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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