The cottagecore dream is dead. Of course, cute summer dresses aren't going anywhere, but the community took such a huge dip in popularity. You have to wonder, what happened? My name is Juno, you're a local mothman, subscribe, relax, and welcome to this series, where I analyze and explain internet aesthetics while making art inspired by them.
We've already talked about Kidcore and Weirdcore, the plays will be linked down below. And today we will be trying to uncover the mysterious death of the cottagecore daydream. We will analyze the visual themes, fashion and much more.
And I will try to prove to you that this downfall was always just around the corner. But for all of this to make sense, we need to go back to the time when cottagecore has only just blossomed. It's the summer of 2020 and you're slowly losing your mind after being stuck in your home for months.
For the eighth time today you open up TikTok just to get away from everything. And this video comes up across your feet. You watch it and absorb the feelings it awakens in you.
And suddenly everything disappears. Your collapsing reality is left behind. And you've transported somewhere far, far away. To a place straight out of a storybook or a Ghibli movie.
You are suddenly surrounded by nature and basking in the warm summer sun. Can you hear the bumblebee swarm? Here you can spend your time picking strawberries and mushrooms, exploring lush green gardens and overgrown meadows, while weeping willows gently sway in the wind. This is the dreamy land of Koryzko. Where reading poetry while laying down on a picnic blanket, eating ripe fruit and cheese, and kissing girls, I mean, tending to cows and lambs, is your day-to-day life.
Speaking of cottages. When you enter one, the smell of spices and homemade soap hits your nose. The walls are covered in paintings, quilts and posters, from the ceiling herbs and flowers are drying, and on the comfy armchair two cats are cuddled up.
It feels like home. Everything about this aesthetic is so comfortable and warm and welcoming. A simple yet beautiful life, lived to the beat of mother nature.
It makes sense that cottagecore bloomed in popularity. Who wouldn't want that life? But who had wanted so much that they would spawn an entire aesthetic around it? It is always difficult to find the origin of an internet aesthetic. Due to the fluid nature of the internet, particularly social media, Tracking the beginning of Kotachko is not as simple as an analytic freak like me would like it to be.
What is however clear is that Kotachko originally gained popularity among young queer people on Tumblr. More specifically, sapphic women. And I mean, I get it. Their appeal to queer women is quite clear.
Pretty girls, nature, no man in sight in any of these photos. It makes sense that such a comfort and safety would appeal to the LGBTQ community as a whole, but also that this appeal could be shared by young women regardless of orientation. Looking beautiful while picking fruit, working for yourself, eating well, being self-sufficient and having a bond with the land you're on.
It truly is a universal dream. Who needs the city if you can have a life in that shape? Now that we know how it looks and how how it was created.
We can finally talk about the-No, wait, before we go, we need to pick something to wear. This video was bought to you by my patrons, so if you think that what I'm doing is cool, you can join my patreon for just a dollar and a half and get to see a bunch of exclusive art, videos and other content. Thank you so much for your support. Like with most aesthetics that hit the mainstream, cottagecore has a unique clothing style attached to it, not only in the visual sense. One of the main ideological motives behind cottagecore is its return to craftsmanship.
As Tumblr user and seamstress Craftworker posted about One thing that we don't talk about enough is that sometimes the pining for those clothes is pining for an era when clothes were sturdy and dependable. The aesthetic aspect of it for me, and the vintage clothing, is in no small part about how high quality materials that are fitted to your body and will last. So what era historically are we talking about? Well as always it's a bit of a mix and match. On one side you've got patterns and shapes reminiscent of the 1950s America and on the other you'll find dresses clearly inspired by rock'n'roll fashion with bows, layers of soft pasteled collared jewel and corsets.
In a cottagecore closet you'll find Romantic blouses, cozy knitwear, flowing dresses, straw hats, practical garden trousers, all made from natural materials like cotton, linen or silk. The patterns on the clothing vary from polka dots to flowers, butterflies and mushrooms, and so do the colors, ranging from muted soft tones such as sage green, rusty orange, dusty pink, all the way to deep blue and bold yellow. If it's a color you can find in a garden in full spring, it has a place in cottagecore wardrobe. Especially if it has some romantic or feminine detail, like frills, puffy sleeves or lacy trims. I believe a cottagecore piece pretty much everyone has seen before is the strawberry dress first worn by Tess Holliday in 2019. It became a trend at that point and ever since, similar dresses have become a part of the fashion trend cycle.
Did you pick out an outfit out of the clothes I showed you? I hope so. And now that we are dressed, we can finally go out and join the beautiful girls frolicking in the fields in dresses they bought on Shein.
Wait, what? This entire earlier part of this essay might have sounded a bit odd to you if you tried to shop for any cottagecore clothing recently. If you go online and search for clothes, most of the results will link you to Amazon, Shein, Temu or fast fashion brands like H&M and Zara.
Currently, cottagecore, like any other fast fashion trend, has been used as a marketing tactic by fast fashion clothing brands, which is a direct antithesis to the cottagecore movement. Not only that, before its boom in popularity, fashion in line with the guidelines of cottagecore was easily accessible in thrift stores. Nowadays, with the rise of grifters, buying out thrift store clothes and reselling them for an upturned price, that accessibility has been killed. Was that?
The self-sustainability and aviability of the fashion is no longer the M.O. Now to dress gotishko in a viable way, you need to have enough money to pay for indie brand and Etsy store prices or alternatively you can indulge in the dropshipping hellscape of fast fashion. Capitalism, ever the thief of joy, is not the only issue with the fashion.
The clothing we wear always represents something. whether that be status, passion or our own perception of ourselves. And so if a certain style is inspired by something culturally significant, no matter how many years we are removed from that moment in time, that link still matters.
Before I spoke of Rococo fashion, and for a good reason, the style icon of the 1700s was, after all, the one and only Marie Antoinette, who to this day is a rather controversial figure, and who built for her private use a Mou de la Reine, a rustic retreat inspired by the homes of peasants. A wave of naturalism and the affinity towards the simple life was sweeping across France in the 18th century. French aristocrats loved to act like shepherds and shepherdesses while still enjoying the comforts of the social position.
The hamlet seemed completely rustic and natural from the outside, while the rococo interior provided the desired comfort and luxury of the queen and her friends. I've seen some people draw comparisons between Marie Antoinette and her affinity for cosplaying poverty during a time that had a big wealth gap to celebrities of today using cottage class aesthetics to make themselves appear more connected to the average person. I always watch celebrities jump on trends started by people of a much lower social standing with the same resigned disinterest. I really don't care.
care and a part of me just wants people to enjoy themselves. and at the same time the complete lack of self-awareness is kind of funny. but i understand why this kind of behavior from the unfathomably rich can be pretty upsetting to people that actually live or aspire to live that lifestyle.
of course the superficial issue of the fast fashion ...takeover caused only a tiny crack in the cottagecore community. If anything, the newfound popularity only grew the aesthetic since many more people learned about it and decided to join the community. Let me show you where the other blatant issue that divided the community further formed by looking at some pictures. I want you to tell me what they all have in common. It's the subject, right?
The settings are different and so are the moods of these photos. But the one thing that makes them all connected is the models. It is pretty clear to me why women that look like this are all in the most popular of posts.
The beauty standard of Korychko is very strict, unlike with other aesthetics. I don't think Kyrko or Whimsigov etc. have such a strong visual guideline as to who is considered to fit the aesthetic. The only other aesthetic that I can think of right now is ballet corps. It has a similar beauty requirement. Of course, you don't need to embody a certain beauty standard to be allowed to enjoy something, but on a subconscious level, that's the message you receive.
You don't fit in here. This isn't for you. Why? Because you aren't feminine enough.
The more time you spend browsing the aesthetic, you'll start to notice the obvious focus on delicateness and pristine beauty of the cottagecore woman. And of course, that's the case. because that's what cottagecore is partially about, right? The visual of a femininity that's clean and beautiful, like a well-tended garden. I've been thinking about that aspect of cottagecore for a really long time, since it feels so detached from the reality of rural life.
And I didn't really know how to put it into words, but this person hit the nail on the head. Cottagecore presents the ideal of land that has been touched, created, farmed, divided by fences. It is not wild, it is not the wilderness.
And in a way, the femininity in cottagecore is civilized, just like the gardens. It is about always looking clean and sweet and nice and pliant and young and pretty in dresses. It is never messy, never complicated.
And this aspect is truly so fascinating to me, because the need that is the fuel to cottagecore is the need for freedom and space and connection to nature Yet, College Court champions a femininity that is so controlled, so detached from the real life experiences of women, it is the exact opposite of the life in rural parts of the world, it whispers Hey, you can be free from the oppression of modernity, but you need to be beautiful. You need to be the perfect woman. A woman that, just like the land, is to be tamed, be quiet and beautiful to look at.
Of course, this created a rift within the community, because, let's be honest, most people don't look all as aspire to look like porcelain dolls? What about women of color for example that are never seen as delicate or feminine enough? Are they not good enough to be cottagecore? And what about men and masculine people?
Such a hyper feminine approach to the cottagecore lifestyle is both what divides the community and what made it so popular in the first place. Because I think we're living in a time where young people are lost. We played the game by the rules and then the rules changed and now we are in the dark.
So I think that young women that don't know where they are going, don't know who they are yet, lean on these aesthetics as a way to define themselves. Such a hyper-femininity can be aspirational to them. Within Kotechko, there is a very clear guidebook on how to be a woman.
A guidebook that is based on an idealized past. But we'll get to that. Right now let's talk about what Kotechko has little to do with.
The reality of rural life. If throughout this video we were trying to answer why the cottagecore community crumbled onto itself, to a lot of people this would be the answer. Because those that know the life that cottagecore idealizes were skeptical of it from the very beginning.
I grew up gardening and canning and drying and preserving. It has been a way of life for my family for generations, necessary for survival. What people call cottagecore is just...
how I was raised. I'm so tired of people thinking it's an idyllic pastoral fantasy. It's getting up early every day. It's mud and sweat and discomfort before you get to reap the rewards. Like making cheese from scratch out of milk from your own goats or harvesting tomatoes.
Reducing all of that to a cutesy Instagram aesthetic where you only see the end product of the labor feels disingenuous, inauthentic. This outlook on cottagecore is a very interesting one to me. Because it touches on the topic of labor, something that lies hidden under all the aesthetic posts, and something that caused me to be pretty surprised by cottagecore's very existence. I suppose it's time. to come clean.
Hi guys! Say hi, you're in a YouTube video. I am truly living the modern cottagecore life.
As I'm writing this script, I can lift up my head and look out the window and see my neighbor's sheep in the fields. I can at any point get up and go pick fruit to snack on as I work. I can hear birds and sheep through my window and yesterday we had zucchini for dinner from our own patch. I live in a place surrounded by forests, mountains and fields with only a couple of neighbors in sight.
And because of that, when I learned of cottagecore, I didn't like it at all. Not because I hate my culture and my life. Listen, living in what my friends refer to as a Minecraft house for a better part of my childhood has been pretty nice, but because, like the person whose post I read, I didn't like how idyllic cottagecore made it out to be.
Cottagecore truly has very little to do with cottagecore, if that makes sense. The women I know that live as close to the cottagecore lifestyle as possible in the 21st century are hardened by years of physical work. When I think of the things I admire about them, they're pristine, clean beauty isn't one of them. It's the hard work they put into cooking and farming and tending to the crops. The generations before me lived a life where the result of harvest impacted whether or not they had food on the table.
Living in a literal 70-year-old cottage for a big part of my childhood meant that it was cold during the winter. I know that having livestock animals is tied to a rather unpleasant smell. And having any crops means a lot of hard work. It was very bewildering to me that someone would aspire to live a life that I knew could be very tiring.
The closest thing I could relate to Kotyczko was the romantization of rural life that was present during the 20th century trend in Polish art called ludomania. which was an obsession of the artists with the simple lives of Polish peasants. But the more time I spent browsing through the community, the more I understood.
The Korychko community looks and aches for something that isn't available or possible. And I don't think it's fair to make fun of them because of that. Yes, are their dreams unrealistic to the point where people that actually do the things the aesthetic idealises can't help but scoff?
Absolutely. But That's the point of dreams, isn't it? When you daydream about something you really want, you don't spend the precious time rummaging over everything that could possibly be awful about it, right?
Unless you have an anxiety disorder or need some drama to spice up your maladaptive daydream world. When you dream of a loving relationship, you don't dream of your partner's parents not accepting you or your partner developing some kind of disease and dying. You dream about the cute part. the hand-holding, the dates, the comforts, not arguments and rejections. People love cottagecore because they want to take Howl's hand, they want to go on an adventure with Snufkin, they want to sing with Snow White, they want to move to Stardew Valley or tend to their own village in Animal Crossing.
Maybe they want to plant strawberries and have a couple of chickens. This video would be incomplete and false if I only talked about the issues or the bad bits. Not only that, if we want to truly understand cottagecore, we need to buy into the dream. So before we get to the moment when everything fell apart, let's look at what's so appealing about cottagecore.
You might think it's silly, but I believe that the fact that in cottagecore videos you see people running and dancing is not a coincidence. Both of those actions are an expression of freedom. And I believe that that's what makes cottagecore so appealing to the masses.
The almost desperate need to escape from consumer culture, to be independent from a failing economy, to work for something that matters. Not for rent or to pay off debt, but for the earth that you love. To be able to eat something you grew and made with your own hands. Cottagecore was born from that need. From wanting to be connected to your community, to your home, to your food, to your life.
We live in a time where a big chunk of our lives is happening online. And what better way to connect and come back down to earth than to immerse yourself in the beauty of nature. And instead of living life 9 to 5, dictating your own tempo to a life that still has a clear structure. The structure of crop season.
Obviously, my entire previous segment was on... How cottagecore is unachievable. That's why one thing I absolutely love about the cottagecore community is the creativity. Who cares if the lifestyle is mostly unattainable?
People with passion will always find a way. You don't need an idyllic life to spend your afternoons knitting the cozy sweat of your dreams, sculpting the perfect cup for hot choco, making the cutest jewelry a fairy could wear. Seeing people embrace those parts of cottagecore is... Really heartwarming. Can't have a garden?
If you do it right, you can grow herbs and veggies on your balcony. Can't own a farm and animals? You can go to a petting zoo or volunteer at a local animal sanctuary.
These passionate people were what made the community so cozy. Seemingly everyone wanted the same things, to bake bread, pick berries and read poetry, while wearing some very beautiful clothing. I think that that almost childlike whimsy of Koczko is a very needed thing, especially nowadays. We're living in very unsteady times, and cruel times at that.
I think a lot of people have lost whatever faith they had in the government and want to seek protection and independence. Surprisingly or not, freedom and control goes hand in hand. After all, having complete control over your life is what freedom truly is.
So, as I said, everyone in the cottagecore community wants the same thing. This freedom and peace and wanting to return to a time long past. What's wrong with daydreaming about an escape?
About a slow life on land that's your own? Leaving the city and society behind to find a new land that can be yours, that you can tame and divide and conquer. Enjoying cottagecore without addressing its underlying issues is like living in a cottage and hoping that ignoring the mold growing in its walls will cause it to go away. The community tried to do that and it didn't work.
It only caused further damage. So we're gonna talk about the mold now. And it all starts with one word.
Homesteading. If you're like me and you're not from the United States, that word might mean absolutely nothing to you. Like it did to me.
Going into this video, I didn't fully know the scale of criticism against Korychko, and also why it was even happening. I obviously realized that something was off, and I had my own criticisms, but the more I researched, the more I realized that the downfall of Korychko was always going to happen. Because if you base an entire aesthetic around a that was cruel and later idealized, the...
people you attract might be interested in more than just cute outfits and picking fruit. Homesteading is a tag you might frequently see alongside the gotishcore hashtag and on the surface level it makes sense. After all the definition of homesteading is a lifestyle of self-sufficiency characterized by subsidence, agriculture, food preservation and small-scale textile, clothing and craft production.
It differs from rural village living due to isolation. So it's almost as if owning a homestead is the dream that cottagecore fans are aspiring to achieve, right? And that's where the controversy lies. Because homesteading isn't simply a lifestyle choice or an aesthetic.
It's a generational privilege built on colonialism and what goes with that, blood. It all began in 1862 with the Homestead Acts. which allowed British settlers to get 160 acres of land. Which means that as of the year 2000, there were over 46 million adult descendants of their original homestead recipients, around a quarter of the US adult population.
With this context, the discomfort so many people have expressed with this aesthetic starts to make sense to me. Because aestheticizing a life that was built on oppression and continues to this day to contribute to subjugation, is uncomfortable, to say the least. The people that feel distaste for Kottisch Chor aren't distasteful of city kids wanting to be closer to nature or farmers doing their job.
They're upset about the unspoken link between some fans of Kottisch Chor and past colonizers. I know that often in these kinds of discussions the point of it's not that deep comes up, which I think is unfortunate since it tries to cut the conversation short. but I would like to counter that by reminding you that nothing really exists in a vacuum.
Everything that is created has a context and has an effect on our reality. Visual symbolism has a lot of power and puts Putting cottagecore symbolism in the context of the aftermath of colonialism, where native tribes live in poverty to this day, makes it uncomfortable at the very least. The similarity between cottagecore imagery and homesteading meant that no amount of goodwill or purposeful ignorance could prevent the merging of the communities.
And that merge didn't go over well. At a first glance, it might seem as if cottagecore was stolen by the tradwife movement. But I would argue that cottagecore was always one step away from a lifestyle people with such views aspire to live. That hyper-femininity I mentioned before appeals to men and women to whom that hyper-femininity is the only correct way to be a woman.
They identify with cottagecore's themes not only because it's a fun trend or because they enjoy the fashion, but because for them that's how life is supposed to be. However, that's not the case. be because they are deeply religious or because they idealize the past.
So Kottisch Chor is a heaven for people that are obsessed with the past that never truly existed. Just like today, a Kottisch Chor lifestyle is not attainable for most. It also wasn't attainable in the past, unless you were incredibly wealthy. The traditionalist fans of Kottisch Chor don't aspire to be farmers. They aspire to live the 1950s American dream.
So while self-sufficiency and homemaking skills were gaining popularity due to 2019, suddenly on a cottagecore post you could see hashtags such as Tradwife, traditional Christianity, Tradfem, traditional gender roles, etc. And that's what made a bunch of people leave. Because are you sure you want to live vicariously through people that hate you? Or do you want to live vicariously through the rich kids that, even though they themselves haven't done anything wrong, are very much part of the problem?
With the rise of the popularity of the ascetic amongst the rich and conservative, the message was once again clear. You don't belong here. This isn't for you.
So if the core of your dream is rotten with implications of blood and oppression, what do you do? If you can't control who that kind of lies appeals to, you either make space for the people you disagree with or you leave. I opened this video by stating that the cottagecore dream is dead. Of course, saying that cottagecore, the aesthetic, is dead, isn't an exaggeration.
Or is it? Because as I said in the intro, this video isn't about cute summer dresses or people enjoying beautiful picnic setups. The clothing trend will stay and it's not going anywhere, especially not during the summer.
But the thought behind cottagecore, the appeal, got lost. Even if the needs of young people have not changed, They still need comfortable spaces to experience life and still dream of non-judgmental safe havens where they can simply live an honest life far away from the big government, social issues, housing crisis and the current job market. But the Kotyško community lost the control of the narrative.
It no longer could be just about beautiful girls frolicking in the fields or baking bread for your lover. It lost whatever detachment it had from the past and crumbled under the pressure of implications. It could no longer be a daydream if it was a reality built on dark roots and later painted over in neon paint with a giant sail sign on top. A dream dies when it's met with reality, especially a cruel and uncomfortable one.
Throughout this video I've been reciting the lyrics to Strawberry Blonde by Mitski. It's one of the, let's say, flagship songs associated with the aesthetic. A couple years ago you could not escape it on Cottagecore TikTok.
The song is about longing for love from someone unavailable and the beauty of summer. But the song is really about Mitski's struggles as an Asian-American woman and being seen as less desirable because of that. And there is nothing wrong with listening to the song and experiencing it just as a summer bop. However, just like with Cottagecore, the aesthetic is still there. You can ignore the meaning and underlying theme, but you cannot outrun it.
In the end, you get to choose what you do about it. Do you ignore the implications? Or do they tire you out to the point where there's no more enjoyment to be found? Or maybe you can embrace and understand the implications and still daydream about the wheat fields. If you enjoyed me yapping about Koteczko, I believe you will love my other aesthetic deep dives, especially the ones I'm working on right now, so make sure to subscribe.
And until then, you can watch this video about a cryptid, which I did last week. I worked really hard on it, so if that's your jam, go and watch it. If not, YouTube is probably recommending you another one of my videos to watch. I'll see you next week.
Bye bye!