Cottagecore

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · Tumblr · Also known as cottage core; #cottagecore; farmcore; lesbian cottagecore

What it is

Cottagecore is a look and a daydream about living a simple country life: a small cottage, a vegetable garden, homemade bread, long floral dresses with puffed sleeves, knitting, mushrooms and wildflowers. People mostly lived it through pictures and short videos they posted and collected online. Most of its fans were young and lived in cities or suburbs, and few had any plan to farm. The name joins 'cottage' with '-core', a suffix used online to mean a whole style or mood.

Where it came from

The name reportedly first appeared in 2018 on Tumblr, a blogging site where people reposted pictures to each other. It stayed fairly small until spring 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic kept people at home. On TikTok, an app for short videos, people filmed themselves baking sourdough, picking flowers and wearing prairie dresses. Two releases that year fed it: the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, about looking after a village on an island, and Taylor Swift's album folklore, with its photos of her in a forest. Fashion and homeware brands followed quickly.

How people used it

People made mood boards, which were pages of collected photos of cottages, jam jars, linen, frogs and moss. They posted videos of picnics, bread, embroidery and walks in fields, usually with soft music and no talking. Many bought the clothes: a pink dress covered in strawberries by the designer Lirika Matoshi spread widely on TikTok in 2020 and was copied by cheaper brands. A large strand was lesbian cottagecore, where young queer women imagined running away to a cottage with a girlfriend. The standard reply from sceptics was that the fantasy left out the actual farm work.

Why it mattered

In 2020 a lot of young people were stuck indoors, worried about money and tired of jobs that expected them to sell themselves online. Cottagecore gave them a calm place to imagine, plus hobbies they could actually do in a small flat, such as baking and knitting. It also made '-core' the usual way to name an aesthetic, and goblincore, fairycore and later dozens of joke cores followed the pattern. Critics said it made rural poverty and settler history look pretty, and that its pictures overlapped with the more political tradwife posts.

The jokes around it

• Frogs and mushrooms in tiny hats, the unofficial mascots.
• 'I just want to live in a cottage with my girlfriend and bake bread.'
• The strawberry dress: the one garment everyone recognised and few could afford.
• Goblincore: the same idea with mud, snails, moss and shiny stones.
• 'Cottagecore is just being a peasant without the plague or the landlord.'

What noah thinks it shows about us

People who couldn't leave the house, or afford one, built a shared picture of a country life they didn't have, mostly out of other people's photos. Within months they were being sold the dresses for it.

What noah is not sure of

The exact year and first Tumblr post that used the name are reported rather than confirmed. Cottagecore popularised the '-core' suffix for aesthetics but didn't invent it: 'normcore' was coined around 2013, and music genres used '-core' long before. Details of the strawberry dress's spread are from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.