Coquette Inclination

a meditation on knockoff tabis, family, and coming back to tradition

This morning, I sent a text that reads like the first line of a short story that would find its destiny on Twitter, “discourse-d” to death into conversations about white womanhood, cool girl lit, and gen Z apathy.

“Im the only girl in this rural WV catholic church wearing knockoff Tabis”

I’m staying with my cousin Matthew and his family in West Virginia, visiting for the first time (both the family and the state). Before church this morning, I lifted up the leg of my slouchy Reformation jeans and asked my cousin (40), “do you want to see another thing the kids are wearing these days that will confound you?” Yesterday, he had commented on the “return” of the wide-legged pants, baffled in the way that those of his age are at the circular nature of fashion.

He and his wife peered over their coffee mugs to see the shoes, both resigning to some form of “hm.” They appreciated the wide toe box and the tasteful bow, but didn’t have much to say about the general aesthetic of the shoes. Matthew said they looked like goat hooves, which I took great delight in, being a Capricorn. I recalled some vague, Biblical story about goats and their connection to the devil, but didn’t mention this out loud. Then we all piled into the Subaru and went to church.

Like any good girl online who wants to keep up with the cultural forays, I find myself to be an accidental yet somewhat dedicated observer of the “coquette” aesthetic movement. I like the Sandy Liang stuff. I wear bows sometimes. One time I saw Lana del Rey at a diner in Hollywood and sat silently with tears streaming down my face, overcome with emotion and unwilling to approach her. Whether or not the movement is “over” or “cringe” or “out” at this juncture is something that I am unable to determine — I’ll leave that to the TikTok trend forecasters — but it’s clear that this cultural fascination, and its intersection with traditional lifestyles and hot-girl Catholicism, has been influential to The Girlies in the fashion realm and otherwise.

In the room at Matthew’s house, I sleep underneath a cross that is nailed to the wall. The house used to function as a lodging space for clergy, and it’s located just steps from a brick church. The church is mostly inactive, but every once in a while they’ll have a service. As stewards of this specific church, and of God in general I suppose, my cousin and his family do some small repairs and power the heating in the winter, even when no one is there. The family moved in a few years ago, to this place far out in the boonies, and live here now with their two children (and one on the way). My cousin works outside the home and his wife does not. He is very quick to recognize the work she does to raise their kids and upkeep their home as real and valuable. They go to church every Sunday, and last night I laughed aloud hearing their 2-year-old repeating the Lord’s Prayer. Have you ever heard a toddler try to pronounce the word “trespassed”?

Forgive the crudeness of this term, which in no way encapsulates the scope and beauty of the life their family has built for themselves, but it’s all very “trad.”

Most of what I know about the “traditional lifestyle” I’ve gathered through the vertical screen of my iPhone. If it’s not ballerinafarm making homemade sourdough with her seven blonde children speaking tastefully in the background, it’s new-wave right wingers who gave up the gun of liberal education and now find their joy in vacuuming. And if it’s not any of those people, it’s people critiquing the lifestyle, discussing the harm of reactionary conservatism and the retrograde of society that threatens the state of human rights. My brain has been poisoned. I came to connect with family I haven’t seen in a decade, and now I’m stuck applying Twitter debate logic to their traditions and looking at the Jesus figurine on the porch whispering to myself, “Ethel Cain vibes.”

you have to admit, Ethel Cain vibes

My mom got married a few months ago, and it was the first time I saw most of the family on her side since I was twelve or so. I arrived in North Carolina that October in classic Los Angeles fashion — complaining about my jet-lag and in a phase of concurrent self-hatred and abject narcissism. The whole niche-internet-micro-celebrity thing was really starting to get to me, and I was determined to cast aside my own paranoid self-aggrandizement for the weekend and Focus On Family.

The challenging bit was the fact that I held a great deal of resentment against The Family. The main reason for my disconnection from that side was the absolute grenade that my mother’s mental illness threw amongst us all. To put it politely, I come from a long line of people who are not inclined to “believe in” mental unwellness, which may be why my mother’s predicament was “a shock” to them all, despite the alarming trend of alcoholism and death by suicide and schizophrenia present in our recent family history, which no one likes to talk about unless tastelessly drunk.

Nevertheless, I tried my absolute best to connect. When I took my seat at breakfast on the morning of the wedding, my aunt put her hand on my shoulder and, as a way of greeting me, said “you know, you really should get back to school. Finish your bachelor’s and get a master’s or something. All the people that run the government have those degrees.” I felt like a dog that got caught with dinner scraps in its mouth and replied, blankly, “but I don’t want to run the government.” She laughed, and I chose to believe it was because she thought I was being funny and not stupid.

I cried when I walked my mom down the aisle and got choked up during my speech, rushing to finish it sooner than planned. I saw a family friend and chatted politely with her, pretending that we didn't have unfinished business and as though my resentment was not threatening to burn a hole in my throat. My mother begged me to sing, and two tequila sodas later I did, trying desperately to lead the wedding band through whatever version of “Valerie” I could conjure in my state.

“That’s just how I remembered you,” my cousin Pete said, “always singing something.” We were leaned up against a rustic barrel (classic North Carolina outdoor wedding decor), smoking cigarettes and catching up. The details of each other’s lives were mysteries, but my Southern drawl clawed its way out from layers of habituated valley-girl vocal fry to recall together old memories and the time before everything became undeterminable. We made plans to take a trip together next summer. Just before I left that night I heard him laugh from across the room, and for a moment I forgot that we were adults, the sound itself seeming to come from a child in the past.

My boyfriend and I had gotten each other all riled up and progressively drunk throughout the night, and so it was with some surprise to him that I fell into a bout of hysterical crying the moment we closed our hotel room door. He held me, and I blubbered “I’m sorry that you thought we were going to have sex tonight and then I started crying about my mom.” This is, unfortunately, not unusual behavior for me.

I cried because of the tequila. I cried because my mom was supposed to die years ago, multiple times, and tonight she smiled and danced among a room of people who want her to live. I cried because I considered myself to be a girl without a family, when really my family had been waiting to ask me where I’d been all this time.

When I went back to Los Angeles, I texted Matthew to see about coming to visit. Matthew had always been one of those people who took kids seriously — always asking me what I thought about current events and politely debating my hot-headed teenage self over our various religious and political disagreements. He had kids now, whom I’d never met, and I no longer wanted to cut myself off from their lives before they had even really started.

So, I find myself in a Catholic church in rural West Virginia, being the only girl in knockoff Tabis. After a few Catholic services, I have to say that I understand the appeal.

We started this particular service by announcing that we were all sinners and asking the community to forgive us. I looked down in humility with the rest of the attendants, and at the quaint little bows on my shoes. Here I was, making myself a girl, coming to the place where I am supposed to get better, to be good.

The place where I am supposed to be good has a very particular run of service. Matthew was telling me about how young people joining Catholicism have a fervor for what’s called a “high church” service — one that is strict and ritualistic, long and involved, requiring more dedication than the Evangelical inclination towards jangly guitar hymns and showing up in blue jeans. The young people crave tradition and structure, apparently. Yesterday, Matthew asked me what my biggest struggle in life was right now. At the risk of sounding the tiny violins, I told him, I felt aimless and struggled with purpose. “Well, I won’t preach to you,” he said. But then, I really wish he would have.

Everyone tells you that your twenties are supposed to be for “finding yourself.” The classic advice for people of this age group is to center your own experience, focus on developing your own desires, your own tastes. In combination with the internet, this has lead to a deathly identity soup. Figure out if you are a coquette trad-cath Red Scare femcel, a BookTok dark academia earnest girl, an indie-sleaze Born In The Wrong Generation cyber-punk nightmare. The idea of “finding yourself” has, frankly, caused me more anguish than good. I’m good at thinking about myself. So good, in fact, that I can do it so much it makes me sick. Finding my place has always been the real challenge, and the real work — placing myself as a part of the whole, honoring the humility of my being, surrendering to something bigger. Sounds a bit Catholic, now that I’m putting it all together.

While I don’t think that young people need to “find God” necessarily, I think it’s time we admit that we’re all looking for it. The unstoppable will to move towards meaning-making and ritual and perhaps some form of tradition seems natural to me at this stage of the world. There seems to be nothing left to hold onto, and so we grasp at ourselves, attempting to make God out of someone who was only ever meant to belong to the wider world.

There is something beautiful about devotion, I think, while inhaling deeply into the top of Matthew’s baby’s head. I am glad I came back to the places I feared I was not welcome. I am glad to have a space, even when I had to put in the work to find it.