Escape Into Cottagecore, Calming Ethos for Our Febrile Moment

In the dense thicket of the internet lies a verdant patch of grass where dappled sunbeams peek through the leaves, resting fawns doze about, a troop of woodland mushrooms grows underfoot, and a brook faintly burbles in the distance. Freshly baked scones are just emerging from the oven in a thatch roof country cottage bordering the woods, while linen-scented laundry dries peacefully on a clothesline in the yard.

It could be the beginning of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, before the inevitable darkness seeps in, but rather it’s the backdrop of a budding aesthetic movement called cottagecore, where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.

“It’s like Animal Crossing but in real life,” Emily Kellum, an 18-year-old from Belmont, Miss., wrote in an email (she’s not able to get phone service in her small town, she said). She was referring to the wholesome video game in which one plays a human living among adorable anthropomorphic creatures like bear cubs and deer.

Take modern escapist fantasies like tiny homes, voluntary simplicity, forest bathing and screen-free childhoods, then place them inside a delicate, moss-filled terrarium, and the result will look a lot like cottagecore.

It’s a Holly Hobbie illustration come to life, consisting of a coterie of young people, mostly in their teens and early 20s, who congregate online to swap bread baking recipes and photos of their foraged mushroom hauls, stare at pictures of farm animals and otherwise partake in an aspirational form of nostalgia that praises the benefits of living a slow life in which nothing much happens at all.

And yet access to the cottagecore universe is only through the very technology most of its adherents would rather eschew.