Cottagecore: The New Dimension of the Queer Community

Rolling hills, cross stitching and Taylor Swift. Where did cottagecore come from, and why are queer people suddenly longing for a life in the country?

BY: SARAH HILTON

Photo courtesy of Aesthetics Wiki

“Just thinking about my future wife and I composting our food scraps for plant food.”

“Daydreaming about building a greenhouse for my girl and I to grow our own food together.”

“Preparing to ask my girlfriend if we can quit our jobs to live in a cottage in the woods in the pacific northwest…”

If you’re anything like me and you relate to these quotes above, then lately you’ve probably had this unprompted urge to escape your responsibilities and just live a secluded life in a farm on the countryside with nothing but you, your partner, and the calm of nature to keep you company. Or maybe you’ve been itching to make progress on your many creative projects like knitting or painting. Maybe all this working from home—or just COVID-mandated isolation in general—has sparked a sudden longing to take more walks in nature during the day.

In any case, if you connect to these quotes above from TikTok, possess an untapped desire to live a simple life in the country, or simply want to connect better with nature, there’s a chance you’ve fallen in with the cottagecore aesthetic.

Cottagecore is “an aesthetic inspired by a romanticised interpretation of western agricultural life … centred on ideas of a [simpler] life and harmony with nature.” Essentially, cottagecore is an aesthetic that hearkens back to living a life in the countryside without the weight and stress of society or politics to take over your life. It encourages the idea of nostalgia for simplicity and opens a door for us to foster a deeper connection with nature, as it also promotes eco-friendly values and practices like foraging, making your own clothes, and living as sustainable a life as possible.

The visual hallmarks of cottagecore include farm animals, cottages, flowing dresses, vegetable-filled gardens, knitting and cross stitching, and sometimes even fairies. The New York Times describes cottagecore with the images of “modern escapist fantasies … tiny homes, voluntary simplicity, forest bathing and screen-free childhoods, then place them inside a delicate, moss-filled terrarium.” Think the Shire from Lord of the Rings, Avonlea from Anne of Green Gables, and the many rural settings in Studio Ghibli movies—specifically Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbour Totoro and When Marnie Was There. 

But the aesthetic stretches far beyond appearance and fashion alone. You can even find the word “cottagecore” when you search for music on Spotify, where you’ll immediately get hit with hundreds of results for playlists featuring music by Hozier, Sufjan Stevens, Ben Howard, and most recently Taylor Swift. 

Though cottagecore was supposedly founded in the early 2010s, it wasn’t until quarantine guidelines were put into place, and later during the release of Taylor Swift’s new album folklore, that it suddenly sprang back into popularity. With lyrics that called to attention motifs of cottagecore living (e.g. “sweet tea in the summer” from “seven,” or “Salt air, and the rust on your door / I never needed anything more” from “august”) it only made the desire for cottagecore life all the more appealing and vivid. 

Suddenly, you turn on a Taylor Swift song and you can see yourself living in a quaint, secluded cottage with livestock and fields of sunflowers, with the soft overlay of a folklore song set as your personal soundtrack. It exists for many as this faraway place that young people have especially wanted to escape to, especially when quarantine guidelines were put into place—it felt as though all any of us wanted to do was just run away and live miles away from anyone else to just be at ease with ourselves. It’s not surprising that cottagecore made a resurgence in a time when everyone had to stay inside: cottagecore allows you to live a life in isolation but with all the liberation and freedom of living the rural life in a cottage.

Photo courtesy of Tumblr user sapphoeresia

But more specifically, this rise in popularity with cottagecore has spiked particularly within the queer and sapphic/WLW communities. In fact, according to Insider, cottagecore has statistically become more popular on social media sites, “with posts up [on Tumblr] by 153%, likes by 541%, and reblogs by 644%.” Most of the cottagecore content I’ve seen on social media specifically features queer women—either living together or celebrating their identities independently—taking part in typical cottagecore activities, like making their own clothes, picking flowers together, or interacting with farm animals. In fact, when you search “cottagecore” on TikTok, the hashtag “cottagecorelesbian” is one of the first suggestions to come up. This is where I also came across the TikTok quotes I initially introduced you with at the beginning of this article.

A big theme in the cottagecore community is the fantasy for queer women to run away to be together. For instance, one of the above TikTok quotes features a young woman dressed in a peasant-style dress overlaid with text that says: “Preparing to ask my girlfriend if we can quit our jobs to live in a cottage in the woods in the pacific northwest and have chickens and I can grow a garden and collect wild mushrooms while they make art all day and we stay in love forever and have a daughter named Juniper.” 

Most of these #cottagecorelesbian TikTok creators have a very specific image for what they want in their cottagecore fantasies, and usually these encapsulate the feeling of pure, unconditional love manifested into the activities they discuss within the TikTok, like “[growing] a garden” and “[collecting] wild mushrooms” all while two women love each other fully and unapologetically. These are life goals filtered through the lens of cottagecore, the perfect place for sapphics to be in love without judgement from others.

As a queer woman, I can render a guess that cottagecore is mostly populated by LGBTQ+ folks as an attempt at escaping trauma and discrimination based on gender and sexual identity in our present-day lives. Though according to my friend Katherine, cottagecore also draws in many queer folks because it fosters the feeling of absolute freedom and liberation, a step away from the expectations in our heteronormative society. 

For Katherine, the first time she really felt a desire for a cottagecore life was when she watched the 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

“There’s this one scene where Lizzie treks through all the mud to go to the Bingley manor and Darcey is like, ‘what the fuck, why are you muddy as shit? That’s not how a lady should act.’ But even just having that freedom and imagining her running through the fields in her dress, I can totally feel that.

“Just the liberation it must feel like, even when her parents are like, ‘oh my god, take a carriage, take a horse,’ she obviously did it intentionally. And she did it to be free.”

This is one of the many themes present in cottagecore culture, which is the ability to live in absolute freedom. For me, the best way I could connect to the cottagecore aesthetic was through the Shire in Lord of the Rings. In the movie, the town of Hobbiton is introduced with a voiceover by Bilbo who explains the customs of Hobbit life: “It has been remarked by some that the Hobbits’ only real passion is for food. A rather unfair observation, as we have also developed a keen interest in the brewing of ales, and the smoking of pipe-weed. But where our hearts truly lie is in peace and quiet, and good tilled earth. For all Hobbits share a love for things that grow.”

Even though Lord of the Rings is about a fantasy universe, from the age of 12 I’ve felt a desire to live in a world like the ones Hobbits live in. Though at that age, I was more attracted to the idea of living in a world where I didn’t have to worry about homework and assignments, rather than being drawn into a life of simplicity and peace the way I am now.

Photo by Sarah Hilton // THE UNDERGROUND

It’s hard to say that cottagecore was even established at that point in time, but Katherine informs me that she’d first heard of cottagecore as early as 2013.

“It kind of died down in favour of the more ‘popular girl’ aesthetic, which was very glamorous, very Kardashian. But then [cottagecore] made a very big resurgence in light of COVID.

“A lot of [cottagecore] started with living in cottages, growing up in the countryside, growing your own plants, making your own jam, being very sustainable. But there’s been a very big resurgence as of late because people are just always hearing these awful, terrible news, and they just want to escape. So, they have this escapism fantasy of going to the cottage.”

Sure, there’s certainly an appeal for everyone to want to get away and put distance between themselves and COVID-related tragedies with a rural life in a cottage; I’m sure that at this point, we’re all ready to put 2020 behind us completely. But when Katherine mentions the sapphic community, cottagecore has a whole other meaning to it.

“It’s not a secret that our society is very patriarchal, and very capitalist,” Katherine explains. “There’s a lot of aggression, and a lot of traditionally male roles are valued. It feels like cottagecore is a rebellion [against] that. You can be soft, you can be emotional, you can just work, not for money but just to create.

“In our society, women are lower than men. But then WLWs are the lowest, because there’s no attraction to men whatsoever. WLW, they don’t need men at all, and I think that’s what society is very scared of. But cottagecore is a complete rejection of that: you can love whoever you want to love, you can be the outcast of society in a cottagecore and still feel like you belong.”

Though Katherine says cottagecore isn’t “necessarily [her] aesthetic,” she feels safe knowing that there’s a place for her where “there’s no patriarchal expectations. You can be gay, you can create, you can live freely.” So, rather than trying to live your day-to-day in a world with so much to learn and unlearn about sexuality and gender identity, cottagecore exists as a way for sapphics to fantasize the ideal world where they can love who they love, be who they are without the fear of rejection or disapproval from those who will never accept queer love in any context.

Cottagecore a realm that I can see myself living in for this reason as well. From my experience in sapphic relationships, there're so many factors to consider when compared to straight relationships that you almost want to run away just to escape everything and everyone who won’t accept you. In straight relationships, my boyfriends could introduce me to their family, we could be affectionate in public without unwanted attention from strangers, we didn’t feel unsafe holding hands in the street at night.

But in my last relationship, we faced a lot of complications that stemmed from the religious beliefs in my girlfriend’s family. It constantly felt like we were running out of time because we knew her family would never even entertain the idea of her being in a relationship with another girl. But in a cottagecore world, this is a problem that would never exist. There would be no one holding us back from loving each other, and all the problems and fights we once had would disappear entirely. For me, cottagecore is important because it’s the safe space sapphics need to love each other openly.

Overall, Katherine thinks many could benefit from adopting some of the common cottagecore practices like gardening, walks in nature or knitting into our daily lives. 

“I feel like a lot of us, especially in the technological age, just need to completely connect with nature,” she says. “There’s a lot of people who have been feeling disconnected because of technology: seeing people through screens versus seeing someone in real life.

“I started really being surrounded by technology in university. So, I’ve felt disconnected from a lot of people. And I feel like there’s a huge difference between how much is expected of the average person now compared to someone in the 1800s, where it seems like cottagecore takes place. You’re [currently] expected to split your time, and your effort, and your energy into doing so many different things. But cottagecore is about going back to your roots. Take some time off to grow some plants. I personally don’t know that much about gardening or growing plants, but this would be a really cool way to get into that.”

When you step back and look at the values of a cottagecore life, it creates so much room for folks to make a habit out of practicing self-care and putting time into fulfilling emotional needs. Unlike the demands of the average person’s life, cottagecore gives you a world to create what you will from it. Rather than trying to create an empire or a legacy, Katherine says that cottagecore is about living off the land and spending your days doing the things that truly feed your soul.

For some, cottagecore is a pleasant, aesthetic experience where you get to admire flowy dresses, pastoral landscapes filled with cows, and the overall romanticism of agricultural life. But for queer folks, cottagecore is the escape we’ve always wanted: to live in a world where our way of life is normalized and safe. Cottagecore celebrates the overall openness of the queer identity and offers a place for people to simply be; to love who they love and love who they are. 

Photo courtesy of Aesthetics Wiki