Kellen-Pippa, 17, is a self-professed coquette. More often than not a copy of Lolita will be lingering in the background of a shot, too – failing that, signifiers of Lolita, like heart-shaped glasses, cherries, or a bottle of Coke. The ‘coquette aesthetic’ is everywhere on the app at the moment – the hashtag has racked up over three billion views – with countless videos of young women draping themselves in pearl necklaces and decorating their rooms with framed photos of Lana del Rey. Now, today’s young women are discovering the story, largely thanks to TikTok. Given the deification of Lana on Tumblr, it’s unsurprising that legions of young women were keen to dig into her source material. Lolita has had a monumental impact on her work, from overt references to the book (like the “light of my life, fire of my loins” refrain in “ Off to the Races” or her 2012 song “ Lolita”) to the recurring themes in her work: unequal relationship power dynamics, the loss of innocence, violence and abuse. It helped that Swain’s outfits in the film – heart-shaped glasses, cutesy co-ords, and red lipstick – were cute, as Warner noted herself back in 1997. If you were on a certain corner of Tumblr, you could hardly scroll through your dashboard without stumbling across a GIF of Lolita eating a banana or the infamous “light of my life, fire of my loins” extract. The film developed a cult following and introduced Nabokov’s original work to a new generation of readers. Then came Tumblr in the early 2010s, and the story’s popularity exploded. Teenage girls flocked to forums on Livejournal dedicated to dissecting nymphet culture, and Lolita-inspired outfits consisting of high-waisted shorts and bardot tops began to abound on fashion website Polyvore. In a 2018 article, writer Lacy Warner – who was 13 when Lyne’s film was released – recalls flicking through pictures of lead actress Dominique Swain in Esquire in the 1990s: “I spent years searching for the same shoes and romper I tried my hardest to mimic the clothes and posture of Swain.”įollowing the advent of the internet, the growing fandom moved online. It was subsequently banned in the UK and France, with the editor of the Sunday Express calling it “the filthiest book I have ever read.” While many of the story’s harshest critics have often been men of Humbert’s age, the responses of younger, female audiences have been less visible in comparison (Lyon, aged 15, wasn’t even allowed to go into the theatre to watch the film at its premiere in 1962).īut there is evidence that the story has always piqued the interest of girls Lolita’s age. The book, unsurprisingly, was met with controversy upon publication. The story was adapted for the silver screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 – with that iconic photo of Sue Lyon as the film’s promotional poster – and again by Adrian Lyne in 1997. When Lolita’s mother is killed in a car accident, Humbert abducts the teenage girl and begins to sexually and psychologically abuse her, before she manages to escape him years later. Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel centres on the abusive relationship between the book’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, and his teenage stepdaughter Dolores Haze – AKA, the eponymous Lolita. It’s one of the most striking images to come out of 20th-century culture: a visibly young girl, one blue eye glistening over the rim of her heart-shaped glasses, her lips puckered around a lollipop.
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