Cottagecore aesthetic has become one of the most popular movements on social media and beyond in recent years. With its dreamy, romanticized vision of rural life, Cottagecore aesthetic seems like a modern phenomenon perfectly tailored for the Instagram era. However, the origins and influences that formed cottagecore stretch back over centuries, tapping into enduring desires for connection to nature, heritage, and craftsmanship.
This article will delve into the trajectory of pastoral ideals throughout history that ultimately gave rise to today’s Cottagecore aesthetic trend. Understanding the deeper context behind cottagecore reveals why its nostalgic charm still resonates so powerfully.
The Allure of the Pastoral in Art and Literature
The roots of Cottagecore aesthetic can be traced back to the Romantic period of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement that emphasized emotion, imagination, and connecting to the beauty of nature.
Romantic painters like Constable and Turner created stunning landscape scenes depicting the sublime power of the natural world. Poets like Wordsworth exalted the spiritual purity found in living close to nature. This championing of sentiment and rural life aligned with cottagecore’s future pastoralism.
In the mid-late 1800s, the Arts and Crafts movement also emerged in response to mass industrialization. Leaders like William Morris called for a revival of traditional craftsmanship using natural materials and techniques like woodworking or gardening.
The desire to retreat into a simpler, handcrafted lifestyle resonated strongly with the cottagecore ethos that would ultimately emerge decades later.
The Dreamy Landscapes of Romantic Art
Romanticism originated as an artistic movement in late 18th century Britain, largely as a reaction against the Enlightenment values of logic and rationality. Artists and poets emphasized awe-inspiring natural beauty, emotion, and imagination over cold reason.
Landscape painting flourished under Romanticism. Artists like J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and John Constable aimed to capture the sublime majesty and wildness of nature, conveying its spiritual qualities.
Their luminous, dramatic landscapes evoked nostalgia for rural solitude and harmony with the natural world. Gazing upon these Romantic scenes transports the viewer to peaceful woods, towering mountains, and serene countryside – an atmosphere that certainly influences the cottagecore aesthetic today.
Romantic painters used light effects, emotion, and color to imbue natural landscapes with a sense of majesty and spirituality. In contrast to Neoclassicalorder and reason, the wildness and ruin-strewn vistas of Romantic painting pointed to the sublime forces of nature beyond human control.
Cottagecore aesthetic similarly seeks to reconnect to the awe-inspiring beauty in the natural world through itsblooming floral motifs, gardening, and outdoor living.
Poets and Writers in Harmony with Nature
Beyond visual art, Romantic ideals also flourished in literature. Poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats emphasized living harmoniously with nature and capturing the purity of the natural world, including ruins.
Romantic poetry uses vivid descriptive language to immerse the reader in pastoral scenes, evoking the senses of sight, sound, and smell. For example, John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale depicts the narrator listening to a nightingale’s sweet song in a forest. The trancelike beauty transports the narrator’s imagination through the natural world:
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. (15-16)
The rich sensory description – musk-rose scent, fly murmurs – creates an experience akin to a beautiful Cottagecore aesthetic lifestyle filled with natural pleasures and simplicity.
Romantic novels like those of Jane Austen also often centered around pastoral country villages and picturesque estates far from the gritty cities. Her heroines enjoy long walks through verdant, rolling countryside and charming cottages.
This literary immersion in visions of sublime nature and quaint rural living helped establish the elemental building blocks of cottagecore over a century before it became a defined aesthetic.
Legacy on Pastoral Ideals
Both Romantic visual art and literature left a legacy that informed the eventual emergence of Cottagecore aesthetic as a lifestyle. The Romantics made connecting emotionally to the awe-inspiring beauty of nature while living a simple rural life an exalted ideal in Western culture.
Centuries later, proponents of cottagecore now seek to channel the harmony, nostalgia, and retreat into nature romanticized so powerfully by artists and poets of the Romantic era. Their art established yearning for the pastoral as a powerful undercurrent that Cottagecore aesthetic taps into today.
The Arts and Crafts Movement Promotes Simple Handmade Living
In mid-late 19th century Britain, the ravages of the Industrial Revolution – urban sprawl, pollution, unsanitary factories – led to a pushback against industrialization under the Arts & Crafts movement. Leading artists, designers, and intellectuals aimed to elevate traditional craftsmanship once more, emphasizing natural beauty and techniques in contrast to mass production.
The Arts & Crafts movement promoted decorative arts like textile design, furniture making, and bookbinding that celebrated natural materials and forms. Reformers like designer William Morris wrote and lectured on the importance of traditional handicrafts and cottage industries in the face of industrial capitalism.
This celebration of handmade crafts and cottage-scale living dovetailed beautifully with the eventual emergence of Cottagecore aesthetic visual culture and its emphasis on DIY lifestyle, gardening, and disconnecting from modern technology.
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” – William Morris
William Morris was a towering figure in the Arts & Crafts movement as a designer, writer, and socialist activist. Through his London company Morris & Co., he produced handmade textiles, stained glass, and furniture emphasizing natural motifs, beauty, and craftsmanship. His wallpaper patterns featuring floral designs are iconic.
Beyond creating decorative arts, Morris powerfully advocated for socialism and craftsman-oriented principles through his writing and lectures. His book Hopes and Fears for Art eloquently argues for bringing beauty, creativity, and meaning back into the lives of laborers demoralized by factory work.
Morris’ emphasis on authenticity of materials, respect for traditional craft, and decorative natural forms makes him one of the seminal influences behind the cottagecore aesthetic today.
This connection between handicrafts, nature, and rural life at the heart of Morris’ work and writings would go on to seed the Cottagecore aesthetic lifestyle envisioned decades later.
The Simple Authenticity of C.R. Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft
Designer, architect, and writer C.R. Ashbee was also a leading proponent of the Arts & Crafts philosophy on the importance of simple, handmade craft to enrich modern life.
Ashbee founded the Guild of Handicraft in 1888 in East London, bringing together craftsmen from many disciplines to create handcrafted work of the highest quality using traditional methods. The Guild produced furniture, metalwork, jewelry and more – all emphasizing natural materials and forms.
In 1902, Ashbee moved the Guild away from industrial London to the rural village of Chipping Campden. This expressed the movement’s desire to retreat from urban chaos to a pastoral crafting community closer to nature.
Ashbee wrote extensively to promote the Guild, arguing that good design must be rooted in handcraft, not machinery. His work linked beauty, nature, and handicraft in a direct precursor to Cottagecore aesthetic’s modern pastiche of those ideals.
A Lasting Legacy
To this day, the Arts & Crafts movement’s emphasis on homespun craftsmanship using natural materials and traditional techniques remains an essential pillar of cottagecore aesthetic and philosophy.
Cottagecore aesthetic embraces handicrafts like whittling wood, sewing or embroidery, basket weaving, pottery, and knitting as tranquil activities that allow connection to history and nature. The enjoyment of baking bread from scratch, growing fruit and vegetables, or pressing wildflowers also stems directly from Arts & Crafts respect for homemade and homegrown.
And beyond specific activities, the Arts & Craft founders’ writings and philosophies extolling craftsmanship, natural living, and heritage helped shape an enduring pastoral dream that cottagecore breathes new life into today. Their influence connects Cottagecore aesthetic to a rich creative and intellectual history.
Back to Nature – Seeking the Simple Life in the 1900s-1940s
The late 19th to early 20th centuries saw a surge of interest in back-to-nature movements and simple living on both sides of the Atlantic. Artists, intellectuals, and families sought refuge from the pressures of modern industrial life by returning to pastoral roots.
The self-sufficient homesteading lifestyle and aesthetic that developed during this period contains clear echoes of what would later become cottagecore’s vision for escaping modernity.
Homesteading and the Simple Life Take Root in America
At the turn of the 20th century, rapid industrialization and urbanization in the United States led to a reactionary interest in getting “back to the land” – escaping the city for a rural, agrarian life.
The 1904 book The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing chronicled their experiential journey leaving New York for rural Vermont to live simply off the land on a self-built homestead. This kickstarted renewed American interest in homesteading.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s writings promoting self-reliance, solitude, and transcendentalism in nature also influenced this shift towards rustic, minimalist living. Homesteaders aimed to build their own dwellings, grow their own food, and live independently.
This hands-on, homemade homestead lifestyle clearly presaged later cottagecore tendencies. Urbanites dreaming of leaving behind materialism for a rewarding life of physical farm labor and fresh country air echoes Cottagecore aesthetic’s romantic views of rural living.
Magazines and books for modern potential homesteaders like Mother Earth News (founded 1970) and Backwoods Home Magazine (founded 1989) kept this tradition alive through the late 20th century, offering DIY tips and inspiration for those still seeking to embrace off-grid rural living.
The homesteading movement made living an authentic, hands-on lifestyle on a small farmstead an enduring part of the American identity. Cottagecore aesthetic retains much of homesteading’s imagery and ethos.
Back to Nature in Britain: The Simple Lifers
A similar return to nature played out in early 20th century Britain in response to World War I and the fast pace of modern life. The inter-war years saw a blossoming of back-to-the-land movements among British artists, intellectuals, and reformers aiming to lead simpler, rural lives.
Many urban British families also bought smallholdings in the countryside during this period to pursue self-sufficient “good life” farming. Books like The Cottage Homes of England by Ditchfield P. H. helped popularize a romantic pastoral ideal based around country cottages.
Proponents of what became termed the “Simple Life” coalesced around rejecting urban industrialism in favor of rural village life and handicrafts. This quest for sanctuary in nature and crafts presaged the modern cottagecore dream.
Leading voices like writer H.J. Massingham explicitly called for a return to England’s pre-industrial past, extolling the morality of farming and handicrafts in harmony with nature. Activist Henry S. Salt published The Creed of Kinship in 1935 arguing for “simple living, self-help and a sympathy with nature.”
This pastoral vision clearly presaged cottagecore’s idealization of heritage crafts and rural living as an antidote to modernity.
Wartime Austerity and Self-Sufficiency
World War II further encouraged a return to past handicrafts and self-sufficient living in U.S., Britain, and beyond. Rationing and scarcity mandated thrift, mending, gardening, and DIY skills now associated with Cottagecore aesthetic charm.
Victory gardens flourished, allowing citizens to grow their own vegetables to supplement food shortages. Propaganda posters featured floral cottage imagery and depicted rural, outdoorsy living as ideals of American and British national identity and perseverance.
The wartime “make-do-and-mend” ethos promoted patching, darning, sewing, knitting and embroidering clothing to make it last, avoid waste, and uphold morale. These creativities are still celebrated through Cottagecore aesthetic crafting today. The 1940s wartime home front helped embed handicrafts with patriotic meaning.
This period ingrained activities now associated with cottagecore, like baking, preserving home-grown produce, and sewing, into the cultural consciousness as patriotic national duties – deeply binding them to heritage and tradition.
Cottagecore Blooms on Tumblr and Instagram in the 2010s
The internet and social media finally enabled “cottagecore” to coalesce into a defined contemporary aesthetic movement and subculture. Through blogs, memes, and images, primarily young people romanticized pastoral living online in the 2010s, crystallizing the dreamy Cottagecore aesthetic look.
Finding the Pastoral on Tumblr
Cottagecore aesthetic first emerged through niche blogs on Tumblr around the early 2010s as users began sharing a mix of natural, delicate, pastel imagery. Pictures of flower crowns, homemade baked goods, rainbow knitwear, cozy cottages, fields of wheat, and herbs hanging to dry created an immersive pastoral fantasy.
The Tumblr blogs focused on appreciating and collaging this visual culture that romanticized living closely to nature through traditional handicrafts and practices. Comments, tags, and captions on the posts further built out the identity of an online community centered around this aesthetic.
While not yet using the “cottagecore” label, these blogs established the visual language, mood, and motifs that became central to cottagecore – light, feminine dresses, flowering gardens, pastel vintage interiors, crocheting, pressed wildflowers, farm animals.
The idyllic, delicate blend of nature, nostalgia, and crafts tapped into an escapist pastoral fantasy that only intensified in coming years.
A Cottagecore Community Blossoms on Instagram
The highly visual nature of Instagram lent itself perfectly to further amplifying and coalescing the growing cottagecore aesthetic when users migrated there around 2015-2016. Instagram allowed broader content creation and discovery around romanticized country living.
Hashtags like #Cottagecore-aesthetic, #lightacademia, and #goblincore unified the aesthetic and became part of users’ self-expression. Cottagecore Instagram accounts gained tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Shared images, memes, DIYs, and product recommendations expanded the fantasy world.
Cottagecore-oriented brands and small businesses also proliferated, selling items like macrame hangings, flower crowns, and cottagecore dresses to feed the growing demand. The aesthetically pleasing bounty of the pastoral lifestyle translated perfectly to Instagram’s visual scope.
Instagram allowed both consolidation of the existing Cottagecore aesthetic community and explosive new growth. Mainstream names like singer Taylor Swift and brands like Urban Outfitters jumping on the aesthetic greatly expanded its popularity and recognizability.
Cottagecore grew into one of the dominant aesthetics across social media by the late 2010s, no longer niche.
Cottagecore Spreads to YouTube and TikTok
As Cottagecore aesthetic grew dominant on image-first platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, it also gained traction on YouTube and TikTok through educational how-to videos and stylized clips.
Soothing cottagecore music playlists accompanying relaxing countryside footage became popular. Instructional videos teaching crafts like embroidery or soap making cultivated cottagecore skills and DIY culture. Creators filmed beautiful outdoor fashion shoots and off-grid tiny house tours.
On TikTok, the hashtag #cottagecore has over 4 billion views. Users post short videos showcasing dreamy rural activities like flower picking or baking bread in a cottage kitchen. Virality on these platforms introduced cottagecore to new audiences.
The unified mood and motifs of the aesthetic translated seamlessly to motion-based social media, further spreading the cottagecore dream through active learning.
Why Did Cottagecore Aesthetic Resonate So Strongly Online?
Cottagecore’s sudden explosive popularity online in the 2010s can be attributed to a combination of visual novelty and deeper cultural needs. The arrival of any new viral aesthetic immediate inspires imitation and community on visual platforms.
But cottagecore’s romanticization of heritage handicrafts, nature, and rustic living also tapped into modern anxieties about climate change, technology, gender identity, and loss of agency in an increasingly uncertain world.
The cottagecore fantasy evokes a reassuring vision of autonomy, sustainability, and community with nature. By resurrecting pastoral dreams, Cottagecore aesthetic created an oasis of comfort amidst turbulent modern complexity. The power of this promise resonated profoundly with young people online seeking meaning.
Cottagecore Aesthetic as Escape and Self-Expression
A closer examination of cottagecore reveals the deeper emotional needs and identities this pastoral aesthetic expresses for many, especially youth and activists seeking solace, agency, and community.
Cottagecore’s Special Appeal to Youth
Many youth found life-affirming self-expression and metaphorical escape from discrimination through cottagecore’s gauzy, accepting vision of rural paradise and freedom.
The emphasis on restorative connection to nature and heritage crafts apart from mainstream norms resonated as a healing contrast to alienation or marginalization. Cottagecore’s DIY culture also encourages pride through making your space beautiful just for you.
Cottagecore aesthetic became an important subculture visually conveying that possibilities for gentle self-acceptance and belonging exist through appreciating beauty in nature, history, and crafts.
Retreating to Nature as Self-Care
On a broader level, Cottagecore aesthetic also appeals as self-care through its emphasis on quietude, simplicity, and surrounding oneself with natural beauty.
Modern life often feels disorienting and uncontrollable, overflowing with screens, notifications, traffic, and career pressures. Cottagecore offers refuge from constant digital noise and anxiety through romanticization of meaningful, concrete tasks like baking bread or pressing wildflowers.
Shutting out the chaotic excess of contemporary life to water vegetables in a garden or pick blackberries along a trail restores purpose and control. By glorifying graceful crafts and nature, the aesthetic promises a satisfying return to human-scale living.
This natural tranquility and simplicity in cottagecore functions as comforting escapist self-care in a fast-paced, uncertain world for many.
Anti-Capitalist and Activist Sentiments
The Cottagecore aesthetic emphasis on heritage, ecology, and craft mastery also intersects with youth movements for sustainability, economic reform, and social justice.
Handicrafts symbolize anti-capitalist self-sufficiency. Gardening demonstrates interdependence with the Earth. Appreciating forgotten generational skills embodies respect across ages.
So while cottagecore’s decorative surface appeals to many as simply a pleasant hobby or style, the deeper interweaving of natural world justice and anti-consumerist DIY ethics through activities like repairing, pickling, or weaving make Cottagecore aesthetic crafts resonant activism for some.
This marriage of radical activism and pastoral escapism gives additional dimension to why contemporary youth are drawn to embrace cottagecore’s reassuring nostalgia.
Ultimately, the communities, self-care, and connection to meaning found through cottagecore offer agency, purpose, and hope to those feeling marginalized or aimless. The trend revivalizes rich cultural traditions in a way that provides comfort.
Mainstreaming the Cottagecore Aesthetic in Pop Culture
While cottagecore first flourished as a relatively niche online subculture in the 2010s, its ballooning popularity soon seeped into mainstream consumer culture through fashion, home décor, movies, and celebrity endorsers.
Pastoral throwback visuals and merchandise aimed at broader audiences brought Cottagecore aesthetic into mainstream consciousness and commodified the aesthetic.
Cottagecore Motifs in Women’s Fashion
Cottagecore aesthetic’s soft, vintage inspired feminine style made it a natural extension for bohemian women’s fashion labels looking to expand their pastoral vibe. Major retailers began selling cottagecore’s trademark prairie dresses, floral prints, ruffles, and accessories.
Anthropologie, always known for selling dreamy, feminine wares, leaned hard into cottagecore’s old-fashioned romance and quaint craft motifs. Their dresses emphasized fluttering sleeves, lace accents, gingham prints, and embroidered florals that perfectly echoed popular Cottagecore aesthetic style on Instagram.
Free People equally embraced the look with their cottagecore aesthetic clothing line full of embroidered peasant tops, loose floral maxi dresses, and straw sunhats ideal for frolicking freely through fields. The trend also boosted small retailers and Etsy sellers focused on cottagecore fashion.
The commercialization and mass production of the style for mainstream consumption contrasts somewhat with cottagecore’s basis as a handcrafted DIY subculture. But cottagecore’s wider fashion popularity helps spread its appreciation for feminine freedom and nature.
Home Décor and Country Kitchen Products
Cottagecore visual motifs also naturally translated into the realms of home décor, kitchenware, and crafting supplies. The romantic, vintage sensibility filled a demand for pastoral escapism.
Big box stores like Target, Walmart, and IKEA began selling products aligning with cottagecore’s tastes: gingham kitchen linens, rattan furniture, pressed flower frames, woven baskets, dried herb wreaths, and more.
Urban Outfitters launched an entire cottagecore-inspired home goods brand called Stoned Fox filled with mushroom motifs, botanical prints, macrame, and vintage milk glass. The early 2010s Mason jar craze also reflected cottagecore’s farmhouse chic.
These mass-produced goods brought the Cottagecore aesthetic look into more mainstream homes. The commercialization arguably contradicts the trend’s roots in handcrafting and vintage sourcing. But making the aesthetic more accessible helps spread its popularization.
The incorporation into home and kitchenwares peaked with Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia brand cottagecore-inspired lines. The products evoke rustic, vintage coziness for the masses.
Cottagecore in Movies and TV Shows
Cottagecore visuals and motifs have also emerged through set design and costuming in mainstream TV shows and movies over the past decade.
The 2015 live-action Disney Cinderella adapted the fairy tale with a heavy cottagecore twist, with Cinderella wearing a long blue Victorian prairie dress with lace and flowers. She gardened and picked apples from a quaint cottage orchard.
Netflix’s breakout 2020 series Emily in Paris featured the influencer lead wearing cottagecore dresses, straw hats, and floral prints against the backdrop of Parisian parks and gardens.
These ruffled, delicate costumes juxtaposed feminine freedom and nature against the non-stop digital world of influencing.
By filtering into the fashion and settings of popular TV shows and movies, Cottagecore aesthetic benefits from broader reach while potentially losing some unique subculture nuance. But increased visibility keeps pastoral living onscreen.
Celebrity Endorsers Embrace Cottagecore Aesthetic Style
Finally, Cottagecore aesthetic has gained prominence through celebrities embracing and promoting the bucolic, vintage-inspired aesthetic across social media.
Pop megastar Taylor Swift wore floral cottagecore dresses while promoting her 2020 Folklore album, which featured cottagecore motifs on the cover art. Swift baking cookies in her cottage kitchen or picking flowers in ethereal dresses boosted cottagecore’s mainstream appeal.
British actress and activist Maisie Williams shared photos of herself making pottery and flower arrangements in a cottagecore style while advocating sustainability. YouTube influence Emma Chamberlain shared videos thrifting for cottagecore fashion she designed.
These endorsements rapidly spread cottagecore style by associating it with aspirational high-profile figures living an idealized pastoral life. Celebrities strengthened the link between old-fashioned, nature-oriented living and contemporary coolness.
Despite criticism of aesthetic appropriation, celebrity interest helps disseminate broader appreciation of activities like gardening, knitting, and bookbinding championed by cottagecore.
Ultimately, the mainstreaming and commercialization of the cottagecore trend fueled its rapid spread, while diluting some of its subculture individuality. But making pastoral inspiration accessible lives on as a positive impact.
The staying power and future of cottagecore
Although cottagecore may eventually fade like other aesthetics movements, its inspiring impact seems likely to persist even once its trendiness recedes. The timeless appeal of heritage, nature, and craft endures.
Lasting Positive Influences
Despite legitimate criticism of cottagecore’s lack of diversity and romanticized privileges, the renewed appreciation for traditional skills, environmentalism, and offline living sparked will outlast ephemeral social media.
Knowledge of activities like sewing, baking, or gardening persists and can be passed down. Aesthetic movements highlight what people crave – in this case, connection, nature, and community.
Even once cottagecore fades as a hashtag, the elevated value it placed on preserving generational customs and environmentalism leaves lasting positive change. Sustainability and empathy never completely disappear from mainstream conversation once sparked.
Balance of Past and Future
The essence of cottagecore – harmonizing modern living with the wisdom and pace of past generations – remains timeless. Periodic throwbacks are important culturally to balance preservation with progress.
Humanity constantly reimagines what we inherit from the past while envisioning the future. So some form of idealized pastoral living will always help ground society in where we come from, even as we move forward.
Offline versus Online Life
Additionally, the desire for the sense of purpose and physical skills that cottagecore romanticizes will unlikely fade as digital life gets ever more immersive. If anything, periodic disconnect and revival of tangible heritage will only grow more alluring as AI and metaverse immerse us more in simulation and passive consumption. Just as after the Arts & Crafts movement, people will continue needing to work with their hands, make, and grow.
Since Romanticism, reactions have emerged against losing touch with nature and history. Cottagecore revived that reaction for the digital age. And that need for balance persists.
Ultimately, cottagecore’s gentleness and reverence for pastoral wisdom awakened positive potential for human creativity, agency, and purpose that will outlive the trend itself. The seeds it planted – sustainability, skill sharing, activism, identity – will grow beyond ephemeral apps and filters.
The Enduring Pastoral Appeal
In the end, cottagecore’s dreamy romanticism hearkens back to enduring elements of shared longings and aesthetics through changing eras. The desire to retreat from society’s pressures to live simply in nature always rises again when humanity needs restoration of spirit.
By idealizing heritage practices, pastoral living, and craft mastery, cottagecore continues a legacy of generations turning to a romanticized rural past to realign our priorities when modern life grows overwhelming. Its motivations echo those of the Romantics, Arts & Crafts reformers, homesteaders, and 1970s back-to-landers.
Cottagecore on the surface seems like just another social media trend. But peering deeper reveals its reassuring promise reflects recurring cultural tides, as societies continually reimagine how to integrate modernity and wisdom from the past.
The allure of escaping through nature, community, and living simply endures as we all seek meaning and beauty in changing times. Cottagecore awakened this powerful, unifying vision anew for the digital era. Its impact persists quietly, as today’s back-to-nature aspirations shape a more intentional future built on celebrating heritage.
