Cottagecore:

today i'll be taking you on a deep dive into cottage core we're gonna answer questions like
what is it who follows it and what are the cultural influences that have resulted into the rise of
this trend because as many of us already know aesthetic trends are a result of the events
that happen around us cottage core is defined according to the urban dictionary as a niche
aesthetic based around the visual culture of an idealized life on a western farm common
themes include sustainability gardens farm animals rural living and nature searching for the
term cottage core online will bring up images and videos of home baked pies tea dresses
british cottages photogenic picnics mushrooms and the backs of redheaded girls frolicking in
endless grass fields megan mclelan on the psychology of fashion writes this rural imagery
fattened out on the internet during the pandemic and like any aesthetic it came with its own
set of core values for cottage core freedom from societal constructs religious and spiritual
tolerance and an eco-conscious mentality are among them the overall aesthetic is
essentially a queer green and anti-capitalist fantasy that romanticizes the peasantries of a
secluded pastoral life where do i sign up for this is there like a form that i can fill i'm ready to
join the cottage corps people i will do anything it takes to be a part of that lifestyle please
sign me up beam me into your cottages i beg you since eco consciousness was mentioned i
want to look a little more into the sustainability part of it and kind of figure out if it's legit or if
it's green washing but do you want to know what definitely isn't green washing pillow phone
cases yes you just witnessed the most flawless transition ever done pila are the creators of
the world's first biodegradable phone cases which means that they'll break down in a
backyard or industrial compost but not in your pocket pilot cases are also super soft and
drop proof with military grade protection for up to six feet which is almost two meters they
are b corp certified which is a pretty big deal because only businesses that meet the highest
social and environmental standards receive the certification they're also climate neutral
certified and a member of the one percent for the planet where they contribute at least one
percent of sales each year to an environmental cause i have the lavender hemp model but
there are so many other colors and designs to choose from like this one and this one and
this one over here and you can also accessorize with a pila grip to make holding your phone
easier and safer i've had my pillow case for about half a year now and it saved my phone
from so many drops it also feels super soft when you hold it which you wouldn't think that
that's very important but when you're on your phone all day it matters a lot more than you
think pila also hooked me up with an amazing discount the first 50 subscribers to visit the
link in my description and use the code kristen leo will get 50 off their order huge thank you
to pila for sponsoring today's video so is cottage core green washing or not is cottage core
green washing i don't think that sentence makes any sense but you know what i'm trying to
say so when you look up the hashtag online the first images that you see are definitely a lot
of vintage dresses old furniture well-preserved rustic cottages as well as many farm animals
which i am very much hoping are rescued and are not going to end up as part of the deadly
platter in the aesthetic picnic photos it's an overall simple lifestyle especially when it comes
to dressing the part it's pretty financially low maintenance compared to other aesthetics like
the height beast where it requires a lot of designer clothing to pull it off so can you dress the
part by thrifting clothing and buying secondhand from depop and other online platforms yes
is that what everyone is doing the first result that you get when you look up cottage core on
instagram is an account with almost 200 000 followers that is drop shipping cottage core
aesthetic clothing that is bought from aliexpress so fast fashion and not only that a lot of it is
designs that are ripped off from independent fashion designers like the strawberry dress by
lyrica matoshi that has been ripped off multiple times one of the first results that you get
when you look up the hashtag on tick tock is amazon products and she enclosed so let me
get this right what you're telling me is that an eco-friendly anti-capitalist lifestyle and can be
attained by purchasing products from a scrotum faced demonic succubus whose sole
purpose in life is to hoard as much wealth as possible so that he can hop on a phallic looking
object get launched into space and play space cowboy that's that's what you're telling me we
are in hell personally i'm just so tired of capitalists ruining everything that i love like i am over
it so i don't personally blame cottage core for this i blame capitalism as a vague concept i
should probably get more specific this is the point where youtube demonetizes me cottage
core is both a visual aesthetic as well as a lifestyle depicted through images videos and
experienced by some in real life the lifestyle is both real and imaginary it's real in an
imperfect form of scrappy women and cottons and linens making their clothes or building
furniture and in its idealized form as art photography or marketing it's also voyeuristic as
those who don't have the ability to fully immerse themselves into it settle with experiencing it
through watching others live that dream online but in order to understand what caused this
trend to emerge i think we should take a look at its fashion because fashion can tell us a lot
about culture there are plenty of popular mainstream brands that are following this trend at
the moment clearly these brands although loved by the mainstream don't really follow the
eco-friendly cottage core values as many of these brands sell mass-produced clothing made
with unsustainable materials and sweatshops with a manufacturing process that is heavily
polluting to the environment but the clothing elicits the vibe of vintage and handmade clothes
and oftentimes this is enough for the people that are gravitating towards this aesthetic don't
forget this part because it's going to become even more interesting later the clothing looks
vintage or handmade and the designs are also hyper feminine which are meant to make the
wearer look either very innocent or even childlike so the original style of cottage core is born
out of subculture but by the time that it hits mainstream the original meaning behind the
emergence of this style is completely lost or at least diluted which is also why fast fashion
has led to us having such a huge disconnection with our clothes and feeling like we need to
change our style all the time but that's like a discussion for another time the thing is that
whimsical romantic ladylike clothing is definitely not a new thing the last time that we saw a
big emergence of this style was back in the 70s with the storybook trend with some leading
designers being lara ashley and gunny sacks which are both very much coveted at the
moment by true cottage core enthusiasts we remember the 70s as being fun and groovy with
bright colors and the smiley face symbol but a lot of these trends were either escapist or just
straight up sarcastic because the 70s were actually pretty bleak the vietnam war was raging
until the middle of the decade there was a rise in anti-war terrorism cults were promoting
mass slip and slides and it goes on and on if people were so frustrated with their lives or the
system to the point where they were joining youth terrorist groups and creepy cults you know
that things were not going really well so art back then responded with escapism as it is now
the storybook trend was born from nostalgia for the 18th century in victorian fashion as an
escape into the slower and simpler times of the past so what were those times like when we
look into the more aspirational and polished side of cottage core we see a heavy rococo
influence and who better to bring up now other than the queen of rococo herself who also
sort of took it with her to her grave marie antoinette i am so sick of all of you peasants
dragging my name through the mud and making up all of these preposterous rumors about
me if anyone is going to tell my story it will be me it was terrible at the palace people were
urinating and defecating behind the curtains and everyone was sick all the time and the skin
was covered with boils and their breath smelled so bad i wanted to leave but i didn't want to
be poor because nobody wants to be poor but i heated the fields and the weeds with the lies
in them and all the gossiping lunches whispering about me behind my back i wanted a
simple life in the countryside with my friends and that is how hama de la ren came to be it
was the most beautiful rustic little village that i built i mean i paid people to build it but
whatever and when i was there i love to pretend to garden but it turns out the curtaining is a
lot of hard work so i dressed more simply in my shamies that is all no big deal but people of
course had to make up rumors about that as well and they said that i was trying to look like a
peasant which i was not and they also said that i looked like a but i was only trying to be
comfortable but no matter what i do nobody is going to like it so i might as well do whatever i
like my neck is kind of itchy i wonder why another fashion influence to cottage core is of
course the victorian era and if you remember the thing that i told you to not forget which i'm
not going to bring up again is that basically what happened in the 1840s is that social
awareness became fashionable just like now today at this present moment everything
repeats itself so according to fashion historian amanda halley the book the condition of the
working class in england in 1844 by friedrich engels as well as the author charles dickens
who was tremendously popular at the time both influenced a wave of middle class brits to
acknowledge their privilege and of course to do nothing about it but what they did do is start
dressing more like peasants the fashion went from displaying wealth through extreme
embellishments and adornments like ribbons lace feathers big hair big hats big shoulders to
a much simpler silhouette in style the working class had to wrap shawls around them to stay
warm because they couldn't afford coats and the tight look of the shawl was adapted as a
top by the middle classes in my eyes there are some clear parallels between the past and
the present following the evolution of this trend but nowadays there's no real distinction in
how the class is dressed and that's because we the peasants have far more access to
clothing than ever before new trends can now emerge from any subculture of any class not
only the wealthy so what could possibly be leading to the rise of an escapist trend at the
moment um i don't know everything even though cottage core was used as a term since
2018 so pre-pandemi lovato times it's become really popular since then because there's
definitely something about being confined in your apartment with loud neighbors and air
pollution that kind of makes you wanna as we say in greek take the mountains you know
what i'm saying not only that for the many people that either lost their jobs or started working
from home paying with their underpaid salary for some really overpriced city rent stopped
being worth it i've heard of a mice mice migration i've heard of a mass migration out of cities
which i don't know if it's true or not but i'm definitely one of the people that left there's also a
rise in the appreciation for vintage things in general from clothes to even home decor and it's
been very interesting watching that appreciation develop real time here in greece because
as many of you might not know greece is about 10 years behind the rest of the developed
world so i personally grew up with everyone feeling kind of a disgust for anything that is old
even if it's high quality and i talk a little more in depth about that in my video about home
renovations currently they're in the stage where they threw away anything that was vintage
antique or renovated it to look kind of like a sterile miserable gray prison but what they're
doing is they're buying things new that imitate the aesthetic of those things that they
previously rejected and there's also a small boom happening in the vintage clothing and
decor sector which i would like to take partial credibility for making it happen and i swear i'm
not saying this because i'm a narcissist it's just that i'm ovulating and so my confidence is
just sky high for five days a month and then i'll just go back to hating myself so just let me
have this while i can okay back to the topic why is this happening though because we could
have stuck with a gray prison cell aesthetic we could have stuck with minimalism why are we
regaining an appreciation for the old and the used it's really easy to look at charts like these
and just assume that it's just the trend cycles repeating themselves but i personally believe
that these pseudo-mathematical theories on the evolution of fashion trends over time are
oftentimes just trying to simplify and categorize some really complex cultural phenomena
maybe in order to make them more palatable for financial investors and men in general the
reality is that yes some trends are the result of culture and history and history definitely
repeats itself but not in these 5 10 20-year predictable cycles this boom in an appreciation
for old and used things is not what is actually out of the ordinary it's our rejection of those
things over the last 70ish years that was the year is 1945 and in a display of pure unhinged
violence the usa dropped two atomic bombs in hiroshima and nagasaki killing hundreds of
thousands of japanese civilians these are the only two atomic bombs that have ever been
used as weapons and they sort of solidified the usa as the sociopathic uncle sam on top of
that the usa had the world's biggest propaganda machine hollywood if you weren't scared of
america you wanted to be an american that's a west side story reference um which is
something that i've never watched i don't know if it's a movie a musical i don't know why i'm
referencing it but another quote from that song is life is already in america if you're all white
in america as well as being straight and upper class and part of a nuclear family with two
and a half kids two cars a house and all the other accessories that go in it all of it
manufactured in the u.s of a and once the capitalists figured out that it could be made
cheaper overseas and they could turn a bigger profit it became made in china designed in
california why keep the old when you can buy new and show it off to everyone that you know
this was the american dream and everyone wanted a slice of the pie capitalism and hyper
consumerism are the result of u.s imperialism and financial domination so even though these
hyper consumerist philosophies are still very much alive at the moment this not-so-small rise
in the appreciation for old things and used things sort of signified to me the beginning of the
end of an empire and it could very much be a stretch but i think that as the identity of modern
imperialist u.s is built on continuous financial growth through consumerism
pseudo-innovation and always looking into an even bigger and better future i think that when
he who must not be named won the election on the slogan make america great again it was
essentially like the usa made a global announcement saying that things are not great at the
moment it shattered global illusions in the belief of the american dream because even
americans themselves were able to recognize that they no longer had the american dream
and that they wanted it back and what is even more interesting and i guess kind of funny is
that this rejection of the american dream is translated aesthetically into going back to
colonialist britain because like things were really great back then thankfully colonialist
explorer attire isn't really part of the cottage court cosplay at least at the moment i think
cottage core is more of a reimagining of those times but without the sexism and homophobia
ableism and hopefully without colonialism as well that being said as an aesthetic and a
lifestyle cottage court definitely seems to be attracting mostly white ladies like myself but
there are definitely plenty of women of color that are killing it with a cottage core aesthetic
but again what is it about this eco-friendly isolation in the countryside that has become so
enticing to so many people oh my god so when it comes to this craving for isolation i think i
have a theory also i think i'm sitting in cow's so there are two very distinct types of family
structures the nuclear family and also the extended multi-generational family i mean there
are different types of families other than those but i think we could easily categorize them
under those two the extended family is a community of relatives living together where the
grandparents take care of the kids as well as sometimes the siblings of the parents cousins
grow up sort of like siblings and this type of family structure exports adults that are usually
well-rounded social while the nuclear family was born as an addition to capitalism by
alienating the individual family members into separate rooms with their own individual
objects that belong specifically to them and it's also paired up with a cultural push for
individuality and it also presented consumerism as the solution for self-expression and also
the solution for loneliness therefore strengthening capitalism even further the nuclear family
has resulted in adults with an individualistic mindset as well as kind of poor social skills
possibly introverted and with an affinity for alone time and i really feel like i'm calling myself
out right now when nuclear family kids reach adulthood it's also part of the culture to push
those kids out of the family home as soon as possible in order to maintain the appearance of
success and prosperity and your child living with you at the ages of 18 or 30 does not signify
that of course that push out of the nest was successful for older generations because they
were entering a world that was burgeoning with opportunities but in the new millennia these
opportunities are nowhere to be found resulting in a significant drop in the quality of life of
these young adults as they try to survive on their own most job opportunities are in
overcrowded cities and if you are lucky enough to find a job you end up with co-workers that
are less socially adjusted than you are and a boss that is worse than your toxic boomer
parents the cheapest place you can rent is still way out of your budget and it's renovated to
look like a prison cell for those that have not yet become jaded with the american dream and
the nuclear family structure they push through all of that in order to start their own
dysfunctional families but you have become jaded and you yearn for an escape far away
from people far from the city and you find it online and it's hashtag cottagecore for the
anti-social gen zeirs it's a similar yearning for escape but for them it's from school or college
life which seems just to be getting progressively more and more useless in a world where
the future is more uncertain than ever before this need for self-reliance i think is an
unconscious preparation for a collapse in whatever shape or form it takes i think it's also
worth mentioning the family units are also a classist issue while the multi-generational family
is as old as time because it provided a lot more safety and stability for the lower economic
classes when the nuclear family emerged in the 1920s it was sort of hailed as the ideal way
to raise children but that family structure was a lot more expensive because it was expected
that the home would have only one provider which was usually the father while the mother
would stay home and take care of the kids therefore it was unattainable for many people in
the lower socioeconomic classes because both parents had to work so somebody else had
to take care of the kids but things like the mass immigration to the u.s in the past century led
a lot of people coming from multi-generational families to have to break down to smaller
family structures like the nuclear family or the single parent family therefore suffering
financially even further as they lost the support of the multi-generational family structure so
growing up in a nuclear family doesn't automatically mean that you are wealthier but if you
were wealthier then the damage done by the nuclear family structure is either minimal
non-existent or easily mitigated because these individualist values bred by the nuclear family
are aligned with your pockets you can purchase or easily rent a home without having to
share it with roommates or rush to find a partner in order to split rent with them you can
focus on expressing your individuality through purchasing clothes and home decor you don't
have to settle and you don't have to share if you want to move out to the english countryside
and buy yourself a cottage you can also do that but for the middle and lower socioeconomic
classes bred out of the nuclear family things are vastly different their childhood conditioning
pushes them towards appreciating solitude individualism and achieving financial success but
their pockets do not you might say well you can change your perspective change your
values and start embracing having to share your space and your things with others in order
to financially get by but because this is a classist issue it's deeply rooted in western culture
to look down on people that take part in that behavior it's a deep desperation to keep up
appearances of western and white supremacist sophistication it stems from classism and
racism communal living is looked down upon by many cultures and it's really difficult to
overcome those biases and to overcome this individualistic conditioning that we've had since
childhood i think a more safe and familiar solution is to go back home for many of the
cottage corps broads that are making tech talks or taking photos looking seemingly alone out
in nature this aesthetic is sponsored by mom and dad this is a projection of living alone and
succeeding on your own but secretly actually reverting back to your support system i mean
like not to roast myself but do you think that the garden that i am frolicking around in my
videos is something that i could afford to like buy build maintain no the funny thing is that you
know my parents were around 40 years old when they bought this property and built it if they
were 40 years old now in this day and age with three kids and one of them was only working
there's no way they'd be able to afford this things have progressively gotten so much more
dystopian in the last 20 years as for the queerness of cottage core now did you know that
according to the national lgbt health education center evidence suggests that neurodiverse
people particularly those on the autism spectrum are more likely to be gender diverse and
have a lesbian gay bisexual queer or asexual sexual orientation compared to neurotypical
people not to mention that neurodiversity often comes with some visual and auditory triggers
and city life is so chaotic and loud and just overwhelming that even for a non-neurodiverse
person it's oftentimes too much to handle so i can imagine that for a neurodivergent person it
would be like a thousand times worse so escaping to the countryside makes a lot of sense in
this case not to mention that art and creativity is a huge part of cottage core as well from
paintings sewing cooking gardening these could all easily be someone's special interest and
cottage core is a wonderful way for them to share it with the world so cottage core is the
mostly white and sometimes queer neurodivergent anti-capitalists escape but it's also
peasant cosplay for the proverbial marie antoinettes of the world like in this photo of
millionaire nepotism poster child kander jenner living her best cottage core life posing in a
garden in front of what seems to be a golf course nothing to me screams tacky more than a
hobby that requires huge amounts of land that are converted into like grass that requires
insane amounts of water to keep alive like just ill and as we learned fashion repeats itself
and so does history and here we can see some really interesting parallels between marie
antoinette and kendall jenner kendall was born into the world's most famous and rich family
that people love to hate and marie was born into wealth and wed into it and people definitely
love to hate her too the kardashians time and time again aestheticize poverty and leech off
of cultures that aren't their own marie lived lavishly off of money that she never earned and
the media dragged her for it but even though marie's tarnished reputation and provocative
image fueled the french revolution that led to her losing her head she was never the true
cause of people's misery she had no true authority other than the male heir that she could
birth out of her vagine she was simply a female sacrifice for the angry mob of the
bloodthirsty french bourgeoisie and in a pretty similar vein when kendall handed out that
pepsi in the infamous commercial it's her head that people wanted on a steak not pepsi's not
the multinational corporation selling cardiac arrest and child obesity in a can with ingredients
like sugar that are sourced through child or slave labor making billions for the shareholders
that basically don't even pay any taxes of course not how do we get here from cottage core
right if cottage core indicates our desire to escape from a society that is on the brink of
another french-style revolution maybe it's not a good idea to be distracted by all of the marie
antoinettes that the media and just people in general are waving in front of our faces and
nagging us to chop off their heads whether that's celebrities and influencers as well as
migrants and refugees and instead we lift the veil and face the true beast that is causing the
societal misery which is satan the beast is satan he's the one responsible for all of this and
also the richest one percent and the top 100 biggest multinational corporations capitalism as
well as every system that perpetuates things like racism and ableism misogyny homophobia
classism child abuse nationalism colonialism and for good measure cannibalism [Music]
more planes really oh my god the helicopters the military like can i catch a break

we are digging deep into an aesthetic that has been around for quite some time but gained
a lot of popularity in the past year on social media it's all about country life simple living
producing your own food using traditional farming methods but also flower dresses picnics
and goats wildest aesthetic is taken on by progressive people inclusive people but for some
people cottage life means very different things that's what we're going to talk about today
why is cottage course so popular it's a convergence of many different things one of them
being them pandemic and the lockdowns that came with it every time there's been a spike in
cases there's a spike in cottage core right along with it trapped at home people developed a
better appreciation of small things like cooking baking just walking outside credit card
became a way to virtually escape something that is physically inescapable redecorating a
bedroom creating a new wardrobe make the virtual more real by turning your image's
environment into something cottagy and cozy yet the rise of cottage core started way before
the pandemic it was a response to increasing violence to dependency on technology to
hustle culture and just constant anxiety in regards to what will happen in the future finally
that something is going to be very interesting for later on in this video is the cottage call is
very much associated with sustainable living and so as sustainable living gained momentum
well cottage core also became very popular cottage life in general is very sustainable
cottage core is a rejection of modernity the aesthetic appeared in the 2010s but cottage life
has been a recurring trope in films like brook black mountain little women emma but also in
books in poetry and very recently taylor swift i want to put the studio ghiblis in the cottage
core aesthetic as well because i've seen some people joined it in the past and i truly believe
that miyazuki used a lot of the themes that are the essence of cottage core namely the
romanticization of rural life authors writers have continuously described a country with an
implicit or explicit contrast to the urban these works target a urban audience since they
present real life in a very idealized way it depicts what used to be known but is now
disappearing it is a rejection of the modern the cottage core aesthetic draws back to the
pre-industrial era where people live very differently at a very small scale they produce locally
they interactive with a very small number of people everything was very small scale and
manageable people live in harmony with nature with seasons today's cottage tour is filled
with tender nostalgia cottage core influencers will wear long flowy dresses they go around
with a little weaker basket picking up flowers and playing with lumps while this aesthetic is
very much a political i can see you writing your little comments like oh no you don't
understand aesthetics it just meant for fun yes it's totally true the majority of people involved
in cottage core are just interested by the trend and some actually want to make it more
inclusive and less eurocentric yeah i'm very curious about the people who actually decide to
live that way and do so as a political choice i wanna know how they benefited for the best or
the worst from the popularity of this aesthetic how cottage core is politicized school digital life
has been continuously associated with anti-capitalism anti-globalization and it's true going
back to a very simple cottage life is an affront to the globalized world it reduces your carbon
footprint tremendously and turns you into a an active producer instead of just a lazy
consumer yet i want to add another entire to the list of unties and it's anti-big government
moving away from cities also means moving away from governing authorities the words free
and self always appear in conjugal videos when they explain you why they chose this
lifestyle and for example the cutted fairy on youtube explained that she recently quit her job
to live a more simple life in the countryside by doing so she reasserted her power over her
life herself her independence so katico is both a slight liberation from capitalism because it
gives you the opportunity to kind of become your own boss something that is quite difficult to
achieve in a traditional urban setting but still requires a certain financial stability and a certain
amount of privilege to be able to fully take on the contextual lifestyle on top of that it's also a
liberation from the state since it's very much about figuring out by yourself surviving by
yourself without much help from the government or just people in general and finally when
looking at the kurdish corps community online it appears that most of those people most of
the influencers are female which led some to argue that it's also a liberation from men izaben
sloan wrote in the new york times that cottage core offers a vision of the world where men
are not consciously excluded they are simply enough for thought but there are women who
go in a completely different direction now look at this food it looks very cottage cool doesn't it
well this is the darling academy and elena is what you now called a hashtag tried wife the
idea is that women need to care for their home they need to care for their husband for their
kids they emphasize on the fact that being a traditional wife is a choice and some even go as
further as calling it a liberation going back to a traditional way of living is not about
self-discovery anymore it's a reversal in time to binary dynamics and family values in that
sense traditional living is inward looking it's about your family but it also has an outward
dimension it's about like carrying on traditional national state values strider tend to be very
patriotic therefore their use of the cottage core aesthetic a nostalgic aesthetic is a way for
them to get younger audiences that are interested in cottage core and to get them to listen to
what they have to say and potentially expand the movement um before i start this last part i
just wanted to reiterate that most people who like the cottage core aesthetic are good people
who are conscious about the environment who just want to live a better life or just want a bit
of escapism so bear with me for this one there is this commonly held view that's been
spreading faster in 2020 guess why it's the idea that our planet is overpopulating and that's
what's causing climate change that there simply isn't enough resources or energy to provide
for our modern 21st century human needs while all of this is completely false and it's been
proven to be false it had led some to adopt the view that we need to prioritize certain groups
over others to prioritize ourselves our nations which isn't really current when you think about
the fact that global warming is a global problem when your constants are limited to yourself
to your family to your immediate environment your country well it tends to exclude the people
who will be the most affected by the consequences of climate change people in warmer third
world countries or people in your own country won't have the money or privilege to adapt to
the issues generated by the climate crisis many of these will be immigrants people of color
or just people that often included under the umbrella term multiculturalism now here's the
problem this is all very convenient for the far right who generally oppose multiculturalism and
just have a problem with anyone who's not a pure blooded white western male and here we
reach the point of eco-fascism when we say that the world is overpopulated we are actually
playing into their hands because for them it means that some people will have to disappear
we would have to prioritize one race or another some talk of themselves as ethnic
nationalists they'll talk about deep ecology and they use words like forefathers homeland
ethnostate or blood and soul as dog whistle for white nest so the eco fascist aesthetic is
closer to the norse tradition yet they have adopted the language an aesthetic that embraces
nature that romanticize and actually invent a time during which the only race was direct race
so here's a comment from daniel savoy she is replying to a tweet from anne duncan a
democrat who worked with barack obama during his presidency simply offered to start a
conversation whiteness and that's what daniel civil replied about how beautiful it is yes now
here's her profile two years ago there are little trees there's a little sun a reference to sunnah
a north goddess and savoy describes herself as vegan in the style of savitri devi who
happened to be both a nazi and an eco-fascist in this tweet she uses the hashtag evola
radical traditionalism which was the name of evolus ideology that still inspires fascists today
and you get that extra outright for the win civility was banned from twitter two years ago but
now she's on gab an outright friendly platform [Music] so again eco-fascists are very much a
minority but you know it's it's just something to look out for in our communities just to make
sure that the cottage core aesthetic remains something fun positive

Cottagecore Debuted 2,300 Years Ago

Keeping cozy in a countryside escape, through the ages.
Lirika Matoshi’s Strawberry Dress, defined as The Dress of 2020, in Arcadia Jonathan Aprea

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By: Angelica Frey November 11, 2020 11 minutes

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

If there’s a style that defines 2020, it has to be “cottagecore.” In

March 2020, the New York Times defined it as a “budding aesthetic

movement… where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with

dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral

existence.” In August, consumer-culture publication The Goods by

Vox heralded cottagecore as “the aesthetic where quarantine is

romantic instead of terrifying.”

Baking, one of the activities the quarantined population favored at

the height of the pandemic, is a staple of cottagecore, whose

Instagram hashtag features detailed depictions of home-baked

goods. Moreover, the designer Lirika Matoshi’s Strawberry Dress,

defined as The Dress of 2020, fully fits into the cottagecore

aesthetic. A movement rooted in self-soothing through exposure to

nature and land, it proved to be the antidote to the stress of the

2020 pandemic for many.

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Despite its invocations of rural and pastoral landscapes, the

cottagecore aesthetic is, ultimately, aspirational. While publications

covering trends do point out that cottagecore is not new—some

locate its origins in 2019, others in 2017—in truth, people have

sought to create an escapist and aspirational paradise in the woods

or fields for 2,300 years.

Memories of Arcadia
Ancient Greece had an enduring fascination with the region of

Arcadia, located in the Peloponnesus, which many ancient Greeks

first dismissed as a primitive place. After all, Arcadia was far from

the refined civilization of Athens. Arcadians were portrayed as

hunters, gatherers, and sensualists living in an inclement

landscape. In the Hellenistic age, however, Arcadia became an idea

in the popular consciousness more than a geographical place.

Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great, had become a

metropolis of more than a million people. The city was filthy,

polluted, and ridden with disease. Its citizens developed what we

can now call nostalgia for simpler times. They turned to Arcadia,

which came to represent both an untainted, yet benign countryside

and the spiritual haven of a simple life.

The Sicilian-born poet Theocritus (316–260 BCE), widely credited

as the inventor of pastoral poetry, gave form to this longing for a

return to the simple life. He wrote many Idylls, where shepherds

and shepherdesses frolicked in nature and engaged in poetic and

song contests. Theocritus raised shepherds and country people

above their social and cultural status: they speak sophisticatedly,

and they spontaneously engage in poetry contests. The target

audience for this poetry, however, was the educated urban class

who wanted to escape to the countryside while preserving their own

refinement: “Theocritus’ shepherds (who seem to spend more time

in pleasant conversation and lively love song contests, lying lazily

during the resting hour on the grass by a river or spring, under

shady trees, than in tending their flocks) move in an atmosphere of

peace, quiet and happiness that is far removed from the harsh

reality of pastoral life in all times and places,” write the scholars J.

Vara and Joanna Weatherby in Mnemosyne.

Baking, one of the activities the quarantined population favored at the height of the pandemic, is a staple of

cottagecore.

The Latin poet Virgil (70-19 BCE) expanded the reach of the

pastoral genre. A native of Northern Italy, then known as Gallia

Cisalpina, Virgil came from a family of modest land-owners. His

family’s beloved land was re-allotted into 60 settlements for soldiers

in the struggle that broke out in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s

death. These events provoked in Virgil a desire to escape from the

chaos, violence, and disorder of war, into the serenity and peace of

an Arcadian dream, and the theme permeates his pastoral poetry.

Yet the outside world does penetrate his fabled countryside. In his

first major work, the Eclogues, Virgil acknowledges the passing of

seasons. The first Eclogue, for example, features two bantering

shepherds, Tityrus and Meliboeus, in a standard idealized

landscape. Both have lost their land, and while Tityrus’s

possessions have been restored by the “gay, young prince of

Rome,” Meliboeus is forced to leave. Virgil’s pastoralism thus

served a means to explore contemporary issues, moral and

political, without directly engaging with them, a trope that would

define pastoralism through the centuries.

Pure escapist pastoral landscape persisted in the form of novels,

romance-like narratives set in fantastic settings, aimed at a courtly

audience in the Roman Empire. One of these was Daphnis and

Chloe by Longus (second century CE) which sees a shepherd and

shepherdess gradually fall in love, but have to overcome myriads of

obstacles before being able to marry. The plot twist is that they are

actually aristocrats.

The Pastoral Element in the Renaissance

St. Augustine (fourth century CE) argued that Adam’s sin had

brought about moral corruption, not only in man, but throughout the

whole of nature. In Augustine’s imagining, nature is hostile to

mankind, if not downright satanic, and the sensual and bountiful

pastoral landscape a testimony of the frail nature of humankind.

 We can credit the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) for restoring the

pastoral landscape across the arts. From his home base in

Vaucluse (now known as Fontaine-de-Vaucluse), near Avignon, he

delighted in exploring the nearby countryside, and, famously,

climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux for pleasure. He was eventually

overcome with guilt, torn between his sensual love of nature and his

Augustine-centric intellectual imprint. He managed, however, to

integrate the pastoral into his poetry. Just as Virgil used the pastoral

to reflect on the tensions of Rome at the cusp of becoming an

empire, Petrarch enthusiastically adopted it as a metaphor for the

condition of the intellectual, humanist scholar and poet in the middle

of the fourteenth century.

It was in Elizabethan England

that the pastoral genre really
became in vogue.
His Bucolicum Carmen, which consists of 12 eclogues, reflects on

the realities of the era. In particular, the sixth and seventh eclogues

feature shepherds that act as stand-ins for the Pope and the

Church, exposing their corruption. Petrarch is also known for his

gardens: he built one whenever he went. Petrarch described his

modest property at Vaucluse as his “transalpine Helicon,” a

reference to the birthplace of the Muses: He envisioned the space

as a place of learning and poetry, closely associated with the

teachings of Virgil. Renaissance poets and artists in Italy

enthusiastically embraced pastoral landscapes in all art forms, and,

in 1690, the name “Arcadia” was given to the literary academy that

was set out to purge Italian literature of all the flowery artifice of the

baroque.

But it was in Elizabethan England that the pastoral genre really

became in vogue. Shakespeare has two pastoral plays, As You Like

Itand A Winter’s Tale, whose source material includes the tale of

Daphnis and Chloe. As You Like It contains a debate between

pastoral and anti-pastoral: one character, the jester Touchstone,

feels better at court, while he looks down on country people, while

the shepherd Corin defends his own lifestyle. It’s actually not clear

who wins the debate. What’s more, Shakespeare’s plays, including

As You Like It and A Winter’s Tale, feature aristocrats play-acting

being shepherds and falling in love with shepherdesses, but only

marry them when they find out that said shepherdesses are

abandoned royalty themselves.

Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” is

one of the best-known examples of English Renaissance pastoral

poetry, with a shepherd inviting his beloved to enjoy a romp in his

own version of Arcadia, a vision of eternal spring. It inspired poetic

replies from other poets, from John Donne to Dorothy Parker. Quite

tellingly, the most famous reply comes from sir Walter Raleigh

(1554-1618), who had the shepherd’s beloved rebuke him, uttering

words such as:

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: In folly ripe, in
reason rotten.

She points out, in other words, that the idea of Arcadia is rooted in

fallacy.

Pastoral poetry, while detached and elitist in theme and style, is still

marked by a sense of community, which is expressed through the

form of invitation. “The invitation demonstrates that the pastoral

landscape has something to offer, whether it is a rustic feast,

country entertainments, or simply a homely cottage in which to rest

for the night,” writes the literary scholar Kimberly Huth in Studies in
Philology. Huth examines the spoken act of invitation in the context

of early modern pastoral poetry, writing:

It acts as the first step in extending that community to others

who may be passing through the pastoral world by offering not
only a comfortable place to rest but also fellowship and
belonging. The pastoral landscape is often imagined as an
ideal world of respite from corruption of the court or city, but it
is actually the invitation that creates the ideality of that world,
which is only recognizable through interactions with other
people in the landscape.

Cottagecore too has a strong community aspect, even if its

invitations are mostly digital.

The Case of Marie Antoinette

When it comes to the 360-degree-open-lifestyle discourse revolving

around cottagecore, the most eminent antecedent is Marie

Antoinette, who reigned in France from 1774 to 1792. While her

standing as a monarch has been the subject of endless gossip,

discussion, artwork, and morbid fascination, it’s not a stretch to say

that, fashion-wise, Marie Antoinette was revolutionary.

The portrait of Marie Antoinette by her favorite portraitist (and

perhaps lover) Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun, which was presented in

1783, depicts her without the accoutrements of royal portraiture: no

regal ermine cape, jewelry, elaborate hairdo, and high-contrast

makeup. In this painting, the queen wears nothing but a

wide-brimmed straw hat, and a muslin gaulle (loose gown) fastened

with a wide sash of gauze. Only the roses that she holds in her

hand are a reminder of her house of Habsburg. Otherwise, nothing

in the painting is an indicator of royalty. In the news covering the

exhibition, the portrait described the queen as being “dressed up

like a serving maid” and “wearing the chamber-maid’s dust-cloth.”

The gaulle Marie Antoinette sported is indistinguishable from a

chemise, an item of underwear, so in this painting, the queen

looked both undignified and indecent.

A $410 tartan dress in Versailles

The same year the portrait was unveiled, she had an entire hameau

(rustic village) built as a place of leisure: it comprised meadows,

lakes, grottos, streams, a dovecote, a dairy, cottages, vineyards,

fields, orchards, vegetable gardens, and pagan temples. It was a

fully-operational farm, where the queen would host social events.

She and her entourage would “cosplay” as farmers and

shepherdesses. “The Hameau was considered a type of ferme

ornée or ornamented farm that combined agricultural production or

utility with pleasures for the eyes and other bodily senses,” writes

the scholar of visual culture Jill H. Casid.

Casid explores the camp and performative nature of Marie

Antoinette’s peasant reverie. She continues:

[The Hameau] is most notoriously the location of the historic

joke of Marie-Antoinette playing the milkmaid. Beginning with
gossip at court as the Hameau was being built (1783-86), the
critical figuration of the Hameau as a stage set, a playground
for performing the dairywoman or fermière, functioned to do
the labor of distinguishing reputedly natural virtue from its
ostensibly corrupt simulation. The Marquis de Bombelles’
Journal entry (12 December 1783), recounting his view of the
Hameau de la Reine as it was being built, focuses particularly
on the class transvestism of the cottages, designed to give the
appearance of age.

Sneers aside, there are portraits of aristocrats from all over Europe

proudly sporting the gaulleor chemise à la reine. The Baron de

Frénilly called Marie Antoinette’s fashion legacy “revolution in linen.”

The Museum of English Rural Life deems her a cottagecore icon.

What’s more, the queer subtexts of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau

phase, which are explained at length in Casid’s article, are very

much present in the modern cottagecore aesthetic, which has a

strong LGBTQ following. And the pricetags for 2020 cottagecore

fashions are fit for a royal: see the $400-and-up linen dresses, $490
tulle dresses, $125 nightgowns, and the $400-and-up prairie

dresses.

Mutable Pastoral
The idealized pastoral tableaux come to an end at the beginning of

the nineteenth century. The yearning for the sublime supplants the

search for solace. Still, the genre did not die out: Wordsworth, a

nature poet, wrote the pastoral poem “Michael,” (1800) which tells

the story of the aging shepherd Michael and his wayward son Luke.

It’s imbued with bitterness, and we see that Michael is a “real”

world-weary shepherd, as opposed to the merry country-folks of

Theocritus and Marlowe.

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is markedly

anti-pastoral despite its predominantly Arcadian setting. Far from

being a place of respite from the ills of the world, his Arcadia is full

of misery. Early in the novel, Tess is raped in that very Arcadian

setting, and when she retreats with her beloved Angel, the son of

university-educated clergy who dreams of farm life, to the

Arcadian-like setting of Talbothays to escape the problems of

modern life, things don’t go as planned. “It becomes apparent that

pastoral literature is inherently problematic and destructive,

regardless of whether it is written in ancient Greece or Victorian

England,” writes the Hardy scholar Ryan Crennen for The Thomas

Hardy Society. “In Tess he shows that nostalgia for Arcadia is a

tragic dream, and he accomplishes this by subtly and allusively

parodying the pastoral structure of retreat, renewal and return.”

Angel actively play-acts as a shepherd. “His fondness for the harp

and animal husbandry are not accidental manifestations of the

pastoral; rather, they are part of a concerted effort to manufacture a

pastoral lifestyle for himself,” Crennen continues. In music, the

pastoral symphonic poem Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by

Claude Debussy (1894), which narrates a fawn’s romp, was

deemed the “beginning of modern music” for its usage of modes

and harmonies. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphony (1922) is

known as the Pastoral Symphony. Rather than a merry celebration

of the pastoral landscape (à la Beethoven’s sixth), it’s an elegy for

the fallen during World War I, a meditation on the trenches being in

close proximity to a beautiful countryside.

In Virgil’s fifth Eclogue, the shepherds find a tombstone that reads

“Et in Arcadia Ego,” which means “I am even in Arcadia,” with the I

being death. The lines are a memento mori that tell us that, as

fabled and as removed from everyday life a setting might be, reality

and sociopolitical events eventually breach it. The same is true of

cottagecore: while it developed partly in reaction to capitalism and

urban corruption, homophobia, and transphobia, it has not been

immune to capitalism-friendly commercialization (see the “peasant

dresses that retail for hundreds of dollars), making it a mainstream

component of contemporary popculture. The pastoral and

cottagecore remain, first and foremost, an aspirational lifestyle,

whose accoutrements require a considerable investment of money

or, at least, time, for the sake of social-media performances.