Why are teenagers obsessed with pretty coquette picnics — and why are so many adults copying them? 

The edges of the cake’s buttercream are finished in swirls of pink and sage green. Artful piping frills its sides, broken up by tiny edible pearls. In the middle of a perfect circle of sticky maraschino cherries there’s a personalised message written in flamboyant red cursive: “This is a wonder day”. It’s the kind of ostentatious centrepiece that wouldn’t look out of place at a 1950s debutante ball, or a little girl’s party. It is, in fact, the perfect centrepiece for this birthday party. Everyone is gathered around the cake, singing, and the birthday girl, wearing a special silk dress she chose for the occasion, is blowing out the candles. Except it is not a child’s birthday party. It is my birthday party. And I am turning 30.

When I was a teenage girl, the internet hated teenage girls. Femininity was for bimbos and babies. Not so today

In anticipation of the big three-oh my boyfriend kept asking me what I wanted as a present, and I kept ignoring him. Everyone kept telling me that turning 30 wasn’t a big deal, and yet I was determined to make a huge deal out of it, as though I’d wake up and miraculously have a good credit score and a list of all my future babies’ names ready to go in the Notes app of my phone. I knew how stupid this was. I knew I didn’t need to have my life figured out by the time I opened my Moonpig cards. Still, the closer I got to 30, the more nostalgic I became for simpler times. That’s probably why I eventually gave in and told my boyfriend I wanted the cake.

I’d seen it first on Instagram, or perhaps it was TikTok, where all the cool girls are getting cakes that look like they were plucked from the table of one of Judy Blume’s awkward-yet-adorable teen-girl protagonists, or dreamt up by a toddler on a sugar high. My actual childhood cakes were made by Asda, or once by a local bakery with a rice paper picture of me on top (I was turning one). Today’s piped buttercream marvels are a refined, curated version of girlishness, imbued with the chic of a more visually savvy age.

Most often when I saw the cakes on social media, it was as the centrepiece of a new, highly curated sort of picnic with an Alice in Wonderland-type atmosphere and novelty crockery in hues of pink and cherry red. For a new trend in dining and socialising it is remarkably retro, with wicker baskets and Enid Blyton-style gingham blankets. There are strawberries and maraschino cherries and impossibly waxy apples and maybe an ironic takeaway pizza. The centrepiece of it all is The Cake, which some picnickers, in search of a viral moment, choose to “cut” by using a wine glass like a cookie cutter. The cake is then eaten from the glass, like you might an ice cream sundae.

Many of the picnics I see young people posting on social media adhere to the “coquette aesthetic” — a whimsical, explicitly feminine explosion of bows, pearls and frills that seems to be hugely popular online. (TikTok’s ‘‘coquette” hashtag currently has more than nine billion views.) It is controversial — not least because its source material includes Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and because it appears to fetishise skinny, immature bodies. Many self-confessed coquettes — when they’re not cutting cakes with wine glasses or frolicking in parks with the saturation turned way up — don’t seem to really eat.

We’re paying bakeries and luxury-events companies to rewrite the past for us

This embrace of unashamedly girlish picnics is interesting to me. When I was a teenage girl, the internet hated teenage girls. Femininity was for bimbos and babies. Hanging out with your friends meant drinking Lambrini and eating crisps in the park. Not today. Girlishness, long considered inherently immature, is now celebrated long into our late teens and twenties.

In fact, a semi-ironic celebration of girlishness seems to be moving its way up the generations. While there clearly are teenagers embracing the art of the heavily stylised picnic (I spoke to one, Rosie, who celebrated her 18th birthday by having a picnic in the snow and then going sledding after cutting the cake), it’s also something that has become popular with older people, who are throwing disposable income at copying them. If you’re a woman of a certain age — which is how I am referring to myself now, in my new decade — you’ll have seen one of these cakes at a wedding or a baby shower or milestone birthday or an engagement. I recently saw one (on Instagram) at a celebration of someone’s imminent divorce.

A lot of these cakes come from one place: April’s Baker in south London. Or at least, April’s is the celebrity favourite in a crowded field, having made cakes for the likes of Dua Lipa and Alexa Chung. Having never quite grown out of my teenage desire to be chic and cool in the exact correct way, it was here that I sent my long-suffering boyfriend on the eve of my 30th birthday.

April’s Baker operates out of a tiny kitchen in Colliers Wood, where Roxy Mankoo works alongside her sister Corinne masterfully creating between 40 and 50 bespoke cakes a week. “I was always inspired by the retro aesthetic,” Roxy tells me, as I watch her pipe buttercream at warp speed onto a tiny cake in her equally tiny kitchen. Her references are as unashamedly girly as the cake in front of her. “I loved ’80s wedding cakes and Marie Antoinette. It has a certain sense of luxury to it,” she says, not pausing in conversation or cake-decorating. When I tell her about my boyfriend’s present, she and Corinne exchange a look and start to laugh. Apparently not all the well-meaning boyfriends who phone are quite so quick to “get it”. One of them asked if they could put a picture of DreamWorks’ animated character The Boss Baby on top. “The cakes are quite girly,” Roxy adds sympathetically. “So I guess it makes sense.”

The Mankoo sisters started the business in 2019, which some might consider unfortunate timing, except that it wasn’t. The pandemic helped their creations become cult favourites among the elder coquettes of London, who were driven towards endless scrolling by the crushing boredom of lockdown. Picnics also became popular again. With social calendars less cluttered than they have ever been before or since, people decided to make the most of even the most casual occasions — a coffee in the park, birthday parties for an insignificant age, the heady days of the six-person outdoor gathering. What would have once been a casual meet-up became a curated celebration of human connection. I mean, what else did we have to do?

It’s unsurprising that teenagers led the way in dictating our style of park socialising. Putting Covid to one side, this is very much their expert topic. Parks are one of the few spaces where young people have free rein. And, from Jane Austen’s Emma to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette, simply sitting around in a field with your mates has endured as an aspirational trope. Picnics have always been an example of the performance of leisure, and a rare public space where women, particularly young women, have been able to luxuriate in doing not a lot, before they have the money to do so elsewhere. Our ancestors might have promenaded or gone to the mall. Our descendants might unfurl pashminas and pastries to pose for each other. But it’s all ultimately the same activity: a way to be seen in the world at a time when you don’t yet have total access to adult spaces.

Last weekend, when the sun briefly and timidly appeared, hordes of people descended on the park near my home to drink and socialise and laze around doing nothing, together. Inevitably, one of my friends, Mona, was there, having a picnic birthday party complete with takeaway pizza and cake — although “you wouldn’t dare catch me cutting a cake with a wine glass,” she told me. Viewed on Instagram stories, Mona and her friends looked sun-kissed, beautiful and wholesome. When I texted her about it later, she wrote that it had started raining and the group had relocated to a pub instead. But it was the picnic, not the pub, that ended up on Instagram.

Why are we bothering with all this? I think perhaps the appeal is nostalgia for a simpler time. A time before we had the disposable income (or ID) with which to go to pubs or restaurants. But whereas my teenaged outdoor socialising was defined and dominated by alcohol, Gen Z drink a lot less, as often pointed out. They post less. My budget-priced Glen’s Vodka and 700-photo-strong Facebook album; their canned cocktails and expertly edited TikTok. My Skins-inspired house party; their Picnic at Hanging Rock-inspired outdoor dinner parties. They live more curated lives. “They’re not oblivious,” says a friend, a secondary-school art teacher, as we stroll around another park with iced coffees and matching crossbody Uniqlo bags. “They’re careful. They’re posting the best versions of their lives.”

I wish I had been this ostensibly chic as a teenager. I wish I was this ostensibly chic now, hence the iced coffee and the crossbody Uniqlo bag. Consumption is an art form that the generation after mine has mastered, but something we never got quite right. Which is perhaps why, as adults, we’re paying bakeries and luxury-events companies to rewrite the past for us and make our youthful memories more aesthetically pleasing, more geared towards the Instagram grid. The more time passes between the reality of our youth and our memories of it, the more fondness and theatricality we can invoke to look back on it. There’s a reason why, whether you’re 30, 50 or 70, you still believe that the music that was popular when you were a teenager is simply the best music to have ever existed, whether that’s The Beatles or The Strokes. There’s a reason why we outwardly cringe but inwardly rejoice when fashion trends circle back around, because they remind us of what we were before we were this: Cos-wearing adults with laugh lines and household debt.

The popularity of hanging around in parks as an adult, recreating and improving upon our teenage experiences, has reached such aspirational heights that you can now hire a company to organise the platonic ideal of a silly, girly picnic for you. Jane Gillespie, co-founder of The Luxury Picnic Company, tells me she has presided over 183 alfresco parties in the past 226 days. Her staff work to a mood board, providing alcohol and food, perfectly fluffed pillows and gingham blankets, beautiful silverware and pretty crockery. There’s pastel bunting and attentive waiters and even parasols if it starts to rain, and you can sit there with your friends and take photos of each other and gorge yourselves on retro cakes and delicate finger sandwiches. It’s such a perfect ideal of a picnic that it almost becomes divorced from the concept entirely. It’s a restaurant, alfresco, Jane tells me, not technically a picnic. “It’s styling more than anything.” Her 183 outdoor restaurant experiences have overseen five proposals, 4,000 guests and, presumably, hundreds of thousands of Instagram likes.

I think we’re chasing more than an aesthetic though, even in the age of Instagram-grid-friendly socialising. It’s the freedom of youth, seen through a gauzy, rose-tinted lens. What we’re chasing is a more aesthetically pleasing update to the simplicity of socialising before adult responsibilities got in the way and complicated everything.

Although I had my retro, childish cake, the rest of my 30th birthday party was a socially precarious affair, as adult birthdays often are. There were WhatsApp group-chats with a bunch of people who hadn’t met and would inevitably hate each other when they did; several Google Calendar polls to help decide on a date to traipse across the city and hole up in the corner of a pub, crowding around a table marked “RESERVED, ROISIN, 6PM”. It’s a faux pas to show up empty-handed. It’s a faux pas to leave early or arrive late from another event. But, inevitably, there will be another event, because you’re an adult and you’re always double or triple booked. There is always something to do. And you have to get up early tomorrow, actually, and there’s a train strike, so you’re only staying for one or two. And you’re saving up so you can’t really go for a mad one. Also you have a Pilates class.

Socialising, being with your friends. It wasn’t always like this. Perhaps on the way to the bar to get your round in, standing in a queue 15 deep, you start to ponder on this: life used to be simple. You used to text your friends something devoid ­of context that made sense to you all (“field? B there @ 2”) and arrive and stay there all day. Talking about nothing. Spending nothing. The group was amorphous; people would drop in and out. The day would open itself up to you; the world would open itself up to you. You were young and free. That’s how things used to be. You’re at the front of the bar now. Order your Aperol spritz.

It is £14. Empty the glass. Use it to cut your nostalgic, frilly cake.

Róisín Lanigan is a writer based in London and Belfast

Cakes kindly provided by Made by Nez. Photography Assistants, Caitlin
Chescoe and Natalie Lloyd. Set Designer, Lianna Fowler. Set Designer
Assistant, Ellen Huyn. Stylist, Abby Adler. Production, artProduction.
Talent, Olivia Marrie and Luanda Yasmin. Processing, Labyrinth
Photographic. Retouch, Jon Hempstead. Clothes, Clio Peppiatt, Molly
Goddard, Simone Rocha, LISA

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