Aestheticising, after all, is ultimately an exercise in real-world embodiment, a gorgeous organising of self. There’s a keener desire to embody the world of the novel, to turn fantasies into something tangible. The reification of literature into aesthetic object also speaks to today’s changing reading habits.
I’ve even found myself reading more this past year than I have in a long time thanks to the posts everyone else has been making,” says Deniz. “I’ve seen friends who never read picking up copies of these aestheticised novels. She is an aspirational coquette.Īccording to Forbes, the US print book market is up nine percent compared to 2020 – a statistic that has largely been attributed to TikTok. Unlike Reva, she is effortlessly chic, impossibly beautiful she is granted easy access to prestige institutions (she hardly made any effort to get into Columbia). Reva’s a try-hard – she wears “fake Louboutins”, carries a “knock-off Kate Spade bag,” while the narrator quite literally buys Victoria’s Secret underwear and “baby-doll nightgowns” in her sleep. Reva, the unnamed narrator’s best friend, is self-improvement-obsessed, and a foil to the protagonist’s wilful stasis. My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – both its cover and its content – seem to fit neatly into this pre-existing aesthetic. It also, like the Tumblr aesthetic, presents passivity and self-destruction as revolt, as a site of potential power rather than weakness. The coquette aesthetic is a dedication to the sensorium of luxurious, feminine solitude. The ‘coquette aesthetic’ that she is referring to is a continuation of the 2014 ‘Tumblr aesthetic’, wherein the macabre and feminine intersect – the brutal attenuated through the muted and pastelly and soft, like a Lana Del Rey song or a photo of a bruise in angelic lighting. “If you post a picture on Pinterest of this book with those items it is pretty much guaranteed to go viral within the coquette aesthetic niche,” says Romney, who posts “outfits, books & other aesthetic things” on her TikTok, which has almost 120,000 followers. Search “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” on Tumblr, Pinterest, TikTok and you’ll find a swathe of similar images – the novel surrounded by hyper-feminine, Regency-era objects most commonly pearls, perfume, lipstick. The clip featured a copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation alongside a tube of lipstick, a bottle of Chanel perfume and a baby pink Glossier keyring – a tableau that’s now been recreated thousands of times across the internet. That woman, porcelain-skinned, dressed in a suggestive negligee, gazing to the side in a blank and bored reverie, lured Eva in again when she spotted her at a local indie bookstore in 2021 on the cover of Moshfegh’s most famous work.Įva, who makes literature-related content as on TikTok (where she has 36,000 followers), posted one of her most popular TikToks earlier this March.
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