et des messieurs a leur toilette, (n.p., 1770), 12, quoted in Melissa Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (2000): 459.

[14] Ibid, 458.

[15] Garb, Bodies of Modernity, 88.

[16] Festa, “Cosmetic Differences,”37.

[17] Ibid, 35.

[18] Ibid, 27.

[19] Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

[20] Harvey, “The Century of Sex?” 907.

[21] Ibid, 903.

[22] Hyde, “The Makeup of the Marquise,” 460.

[23] Festa, “Cosmetic Differences,” 36.

[24] Harvey, “The Century of Sex?” 906.

[25] Festa, “Cosmetic Differences,” 33.

[26] Harvey, “The Century of Sex?” 906.

[27] Hyde, “The Makeup of the Marquise,” 455.

[28] Jan Dalley, “Flora Yukhnovich is reimagining the Rococo at the Wallace Collection,” Financial Times, June 14, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/e4c54521-9167-45cb-be23-146c5303f56d.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Kate Brown, “Flora Yukhnovich Has Rapidly Become One of the Hottest Artists in the World. We Toured Her Studio Ahead of Her New Solo Show,” Artnet, February 27, 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/flora-yukhnovich-2077868; “Interview: Through the Language of the Rococo: In Conversation with Flora Yukhnovich,” The Courtauld, 2020, accessed November 4, 2024, https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/immeditations-postgraduate-journal/immediations-online/2020-2/interview-through-the-language-of-the-rococo-in-conversation-with-flora-yukhnovich/#top.

[31] Dalley, “Flora Yukhnovich is reimagining the Rococo at the Wallace Collection.”

[32] “Interview: Through the Language of the Rococo: In Conversation with Flora Yukhnovich,” The Courtauld.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la méduse,” L'Arc 65 (1975).

[35] “Interview: Through the Language of the Rococo: In Conversation with Flora Yukhnovich,” The Courtauld.

[36] Dalley, “Flora Yukhnovich is reimagining the Rococo at the Wallace Collection.”

[37] Fiona Handyside, Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood, (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2017): 34-5.

[38] Kendra Marston, “Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic: Vanishing Femininity in an Object-Oriented World,” in Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood, 162–90, (Edinburgh University Press, 2018): 164.

[39] Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 101-2.

[40] Ibid, 114.

[41] Ibid, 117.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Christina Lane and Nicole Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sophia Coppola: Spectacle and Self-Consciousness in Marie Antoinette (2006),” in Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer (eds), Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, 189-203 (New York: Routledge, 2011): 200.

[44] Marston, “Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic,” 170.

[45] Ibid, 162.

[46] Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 35.

[47] Marston, “Sofia Coppola’s Melancholic Aesthetic,” 183.

[48] Ibid, 162.

[49] “I Want Candy,” Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola (United States: Colombia Pictures, 2006).

[50] Lane and Richter, “The Feminist Poetics of Sophia Coppola,” 189.

[51] Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 4.

[52] Ibid, 5.

[53] Nora Princiotti, “2023 Was the Year of the Girl,” The Ringer, December 28, 2023, https://www.theringer.com/2023/12/28/pop-culture/taylor-swift-eras-tour-barbie-2023-year-of-the-girlhood-girl-dinner; Chase DiBenedetto and Elena Cavender, “2023's girl dinner, girl math, girlhood: What did we gain from a year of girl trends?” Mashable, December 10, 2023, https://mashable.com/article/was-2023-the-year-of-the-girl-tiktok-girlaissance.

[54] Handyside, Sofia Coppola, 4.

[55] Jess Butler, “For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion,” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1 (2013): 46.

[56] Butler, “For White Girls Only?” 47.

[57] Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, (London: Sage Publications, 2009), 27.

[58] Liana Satenstein, “The Coquette Aesthetic, Explained,” Vogue, April 25, 2024, https://www.vogue.com/article/coquette-aesthetic-explainer.

[59] DiBenedetto and Cavender, “2023's girl dinner, girl math, girlhood: What did we gain from a year of girl trends?”