Colette

The name holds itself like a woman in a good coat who has nothing to prove. Colette is a French feminine diminutive of Nicolas, which traces back through the Greek nike and laos — victory of the people — a meaning so grand the name learned to wear it casually. Its most consequential bearer was Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the French novelist who wrote about desire, cats, and the body with a precision that made her contemporaries uncomfortable and her reputation permanent.

Saint Colette of Corbie, a fifteenth-century reformer, gave the name its first wide currency in France. The novelist claimed it completely for the literary world. On the American side of the ledger it currently sits at rank 400, rising steadily as the appetite for vintage French names — the same wave that lifted Genevieve, Margot, and Simone — continues. It carries a quality of being fashionable without appearing to try.

Two syllables with all the weight at the back — co-LETTE — the stressed syllable landing sharp and definite, the soft opening making the close feel earned. It pairs beautifully in a sibling set with Fiona, Anya, or Anaya, names that share a certain self-contained quality. The girl who grows into Colette tends to have a very particular idea of how her space should be arranged and extends that same precision, without imposition, to everything else she cares about.