I need to talk about cottagecore.
How homemade bread and open fields charmed the digital fashion elite.
Of all my personal pursuits, none are quite as consuming as capturing the millennial zeitgeist—particularly as it traverses fashion.
What we wear (and now, how we present it online) has been a reliable sign of the times and generally fun to deconstruct. Crop tops, biker shorts, and chunky dad sneakers showed us the 90s will never die and that fashion is as cyclical as ever. Tie-dye sweatsuits during a pandemic quarantine made almost too much sense—a trippy cotton escape from the comfort of our own homes.
But one trend has evaded my eye for analysis until the other day when I discovered its coordinating hashtag: cottagecore.
In March, The New York Times described cottagecore as:
“...a Holly Hobbie illustration come to life, consisting of a coterie of young people, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who congregate online to swap bread baking recipes and photos of their foraged mushroom hauls, stare at pictures of farm animals and otherwise partake in an aspirational form of nostalgia that praises the benefits of living a slow life in which nothing much happens at all.”
NPR covered cottagecore last week, citing the promotional images for Taylor Swift’s new album, Folklore as the viral aesthetic’s mainstream debut.
The alliterative title was a name to the face of an aesthetic I couldn’t escape on Instagram, from the prairie dress explosion of 2018 that hasn’t seemed to die to lockdown sourdough starters; from girls picking strawberries to that Jacquemus fashion show in a fucking lavender field… and then that other Jacquemus show in a fucking wheat field.
Like so many trends that begin pure and help minority folks escape the chaos of everyday life, #cottagecore was bulldozed into a fashion girl escape where the price tag on a gauzy frock can run you as much as your rent and Matilda Djerf serves fresh cake with a professionally bleached smile. Never has the simplicity of rural life—hanging one’s clothes on the line, tending to the garden, rinsing fruit in the sink—been chicer.
So what is it about this pastoral fever dream that’s roped in the digital fashion elite and, in turn, their devout followings?
Perhaps it’s the softness at a time when we’re called to be hard and tough. Microflorals and Bardot silhouettes have this damsel in distress quality, and the distress of 2020 can only be countered by dressing like a slutty milkmaid.
Perhaps it’s the connection to nature. Everyone’s just so exhausted from being online that it feels good and natural to bake bread for an hour and traipse through a meadow.
Or perhaps it’s just plain pretty.
All I know is, despite being entirely tone deaf to the real challenges of rural life, I’m sort of here for cottagecore, and if Reformation wasn’t cancelled during the height of BLM, I’d probably spend $200 on a dress by EOD.